Residents at Shadow Wood Mobile Home Park, a community with many Spanish-speaking residents, have been meeting with Champaign police over concerns about immigration enforcement.

Lieutenant Katherine Thompson of the Champaign Police Department, who has worked the district for nearly her entire 18-year career, said she began hearing concerns last year directly from Shadow Wood Park Manager Roxanna Almaraz.

“Roxanna came to me and said her friends and community members were scared,” Thompson said in an interview. “We hosted several meetings in Shadow Wood to explain that we do not work with ICE, and I told her ‘you can bring this back to your community, please send your children to school, please go and do the things you need to do.’”

Under the Illinois Trust Act, local police agencies are barred from collaborating with ICE on civil immigration enforcement. Thompson said that even in rare cases involving serious felony warrants, cooperation is still unlikely.

“Illinois wants people to feel safe around local law enforcement,” she said. “We don’t know when ICE is here. We don’t coordinate with them. We have no connection to their operations.”

Over the past year, rumors and social media posts about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity in Champaign have spread. Residents have used Facebook pages, Reddit pages, news outlets and word of mouth to warn the Shadow Wood Mobile Home Park community about alleged ICE sightings — sometimes accurate, sometimes not — and to obtain what information they can.

Thompson said if any residents need any verification of an officer, they can call 911 if it is an emergency or the non-emergency number if the situation allows.

“If people feel unsafe and they’re not certain if it’s a local law enforcement agency or entity, they can call and they can have an office come out to verify credentials,” she said. “Everybody has a right to know if somebody is a law enforcement officer or not.”

Regarding the language barriers that might arise, Champaign police said officers are well-prepared.

“I am a fluent Spanish speaker,” Thompson said. “So the only time I ask [where someone is from] is when I’m going to interpret for a Spanish-speaking person, or who my officers believe may be a Spanish-speaking person.”

The department offers a $3,000 dollar a year stipend to officers who are willing to take a test to prove themselves professionally proficient in Spanish.

Police also use a service called Language Line, which can provide a live translator for many different languages.

“I’m glad we pushed for it for the officers,” she said. “It’s insane how much of a need there is.”

Shadow Wood a “stable” area, police say

Police data showed a variety of crimes in Shadow Wood, a neighborhood of about 255 mobile homes.

Police representatives said the neighborhood does not have a single defining crime issue for the north quadrant.

“I personally cannot say that there’s any one thing those neighborhoods are known for,” Thompson said. “It’s a conglomeration — burglaries, stolen cars, shoplifting, domestic calls, wellbeing checks. It’s all different kinds of things.”

The department’s call logs reflect that wide variety in the past decade. In response to an inquiry by CU-CitizenAccess, the department reviewed calls for service for the area, which is bounded northeast of Bradley Avenue and Neil Street, up to Kenyon Road, and stopping just before the train tracks along North Oak Street.

From January 2014 to October 2025, the following were among the calls received in the area:

• 396 juvenile-problem calls
• 168 police “flag downs” where residents approached officers directly
• 155 suspicious activity calls
• 264 suspicious person calls
• 363 suspicious vehicle calls
• 322 calls about animals

Across all categories, Thompson said the call volume has stayed “pretty much the same” over the past decade.

Joe Lamberson, assistant to the chief of police for community services, said one incident can generate zero contacts or a dozen, making it difficult to interpret the raw numbers.

“That’s the challenge,” Lamberson said. “Some shots-fired calls might only involve the reporting party. Others involve notes and reports from half the block.”

Overall they describe Shadow Wood as “pretty stable.”

“It’s going to ebb and flow as the community grows and changes,” Thompson said. “Some years, some patches of year, we’ll see a consistent growth in this area and be fine here. And that’s it.”