As ICE pushes for and gets more help from Maryland counties, some worry about consequences

After a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement team arrested a 25-year-old man from Guatemala last month, ICE officials slammed Baltimore County for releasing him from custody in April.

The county jail “refused to honor” an immigration detainer request from the agency, ICE said in a news release, and instead released the man, convicted of a fourth-degree sex offense and second-degree assault, from custody. ICE agents then arrested him May 29 near his home in Baltimore.

“We will not tolerate the residents of our communities to be victimized by unlawfully present sex offenders,” said Matthew Elliston, the acting director of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations field office in Baltimore, in the release.

While ICE and Elliston frame it in stark terms, advocates for immigrants and civil liberties say the reality is more complicated.

Jurisdictions across the state aren’t required to comply with ICE detainer requests, which ask officials to hold someone accused of being illegally in the country for up to 48 hours after their scheduled release. The Maryland Attorney General’s Office warned in a 2017 guidance that complying with the requests could constitute a violation of the U.S. Constitution. As a result, many local jurisdictions do not hold someone past when courts say they should be released, unless an order from an immigration judge accompanies the detainer request.

The spotlight on Baltimore County is part of a recent playbook for Elliston and Baltimore’s ICE field office. By highlighting these instances, he hopes to get more jurisdictions to cooperate with his agents by giving them advance notice about a pending release.

“We want every law enforcement entity in this state to be a partner with us. And if it means not detaining people, and just calling us beforehand, that’s OK,” Elliston said. “We are just the big olive branch of law enforcement.”

His strategy paid off earlier this year in Montgomery County and, in the past week, in Baltimore County. Both jurisdictions agreed to do their best to notify ICE officials “48 hours or more” before releasing someone who has a pending detainer request.

@EROBaltimore is proud to be working with @MoCoCouncilMD @MontgomeryCoMD to make safer Maryland neighborhoods. We hope to have similar agreements with @PGCCouncilMedia, @CEXAlsobrooks, @AlsobrooksForMD, @HowardCountyMD, @BaltCouncil, @BaltimoreCoMD https://t.co/bRSyk0HkJM

— ERO Baltimore (@EROBaltimore) March 20, 2024

In a joint statement from Baltimore County and Elliston’s office, officials said the county gave “as much notice as possible” in the case of the man whom ICE had to arrest later. Democratic County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. told The Baltimore Sun in an interview that a county employee had emailed ICE about the release one minute after the court order came through releasing him with time served.

To Elliston, jurisdictions working with ICE is a matter of public safety for Maryland counties, which he said vary in terms of cooperation.

“The violent offenders that we do arrest are generally victimizing the other undocumented community [members],” Elliston said. “The idea that you’re going to be a sanctuary because you want to protect the undocumented community — you’re putting them at great peril because you’re not working with us.”

To others, the idea of greater cooperation with ICE rings alarm bells.

Ama Frimpong-Houser, legal director for CASA, an immigrants rights advocacy group, called increased cooperation with ICE a “slippery slope.”

Asking for a heads-up before someone is released may not be “as terrible” as asking them to be held beyond their release dates, she said. But she’s still concerned: What will they ask for next?

“ICE ERO’s job is to detain and deport individuals. So they will not be satisfied with whatever it is that local jurisdictions give them,” Frimpong-Houser said. “Montgomery County succumbs to one request. What will ICE ask for tomorrow and then the next day and then the next week?”

Nick Taichi Steiner, an ACLU of Maryland senior staff attorney, called it bad policy for a jurisdiction to cooperate with ICE, in part because it could muddle the work of local police officers. Police tasked with enforcing criminal laws aren’t empowered to arrest people for immigration violations, which are civil offenses, he said.

“What a local police officer is allowed to do with a detainer request from ICE is confusing, and it leads to Fourth Amendment violations and it leads to racial profiling,” Steiner said. “It’s usually the Black and brown people who are targeted for enforcement.”

Steiner and the ACLU filed a lawsuit in 2019 that alleged Frederick County sheriff’s deputies tried to hold a woman for ICE, in violation of the Fourth Amendment, after questioning about where she was from and her immigration status. The woman settled in 2021, after a judge found her suit could continue, and she received both a monetary settlement and a letter of apology from the sheriff.

Across the state, counties handle immigration detainer requests differently. Counties including Carroll, Frederick and Harford said this week they comply with detainer requests. Others, like Allegany, Dorchester and St. Mary’s counties, said they don’t. Howard County said it had not been “asked to formally comply” with detainer requests, but it also hadn’t received any this year.

Montgomery County officials agreed in February to give ICE 48 hours notice of its release of someone with a detainer request, instead of the 24-hour notice it was giving, said Ben Stevenson, the director of the county’s Department of Correction and Rehabilitation, in an email.

Explaining the county’s decision, a spokesperson for the county executive said that at a February meeting, “ICE officials explained to us that they were not asking Montgomery County to hold noncitizens beyond their release date, but asked for more advanced notification from the county regarding release dates for the most egregious offenders.”

In the wake of news reports about the Guatemalan man’s release, Baltimore County officials met with ICE on Wednesday and similarly agreed to, where possible, give 48 hours notice before releasing someone with a detainer request. Olszewski described it as “formalizing” what the county already strived to do, and “ensuring that we’re being diligent.”

Between Oct. 1, 2022, and Sept. 30, ICE said the county honored 24 of 81 ICE detainer requests, releasing 57 people for whom there weren’t judicial orders accompanying the detainers.

Such 48-hour notice would not have been possible in the case of the man released April 10, Olszewski said, given the court’s day-of decision to suspend his 6-year prison sentence after he’d already spent 15 months in jail. But, he added, it’s possible officials could have worked together to pair a immigration judge’s order with the detainer, which the county would have honored.

The Maryland attorney general’s 2017 guidance recommended that jurisdictions respond to immigration detainers “only when they are accompanied by a judicial warrant, or when further inquiry gives the local official probable cause to believe that a crime — not merely a civil offense — has been committed.”

That’s not enough for some Baltimore County Republicans who on Friday called on Olszewski to rescind executive orders by his predecessors that they say forbid cooperation with ICE and instead order full cooperation.

“County Executive Olszewski should reverse the 2017 and 2018 executive orders to fully cooperate with ICE in the removal of rapists, pedophiles, and violent offenders from our streets,” said Del. Ryan Nawrocki, a Republican representing Middle River, in a news release issued with fellow Republican Del. Kathy Szeliga. “We must prioritize the safety of our communities, including some of its most vulnerable, our children.”

“I frankly want to give as much notification as I possibly can, particularly on violent or gang-related folks — as a parent, as a resident,” Olszewski said. “If we are honoring constitutional rights and promoting public safety, that’s the right place to be.”

Olszewski said he would tell any residents concerned about cooperation with ICE that the county still won’t stop people based on suspicions about their immigration status, and will continue to honor only detainers that have a judicial order attached.

“We’re going to do all we can to respect the rights of individuals and promote public safety,” he said.

Still, Susana Barrios, the vice president of the Latino Racial Justice Circle, worries about the potential for misunderstanding and mistrust from members of the immigrant community. Cooperation with ICE raises the concern for some that “just because we look a certain way, we’re going to be accused of being undocumented,” she said.

During the pandemic, Barrios helped encourage people to get vaccinations. At one clinic, there weren’t enough pharmacists, so the National Guard was called in. She urged that they shouldn’t come in uniform, but they still did. Numbers of people at the clinic dropped overnight.

“What we heard was, ‘It’s the Army that’s there and we don’t trust them.’ We never gained back the trust,” Barrios said. “I’m afraid that something similar is going to happen, where people are just going to be so afraid, and they’re not going to trust the police.”

Baltimore Sun reporters Lizzy Alspach, Bridget Byrne, Angelique Gingras and Kiersten Hacker contributed to this article.