Senate pushes bill to limit ICE in MD: ‘We can’t trust them’

Immigrant rights advocates flocked to Annapolis Thursday in support of legislation slated to ban state law enforcement from entering into partnerships with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“We are watching horrified as this administration beats, abducts, murders people — including American citizens and veterans. Masked men are marching down our streets with weapons with no accountability for our laws and our rights as Americans,” Del. Nicole Williams, D-Prince George’s, said at a news conference. “Today we are here to say, ‘Not here in Maryland. We will not allow the masking of law enforcement or the participation of these ICE programs anymore.’ ”

Sponsored by Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee Chair Will Smith, D-Montgomery, Senate President Bill Ferguson, D-Baltimore City, and Sen. Karen Lewis Young, D-Frederick, Senate Bill 245 would ban any state agency or employee, including local sheriffs, from entering into 287(g) agreements with ICE.

Williams is sponsoring the bill in the House, where it will be heard in the Judiciary Committee later this session.

If passed, the bill would go into effect June 1.

Both Ferguson and House Speaker Joseline Peña-Melnyk, D-Anne Arundel and Prince George’s, support the legislation.

In Maryland, eight counties participate in ICE’s 287(g) Jail Enforcement model Program, allowing them to alert the agency when people who entered the U.S. illegally are held in their facilities for breaking state laws. Of those jurisdictions, five — Allegany, Carroll, Garrett, St. Mary’s and Washington counties — also participate in the Warrant Service Officer Program, which allows law enforcement to serve and execute administrative warrants in county jails.

“How can our community trust our local and state officers to protect us and serve us when these very officers are so entangled with ICE?” Ama Frimpong, CASA’s legal director, asked. “We can’t trust them.”

There are other forms of 287(g) agreements that Maryland counties don’t participate in, including the delegation of certain immigration enforcement powers to local officers.

Though local sheriffs are duly elected constitutional officers, the Maryland General Assembly holds the power to restrict the rights and responsibilities through legislation.

In 2025, the General Assembly passed a bill limiting the amount of time people with ICE detainers can be held in local jails to just two days after they have served their sentence for breaking state laws. If ICE officers do not retrieve those individuals within that two-day period, they are to be released.

Law enforcement officials have decried the 2026 bill, saying that its implementation would decrease public safety and could lead to an increased presence of ICE officers in Maryland.

“I fear … if this legislature passes this law, this bill, you may well see what you’re seeing on television across the country,” Frederick County Sheriff Chuck Jenkins said at a news conference earlier this week. “None of us want that.”

According to Stephanie Wolf, the director of the Immigration Services Division at the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, for every one 287(g) detainer placed on a person convicted of a violent crime, 115 are placed on those with no convictions at all.

This is true in Maryland.

A report from the ACLU of Maryland found that two-thirds of the state’s 700 residents that were arrested by ICE between Sept. 1, 2025, and Oct. 15, 2025, were never criminally charged or convicted. 

Thursday morning, Smith pointed to President Donald Trump’s significant ramp-up in ICE arrests and detainments as a central contributor to what he called a “disorienting” and “head-spinning” period of United States history.

“ICE has been used to stoke fear, disrupt lives and divide our communities,” he said. “The manner in which this program has been administered has bypassed due process for tens-of-thousands of people — most of whom have no criminal record — and we should no longer divert precious resources from our law enforcement from a relentless focus on public safety to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

Asked earlier this week what he would say to Marylanders of color who are scared of being detained by ICE, Harford County Sheriff Jeff Gahler said “don’t sell drugs, don’t do anything violent, don’t break the law and you won’t get arrested and you won’t get screened in.”

Smith said Thursday that Gahler’s statement “bypasses the fundamental principle of due process.”

“Just because you’re arrested does not mean that you are guilty of a crime, and I preside over a committee that’s responsible for creating crimes in the state of Maryland,” he said. “We incarcerate a lot of people in this country — we arrest even more — but the fundamental principle of due process seems to have slipped his mind in that statement.”