Immigration law community weighs pros, cons of MD’s new ICE laws

Maryland’s 2026 legislative session saw the passage of several measures designed to protect immigrants from the Trump administration’s dragnet, drawing mixed reactions from the state’s leaders in immigration law.

Among other things, the Community Trust Act prohibits state law enforcement personnel from asking about or investigating a person’s citizenship, place of birth or immigration status during stops or arrests. It also forbids state corrections officers from holding a person beyond their release date on suspicion of a civil immigration violation, as well as from transferring them to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility without a valid judicial warrant.

The law builds on a measure that banned so-called 287(g) cooperation agreements between ICE and local and state law enforcement.

George Escobar, executive director of We Are CASA, a Maryland-based immigrant advocacy nonprofit that provides legal assistance, hailed the new laws.

“Obviously, this was a tremendous victory for our community,” said Escobar, who is also one of The Daily Record’s MD500 honorees this year. “This has an extraordinary impact on our everyday members. No. 1, it really ensures that any interaction they’re going to have with local police or state police … will not wind up with some engagement with ICE.”

Escobar also pointed to the Online Data Privacy Act, which took effect in October 2025, with active enforcement beginning this spring. The law protects immigrants seeking a driver’s license or health insurance, for example, from having their personal information used to track them.

“It ensures that data isn’t going to be sold to a data broker who’s going to transfer that over to ICE in any form,” Escobar said, calling the legislation a national model. “We’ve been fighting for this for a very long time. We’ve been raising the red flags. We already knew that Trump and the extreme right-wing forces in this country wanted to manipulate data, wanted to really expand their capacity to do their evil.”

Immigration attorney and MD500 honoree Sheri Hoidra of Sheri Hoidra Law Office in Columbia said the new legislation is a step in the right direction, but Maryland’s laws are perhaps not always being followed.

“I do think that this type of legislation is helpful because at least it provides a sense of protection to the community at large to know that their state is … agreeing to protect them,” she said.

But Hoidra said she has observed that federal agents still appear to be accessing data from the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration, in apparent contravention of an earlier law, the Maryland Driver Privacy Act, which requires ICE to have a judicial warrant to access MVA data such as drivers’ personal information or facial recognition data.

Hoidra related the story of a client picked up by ICE this year while driving her mother’s car. While her mother had a removal order with ICE, the daughter was in the United States legally, with Special Immigrant Juvenile Status.

“They picked up this young lady even though she wasn’t the one that was titled on the vehicle just because she was driving,” Hoidra said. “They were supposed to pick up mom and then they grabbed her instead.”

The young woman was granted voluntary departure by an immigration court in Louisiana and returned to Honduras, Hoidra said.

Hoidra said the provision that ICE produce a judicial warrant — not the administrative warrants the agency has been using — is key.

“If anybody is arrested or detained without a judicial warrant, there’s an argument to be made for release,” she said.

Nevertheless, Hoidra said she was unsure if the new laws were having an impact.

“I will tell you that common, everyday Marylanders are picked up somehow by ICE daily even since these (laws) have gone into effect,” she said. “So it seems a little bit more like optics than reality.”

Gov. Wes Moore allowed the Community Trust Act to pass without signing it, praising its mission but adding that “… this bill presents real implementation challenges that must be addressed through executive action and in next year’s legislative session.”

The Trump administration has sued Maryland over the law, as have 17 Maryland sheriffs, who also cite the ban on 287(g) agreements with ICE in their suit.

“Our nation must speak with one voice when dealing with the national problem of illegal immigration, and the federal government must be able to pursue a unified policy, or the supremacy of federal law is in name only,” stated Dale L. Wilcox, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the sheriffs.

Both suits argue that Maryland’s new immigration-related laws violate the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution, which states in part that “all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land … any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

However, Michael Meyerson, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Baltimore School of Law, says two other constitutional principles come into play.

“One, the Anti-Commandeering Doctrine, which says that Congress can’t make states enforce federal law,” he said. “That’s why state police cannot be forced to enforce immigration law. They can do it voluntarily.”

Meyerson also focused on the new Maryland laws’ emphasis on judicial warrants instead of administrative warrants.

“Administrative warrants are really suspect constitutionally,” he said. “An administrative law judge is not a judge. An administrative warrant is not a warrant. It violates the separation of powers principles to have agencies acting like they have Article III power” – that is, the power of a neutral judge.

“I think it’s constitutional,” Meyerson said of the Community Trust Act. “I think the state is controlling its own people.”

The MD500 is a recognition of the 500 most powerful people in Maryland business, law, education, nonprofits and more.