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Every person getting booked in jail in Frederick County is asked two questions: “Where were you born?” and “What country are you a citizen of?”
If the answer to either question is anything other than the U.S., said Sheriff Chuck Jenkins (R), officers will take the individual to the facility’s “ICE unit” where they determine the person’s legal status. If residing in the country illegally, officers will then place a detainer on them to initiate removal proceedings — if determined appropriate by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“Rather than release a criminal back onto the street, we turn those criminals over to ICE,” Jenkins said.
Frederick is one of several Maryland counties where the sheriff’s office has opted to participate in the “287(g)” program, which allows ICE to delegate certain immigration enforcement abilities to state and local law enforcement officials. The powers include executing administrative immigration warrants in their jails, identifying and beginning removal proceedings against individuals arrested by local law enforcement, and serving on task forces that allow officers to “enforce limited immigration authority.”
While 287(g) agreements were first established in 1996, they have gained increased public awareness and scrutiny after President Donald Trump returned to office in January and directed a significant increase in immigration enforcement across the country. So far during his presidency, immigration arrests in Maryland have doubled.
Since the beginning of this year, five more Maryland sheriff’s offices — in Allegany, Carroll, Garrett, St. Mary’s and Washington counties — have signed 287(g) agreements with ICE. Cecil, Frederick and Harford counties already had agreements in place.
While the kinds of agreement can differ, all the participating sheriff’s offices in Maryland only utilize the 287(g) program in their county jails.
Opponents of the 287(g) program say that it leads to racial profiling of Latino residents, and will only increase distrust in law enforcement.
CASA policy manager Ninfa Amador-Hernandez said it was a “great disappointment” that the Maryland General Assembly did not approve a provision of the Maryland Values Act in the last legislative session which would have ended current 287(g) agreements in the state and prohibited the formation of new ones.
“The impact of these programs is not just fear and mistrust in local government,” Amador-Hernandez said. “It’s also the deep trauma and separation these programs cause.”
Amador-Hernandez added that local law enforcement in Maryland shouldn’t be spending taxpayer money on the extra time and effort the program requires of officers to partner with ICE.
“There’s absolutely no reason a locality should be using their taxpayer dollars to enhance this agency’s [ICE] already-over-funded programs,” she said.
Sheriffs who participate in the program, including those from every county in Western Maryland, have defended 287(g) agreements as an effective tool.
Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler (R) said the idea that the program is racially discriminatory or increases distrust in law enforcement among immigrant communities is “all scare tactics.” He’d like to see all 24 counties in Maryland sign a 287(g) agreement, he said
“Our job is not to do ICE’s job,” he said. “It’s not to do the FBI’s job. It’s not to do the DEA’s job. But we should be good partners on the things that relate to keeping our community safe, and this program works to keep our community safe through a partnership.”
Carroll County Sheriff Jim Dewees (R) said that critics of the program are “incredibly naive” to how it works.
“This is a jail-based model. We are not running around looking for people that ICE wants,” he said.
Dewees, president of the Maryland Sheriffs Association, said the program isn’t discriminatory, as each person’s immigration status is checked, regardless of who they are. But University of Maryland Carey School of Law Professor Maureen Sweeney said it matters who is brought to jail in the first place.
“Who are they choosing to bring in, as opposed to giving them a ticket or not even stopping them?” asked Sweeney, the faculty director of the law school’s Chacón Center for Immigrant Justice.
Sweeney pointed to past Justice Department investigations that found some U.S. sheriff’s offices with 287(g) agreements were racially profiling Latino residents.
In 2011, one DOJ investigation determined that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona was engaging in a pattern of “unconstitutional policing,” then-Assistant U.S. Attorney General Thomas E. Perez wrote in a letter at the time.
The investigation found that the office was racially profiling Latinos, unlawfully stopping, detaining and arresting them, and unlawfully retaliating against individuals who complained about the office, Perez wrote in the 2011 letter. Latino drivers were four to nine times more likely to be pulled over for a traffic stop than “similarly situated non-Latino drivers,” wrote Perez.
As a result, the Department of Homeland Security terminated its 287(g) agreement with the county. The program was later reformed by President Barack Obama, removing its “Task Force Model.”
Sweeney said the program incentivizes police to engage in these kinds of unconstitutional stop-and-search tactics.
“It’s an arrest that would likely be thrown out in criminal court, but because of the more lax standards in the immigration system, they often get the credit for enforcement, even though it was an unconstitutional stop,” Sweeney said. “It is illegal to stop somebody on the basis of their race, regardless of whether you’re enforcing the criminal law or the immigration law, but the mechanisms to enforce that are so much weaker in the immigration system.”
The Frederick County Sheriff’s Office, which Jenkins said has the longest-standing 287(g) agreement in the country, has served more than 1,800 immigration detainers since it first joined in 2008.
Others are still getting off the ground. Washington County Sheriff Brian Albert said that his office’s 287(g) agreement has only been operational since July 1. So far, they’ve processed one person, he said.
Most of Maryland’s sheriffs have not signed a 287(g) agreement, however.
Montgomery County Sheriff Maxwell Uy (D), said that he didn’t join the program because county residents don’t want his office entering into an agreement to enforce immigration, and due to the fact that he doesn’t oversee the county’s jails.
“You wouldn’t want a federal officer, federal agent, to write traffic tickets. Montgomery County residents don’t want their deputies out enforcing immigration law,” he said. “It’s the community that should dictate how they want their law enforcement to engage with the public.”
Others, like Talbot County Sheriff Joe Gamble (R), said they haven’t joined simply because they don’t oversee a jail, and wouldn’t have the ability to sign on to a jail enforcement-based agreement.
At its root, Sweeney said the problem lies in uniting immigration enforcement with criminal enforcement. By combining the two, she said, immigrant communities aren’t going to trust the police, or go to them when they need to.
Immigration enforcement is going to have a drastic impact on the way people live, she said.
“We live in a global world, right? And that’s not going away,” Sweeney said. “We will come back to some kind of balance. But how long will it take, and how much damage will be done to individuals and companies, the economy, the culture? That remains to be seen.”
