The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign has led to a succession of showdowns between states and the federal government over local police’s role in immigration enforcement.
These tensions have been playing out within states as well. Democratic-run cities in Republican-led states have found themselves at odds with their governors and other state officials. And increasingly, Republican sheriffs in Democratic-led states have been publicly fighting with their own state governments.
A new front in this battle has opened in Maryland, a solidly Democratic state with an often frustrated Republican minority. A coalition of 17 elected sheriffs, representing most of Maryland’s counties but less than a third of the state’s population, has sued the state over a new law limiting cooperation between local law enforcement agencies and federal immigration authorities.
Maryland had already barred local and state law enforcement agencies from signing formal agreements with the federal government that allow officers to assist in immigration enforcement. But with sheriffs and federal immigration authorities still cooperating in less formal ways, Democratic lawmakers crafted more legislation.
The new law, the Community Trust Act, bars local officials from asking people about their immigration status, notifying federal immigration authorities about people being held in local jails or handing people over to federal agents without a judicial warrant.
In their lawsuit, filed last month in federal court in Greenbelt, Md., the sheriffs argue that the law violates the U.S. Constitution and leaves their officers in a legally precarious place, where state and federal law conflict.
“It put us in a completely undesirable and untenable situation,” said Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler of Harford County, northeast of Baltimore.
Legal experts said Maryland was likely on firm ground because the new law does not require local officials to do anything beyond standard enforcement of criminal law. But given the fraught politics of immigration, the confrontation looms larger than the legal arguments.
Since President Trump’s return to the White House, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have made thousands of arrests in Maryland, more than triple the number of arrests during a similar period under the Biden administration. Nearly three-quarters of these arrests were made in the community, at work sites and in residential neighborhoods.
But hundreds came about through cooperation with local law enforcement, according to testimony submitted to the Maryland legislature by the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit that conducts research on the criminal justice system and supports the new law. In most of those cases, according to the testimony, the person being handed over to ICE had not been convicted of a crime.
“For our clients, that is not an abstract legal problem. It means losing your job, your housing, your family before you have ever been found guilty of anything,” said Stephanie Wolf, director of immigration services for the Maryland Office of the Public Defender.
Sheriffs and immigration activists both agree that cooperation between local officials and federal immigration authorities continued after the state banned formal pacts with ICE. The arrangements are known as 287(g) agreements because of the section of immigration law authorizing them.
“Sheriffs turned around and said, ‘Well, you know, the 287(g) agreements are formal written agreements between us and ICE, so we’re just going to have informal communication,” said Dr. Clarence Lam, the state senator who sponsored the bill.
There are exceptions. Local law enforcement agencies can alert immigration authorities about a person in custody if the person has been convicted of a felony, has had to register as a sex offender or has served at least five years in prison in another state.
The new law’s limits on cooperation are aimed at local jails, not state prisons, which in most states work with ICE routinely. The new law codifies elements of that cooperation, requiring state officials to inform ICE if a person the agency is seeking is going to be released from a state prison.
Still, the sheriffs said that parts of the law, which passed on the last day of the legislative session, were going to create difficulties. Some said they raised concerns in a meeting with Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat.
In a statement, Mr. Moore said the law “advances an important goal,” but presents “implementation challenges that must be addressed through executive action and in next year’s legislative session.”
Some of the sheriffs reiterated a warning that federal officials have made repeatedly in demanding local cooperation — that if ICE can’t pick up people from jails, the agency will end up conducting more operations on the streets.
“We’re going down a road we don’t want to go down,” said Sheriff Joseph Gamble of Talbot County, a politically mixed county on the state’s Eastern Shore.
Senator Lam, a Democrat, dismissed these warnings, saying the Trump administration makes a lot of threats to get what it wants but often does not follow through, or is stopped by the courts.
“I don’t think we should govern as though there was a gun pointed to our head,” he said. “We have to govern based on our values and what we believe is the best thing to do.”
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