Maryland legislation cracking down on police cooperation with immigration officials will put violent aliens back on the streets, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) captured sex offenders, a murderer and an MS-13 gang member in Maryland while ICE partnerships were active, a DHS spokesperson said in a Monday statement. Democratic Maryland Gov. Wes Moore signed his party’s bill on Tuesday, banning contracts known as 287(g) agreements, a once-obscure tool that the Trump administration used to build law enforcement alliances across the country. The change could make future ICE arrests of dangerous people harder, the department said.
“This legislation will make Maryland less safe,” the spokesperson said. “When politicians bar local law enforcement from working with DHS, our law enforcement officers have to have a more visible presence so that we can find and apprehend the criminals let out of jails and back into communities.”
Illegal immigrants arrested in Maryland include a Salvadoran convicted of homicide and larceny, another Salvadoran convicted of assault and lewd or lascivious acts with a minor, a third convicted of incest with a minor and other sex offenses and a fourth linked to MS-13 and convicted on a weapon possession charge, the DHS said. A fifth arrestee was a Peruvian illegal immigrant with strongarm rape, rape with a weapon, sexual assault and sex offense convictions, according to the department.
In January, Prince George’s County also released a migrant convicted of stabbing someone in the back with a suspended sentence after ICE requested to retrieve him, the DCNF previously reported.
Nine Maryland law enforcement agencies signed 287(g) agreements with the first and second Trump administrations, allowing jails and other agencies to arrest, interrogate or transfer migrants to ICE custody depending on the specific contract, federal records show. Activists and Democratic politicians are catching on to ICE’s strategy, filing lawsuits or passing policies against the contracts despite some local support, even in liberal states, the DCNF previously reported.
“In Maryland, we defend Constitutional rights and Constitutional policing—and we will not allow untrained, unqualified, and unaccountable ICE agents to deputize our law enforcement officers,” Gov. Moore said in a statement about his ban. “This bill draws a clear line: we will continue to work with federal partners to hold violent offenders accountable, but we refuse to blur the lines between state and federal authority in ways that undermine the trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve.”
“Maryland is a community of immigrants, and that’s one of our greatest strengths because this country is incomplete without each and every one of us,” Moore said.
Moore’s office claimed that the law does not require “the release of criminals” or harm federal partnerships focused on “the removal of violent criminals who pose a risk to public safety.” The DHS disagrees.
“Instead of working with us, the Maryland Legislature is choosing to RELEASE violent criminals from jails directly into our communities to perpetrate more crimes and create more victims,” the DHS spokesperson told the DCNF.
“The Maryland Legislature is unfortunately following [a] dangerous path — already started by Governor [Kathy] Hochul in New York and Governor [Abigail] Spanberger in Virginia — of putting criminal illegal aliens over American citizens,” the spokesperson said.
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