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From left, Senate President Bill Ferguson, Sen. Karen Lewis Young, Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee Chair Will Smith, Del. Nicole Williams, Gov. Wes Moore, Liliana Ramirez, House Speaker Joseline Peña-Melnyk and We Are Casa Executive Director George Escobar smile as the bill to ban 287(g) agreements in Maryland is signed. (Hannah Gaskill/The Daily Record)
‘No more’: MD ban on local police partnerships with ICE becomes law
Key takeaways:
- Gov. Wes Moore signed an emergency bill banning local law enforcement partnerships with ICE under 287(g) agreements.
- The legislation prohibits memoranda of understanding that allow ICE to detain undocumented immigrants in Maryland jails.
- The bill passed on Feb. 13 and took effect immediately upon signing.
Gov. Wes Moore, House Speaker Joseline Peña-Melnyk and Senate President Bill Ferguson signed an emergency bill Tuesday to prevent local law enforcement from entering into official partnerships with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“We will not allow untrained, unqualified and unaccountable agents to deputize our brave law enforcement officers, because Maryland is a community of immigrants,” Moore said before pen hit paper. “It is not our weakness, it’s our strength.”
The trio of Democrats signed both the House and Senate versions of the legislation, which will prohibit local law enforcement from entering into memoranda of understanding with ICE to hold people who illegally entered the United States in local jails, known as 287(g) agreements.
Both pieces of legislation, which passed on Feb. 13, are emergency bills, and will go into effect immediately.
“By terminating these 287(g) agreements today, we know that ICE will no longer be assisted or subsidized by local law enforcement, ensuring that ICE cannot abuse or terrorize our immigrant families with Maryland’s complicity,” Ferguson said.
Tuesday marked the earliest instance in which Moore has signed a passed bill during the legislative session since he’s been in office.
According to the nonpartisan Department of Legislative Services, the last time an emergency bill passed so quickly and was signed at such a pace was Jan. 30, 2014, under former Gov. Martin O’Malley.
It also marked Peña-Melnyk’s first bill signing since she was elected to serve as the speaker of the House of Delegates. In acknowledgement, Peña-Melnyk, herself an immigrant, said, “God does not get it wrong.”
She stood and spoke of her mother, who immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic without knowing any English. Peña-Melnyk said her mother “went through hell” to put food on the table for her children and make sure they received an education so that she, as speaker of the House, could stand up Tuesday to testify that “immigrants have the lowest rate of people that are incarcerated.”
“Immigrants come here because they want a better life. Immigrants have a very strong sense of God in who they are,” Peña-Melnyk said. “Immigrants have a strong family unit, and they’re good people, and we’re all immigrants.”
Several people shared stories Tuesday of friends and loved ones who have been affected by ICE’s presence in the state.
Ferguson noted that he has a longtime family friend with a green card who does general contacting work. According to the Senate president, this man always rolls up to visit in his work van.
But, when he saw him three weeks ago, he was driving a different car.
“I asked him, ‘Do you no longer have your work van?’ and what he said was beyond horrifying,” Ferguson said. “He said, ‘I had to change my car because too many of my friends had been driving work vans and had been pulled over and ripped out of their vans, and I can’t afford to do that to my family.’ ”
“That is not the world that we can continue living in,” Ferguson said.
At a rally before the bill signing, 10-year-old Liliana Ramirez of Prince George’s County read testimony — with the help of Peña-Melnyk — about how her father was taken by ICE from his construction site in Frederick County on Dec. 30.
“My dad never came home. ICE was waiting for him and other workers in the parking lot,” Ramirez said. “Today, I’m not just here to talk about what me and my family are going through. I’m here to celebrate because Maryland said, ‘No, no more. No more helping ICE.’ ”
“No more making kids like me lose their parents,” she said.
As the ink dried on the signed bills, Ramirez stood and smiled between the governor and the House speaker.
Still, Republicans have railed against the legislation as antithetical to public safety.
In a joint statement issued before the bill signing, House Minority Leader Jason Buckel, R-Allegany, and House Minority Whip Jesse Pippy, R-Frederick, said that eliminating 287(g) programs statewide is “only about political theater rather than public safety or even effective policy making.”
They noted that six Maryland counties employ unofficial models where they coordinate with ICE through their local jails, that three use official jail models with “enhanced formal cooperation to identify convicted or suspected criminals in their custody who are here illegally” to help facilitate their transfer to ICE and that sheriffs in those counties have said they will continue to work with the agency.
“At the end of the day, all this legislation does is make it harder for law enforcement to protect our public safety by throwing up additional roadblocks to agency cooperation,” Buckel and Pippy said.
According to Moore, ICE, which has an $85 billion budget, is currently the biggest law enforcement agency in the U.S. and is the 13th largest military force across the globe.
“It is larger than the FBI, it is larger than the DEA, it is larger than the ATF,” he said. “ICE received more funding last year than our entire state budget, and we’ve seen the results of an unaccountable agency with seemingly unlimited resources.”
Upon signing the bills, Moore sent letters to Carolyn Scruggs, the secretary of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, all executive branch and state law enforcement agencies, and local leaders, informing them that the bill had been enacted.
Moore made it clear Tuesday that, just because the bill had become law, Maryland is committed to constitutional policing and working with federal agencies to “be able to address the worst of the worst in our society.”
“It does not prevent Maryland from working with the federal government to hold violent offenders accountable,” Moore said. “The people in the state know, and they are very clear after watching the first few years of this administration, we do not take violent offenders lightly.”
