By Zachary Bandler and Sabrina Tevolini
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writers
Recent legislation in Maryland to make it difficult for federal authorities to apprehend and detain immigrants may be more political theater than substantive public policy, two political scientists said in interviews.
The professors said emergency legislation approved in Baltimore and Howard counties to ban the establishment of detention centers run by U.S. Immigration and Customers Enforcement and a bill signed by Gov. Wes Moore that prohibits local police from working with ICE agents reflects a political leadership trying to respond to public sentiment in deep-blue Maryland.
Roger Hartley, the president-elect of the American Society for Public Administration and a professor of International and Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore, said local and state politicians are feeling pressure from their voting bases as they face elections this year.
“We’re in a political war, right? And those are bloody,” Hartley said. “It’s only going to be less bloody when people get cool heads and try to solve this as an actual policy problem and figure out a way to get it done.”
Michael Hanmer, the director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement and professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, said people want the government to respond and act quickly, especially when the issue is clear, and there’s photographic evidence.
“I think if you’re an elected official in power, and you’re worried about this potentially coming to your community, you probably are thinking about acting more quickly than you might otherwise,” Hanmer said.
After a leaked video of overcrowded conditions at an ICE detention center in Baltimore on Jan. 26, which caused public outrage, the Howard County Council voted to revoke an ICE building permit and – two weeks later – unanimously voted to prohibit issuing permits to privately owned detention centers.
On Feb. 17, the Baltimore County Council voted 6-0 for emergency legislation to prevent private detention centers after officials learned that the U.S. General Services Administration had leased office space in Cockeysville.
While county officials said they did not know how the federal government was going to use the Cockeysville facility, they approved the bill as a preventative measure against future detention centers.
At the state level, Gov. Wes Moore signed emergency legislation on Feb. 17, prohibiting state and local jurisdictions from deputizing officers for federal civil immigration enforcement activity.
“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,” Moore said in a statement. “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.”
In addition, Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown announced last week that his office filed a federal lawsuit to stop what he called “the Trump administration’s unlawful construction of a massive federal immigration detention center in Washington County.”
Brown said the lawsuit challenges the Department of Homeland Security and ICE’s purchase of a warehouse near Williamsport for conversion into a detention facility for immigrants. He said the federal project was “conducted behind closed doors, and without the requisite environmental review, public participation or state consultation.”
Hartley said, the overall issue is incredibly complex and needs to be understood by the public as a policy problem before legislative decisions are made.
“We’re going to find ourselves in a place where it’s just one side making their simple argument to fire up their base and a lot of harm being done,” Hartley said.
The Baltimore Watchdog reached out to several political science professors in Maryland as well as immigration lawyers. Most either did not return phone calls or declined to comment.