An Open Letter from Project Salt Box in Support of the Community Trust Act

The 287(g) ban closed one door, but the pipeline into ICE custody is still open.

Dear Members of the Maryland General Assembly,

We are Project Salt Box. We track how the federal government spends money on immigration detention by monitoring contracts, filing public records requests, and maintaining a national database of warehouse acquisitions by the Department of Homeland Security. We write today in support of HB 1575 and SB 791, the Community Trust Act.

Maryland’s General Assembly has done admirable work this session. The House passed HB 1017 and HB 1018, which will restrict where private detention facilities can operate and set enforceable conditions standards inside them. HB 351 created a cause of action in state courts against federal officers accused of civil rights violations. The legislature ended 287(g) agreements, the formal arrangements that for years deputized local sheriffs as ICE agents. These were hard-won fights, and they should be celebrated.

But every one of these measures addresses what happens after a person is already in custody. None of them address how people get into that pipeline in the first place.

Within days of the governor signing the 287(g) ban, Maryland sheriffs announced publicly that they intended to keep working with ICE regardless. Harford County Sheriff Jeff Gahler told Fox Baltimore that his office would continue sharing arrest information with ICE so the agency could file detainers: “We go forward still in partnership. Even if it’s not formal, even if the MOUs are banned.” Carroll County Sheriff Jim DeWees said he had already written a new internal policy to continue communicating with ICE. These men are not acting in secret — they are explaining, on camera, how they plan to preserve the substance of an arrangement the legislature just prohibited in law.

Ending 287(g) removed one mechanism. It did not remove the others. Maryland law enforcement agencies continue to exploit both formal and informal means to continue feeding people into ICE custody — and in some cases are paid to do it. The Department of Justice-administered State Criminal Alien Assistance Program reimburses state and local governments for days spent incarcerating people whose immigration status DHS has confirmed, meaning agencies that share detainee information with DHS get paid for it. Maryland collected nearly $3.6 million in SCAAP awards in fiscal year 2024, including payments to Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, both of which have recently adopted local Community Trust Act policies. ICE made its intentions plain on February 15 of this year — the same day advocates across the state were submitting testimony on HB 630 — when it updated its 287(g) webpage to actively promote SCAAP as a continuing avenue for local cooperation, noting in bold that the program is “entirely separate from the 287(g) program.”

A Baltimore Banner analysis of federal ICE data, obtained through a FOIA lawsuit, found that over 3,200 people were arrested in Maryland in the first nine months of Trump’s second term — nearly three times the prior year’s total. During a surge from September through mid-October, two out of every three people ICE arrested had never been charged with a crime. Violent criminal convictions accounted for six percent of arrests. We Are CASA has received hundreds of calls through its community hotline documenting what this looks like in practice — extended detentions without a judicial warrant, transfers from correctional facilities with little notice, and people handed to ICE while their cases were still pending. Many had never been convicted of anything.

When state and local agencies facilitate those transfers before a case is resolved, they are bypassing Maryland’s own legal system.

HB 1575 and SB 791 will establish statewide rules abolishing the conduct those sheriffs described openly: voluntary notifications to ICE, informal information sharing, and transfers without judicial authorization. Both bills define “court order” and “judicial warrant” to exclude documents issued by DHS or DOJ — an ICE administrative detainer, which no judge has signed, does not qualify. Criminal investigations are preserved. Routine booking procedures are untouched. What the bills prohibit is the use of Maryland law enforcement to advance federal civil immigration enforcement where no court has authorized it.

Howard, Prince George’s, Baltimore, and Montgomery counties have preëmptively enacted local versions of this policy. But Frederick County Sheriff Chuck Jenkins has said publicly that he intends to keep working with ICE no matter what. That is the argument for a statewide law. A resident in Frederick County deserves the same protections as a resident in Montgomery County. A patchwork does not accomplish that, and county sheriffs who disagree with the policy direction of their own legislature have made clear they will exploit any gap it leaves them.

The question before this legislature is not whether Maryland opposes gross federal overreach and state complicity in it. This session has answered that. The question is whether the protections Maryland has built will hold at every point in the pipeline, or only at the end of it. A correctional officer who calls ICE without a judicial warrant, a shared database entry, a person with no criminal conviction handed to ICE on the basis of an administrative detainer no judge ever signed — none of that is addressed by anything this legislature has passed so far. HB 1575 and SB 791 address it.

We urge the General Assembly to pass them.

IN SERVICE,

PROJECT SALT BOX