Montgomery County has honored two deportation “detainer” requests turning over illegal immigrants accused of sex abuse crimes, the Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday.
The county has a sanctuary policy that limits its cooperation with deportation officials, but after a spate of high-profile crimes blamed on illegal immigrants, county officials said they would strive to do more to help U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In a statement, ICE said the county is being “newly cooperative.”
The agency didn’t name either of the deportation targets but said one is a 44-year-old Honduran who was charged in November with sex abuse of a minor and two counts of rape, among other charges. The county released him to ICE on March 11.
The other target is a 33-year-old Salvadoran who was convicted in November of sex abuse of a minor and sentenced to 10 years in prison, but almost all of the sentence was suspended. The Montgomery County Detention Center transferred him to ICE on March 11.
“We are extremely happy to be working with our law enforcement partners in Montgomery County toward safer neighborhoods,” said Darius Reeves, director of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division in Baltimore, which oversees Maryland.
The Washington Times contacted the county for comment.
County officials have come under severe criticism in recent weeks after a series of high-profile crimes, including an illegal immigrant charged with killing a 2-year-old. The man had twice been arrested and released by the county in defiance of ICE detainer requests.
The county said the man’s criminal record wasn’t serious enough to trigger cooperation with ICE at the time he was in custody.
After that killing and the slaying of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia, drew national attention to sanctuary policies, county officials said they were rethinking their stance. County Executive Marc Elrich said he would add new crimes to the list that triggers cooperation with ICE, and he also said his office would do a review in each case where a detainer would be declined and decide if the policy should be overridden.
He also said the county would try to give ICE 48 hours’ notice so someone could be ready to pick up a target before release.
It’s not clear if the two new cases fell under the new practices, though ICE had previously said the county had been declining every detainer.
Mr. Elrich has denied the label “sanctuary” applies to Montgomery County, saying he thinks that it belongs only to jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate at all. He said his county did cooperate on a list of serious convictions.
Sanctuary jurisdictions say they promote better relations with immigrants, who don’t have to fear cooperating with local authorities.
Mr. Reeves, though, said ICE is not in the business of targeting victims or other rank-and-file illegal immigrants and is instead looking for the “most egregious” cases.
“The two detainees that we took custody of were both charged with sexually abusing Maryland minors,” he said. “Sex offenders are certainly not the types of people that the residents of Montgomery County want roaming their streets.”