Montgomery County officials promised to revisit their sanctuary policy Wednesday after federal authorities said a man accused of murdering a toddler was twice in the Maryland county’s custody but was released in defiance of a deportation “detainer” request.
County Executive Marc Elrich said he will add more crimes to the county’s list where it will cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and will also give ICE more advance notice to come pick up migrants it wants to deport.
But Mr. Elrich said he doesn’t support erasing the sanctuary policy altogether, saying the county has leeway and doesn’t want to help ICE in cases involving crimes the county doesn’t consider “serious or violent.”
“We have a good list of things for which we people over to ICE,” he said, listing human trafficking, gun trafficking and violent crimes. “Just not the deportation of individuals for low-level crimes.”
The county is part of an emerging national rethink of immigration policies amid the border surge and a rash of crimes attributed to illegal immigrants.
In Georgia, an illegal immigrant who was caught and released at the border and also arrested and released by New York stands accused of killing a nursing student.
In Maryland, an illegal immigrant stands accused of stealing a state tow truck and leading police on a crazy pursuit, smashing more than a dozen vehicles along the way.
In Virginia, local authorities say an illegal immigrant was arrested for sexually assaulting a young teen girl.
And now there are the new first- and second-degree murder charges against Nilson Noel Trejo-Granados, whom authorities have tied to the killing of 2-year-old Jeremy Poou-Caceres in the crossfire of a shootout.
ICE says Montgomery County had arrested Mr. Trejo-Granados twice last year and each time ICE had placed a “detainer” request to be notified so he could be picked up for deportation proceedings. Montgomery County defied both detainers.
County officials said Wednesday that at least the first arrest was for theft, and that’s too low-level of a crime for the county to cooperate with ICE.
Mr. Elrich did, however, say someone who is a repeat offender might deserve to be turned over to ICE even if it’s for low-level crimes.
He met with an ICE official this week to talk over the county’s policy and said they emerged with new understandings on either side. He said he provided a lengthy list of crimes where the county already says it does cooperate.
And he agreed to revisit the list and take ICE’s suggestions for new crimes to add.
He also agreed to try to give ICE up to 48-hour notice before an agency target is released. That would be double the current time. The county says it cannot hold people beyond their release time for ICE.
But he defended the county’s right now to cooperate on some cases, saying that if the federal government wanted counties to have no leeway Congress would have made detainers mandatory.
“We’re not the only jurisdiction that doesn’t honor them,” he said.
He also said ICE sometimes doesn’t show up for someone it placed a detainer on, indicating that the feds also have a list of priorities.
In his news conference Wednesday, Mr. Elrich complained about his county being labeled a sanctuary, saying to him that would mean refusing all cooperation. He said that’s not the county’s approach.
He said jurisdictions like San Francisco refuse all cooperation and are more properly labeled sanctuaries.