Every month for the past three years, Jeanne Velez has convened a Latino community meeting with the same assertion: Baltimore City police officers are not immigration agents.
The meetings, a partnership between Velez, a longtime activist in Baltimore's Hispanic community, and Southeast District commanders, serve to urge skittish new immigrants to shed their fear of the authorities, while educating them about public safety and victims' rights.
It's a vastly different approach from the new policy of the Frederick County Sheriff's Office, which recently became the only law enforcement agency in Maryland to sign an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to check immigration status when they make an arrest or respond to a call for service.
Montgomery County has a policy of checking the immigration status of people police arrest.
Nationwide, a rising number of local agencies are deputizing officers to enforce federal immigration laws, sparking fierce debate about the priorities of local authorities. On one hand, politicians and some residents, frustrated with federal authorities' failure to clamp down on surging illegal immigration, are pressing police agencies to take enforcement into their own hands. Meanwhile, immigrant advocates and some crime-fighting experts assert cracking down on illegal immigrants encourages ethnic profiling, threatens community-police relations and siphons resources away from fighting violent crime.
Although this debate is heating up in Maryland, few law enforcement agencies appear willing to follow the Frederick County sheriff's lead. Most chief law enforcement officials in the Baltimore region said they do not plan to enter such agreements, with some saying they know very little about such enforcement policies.
"We see immigration enforcement as a federal law enforcement responsibility, and we have a local responsibility," said Bill Toohey, spokesman for the Baltimore County Police Department, adding that the county would not sign an agreement with federal authorities. "We are not passing judgment about whether the federal government is doing enough. We are just drawing the line. We are a local law enforcement agency with local responsibilities."
But Brad Botwin, director of the anti-illegal immigration group Help Save Maryland, said local authorities cooperate with federal agents all the time and that Frederick's policy is no different. The group is launching a letter-writing campaign to sheriffs across the state, urging them to adopt enforcement agreements with the federal government.
