Maryland politicians and advocates publicly confronted the interim director of Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Baltimore field office last week at the state’s premier gathering for policymakers, questioning her agents’ tactics for targeting and detaining immigrants and imploring her to resist what they called the harsher edicts of the Trump administration’s enforcement crackdown.
“Your officers have to do your job, but do you have to do it in a manner where the windows are broken?” Del. Joseline A. Peña-Melnyk (D-Prince George’s) asked ICE director Nikita Baker during a heated question-and-answer session at the Maryland Association of Counties Conference in Ocean City.
Peña-Melnyk, one of several in the audience to question Baker on Thursday afternoon, questioned why ICE agents would use force to detain otherwise cooperative people, especially in front of children, and pleaded with the acting director to honor “due process.”
“We need to be respectful because we are lacking empathy right now in this country, and we are abusing people and we have laws for a reason,” Peña-Melnyk said. “Can you please go back to your office and tell them to be kinder?”
Baker said she would go back to her agents and convey that message. She defended them as professionals who have a job to do: “I can understand your feelings about it, but, however, I can’t stop doing my job. And my job is to enforce the law.”
The emotional back-and-forth mirrored the alarm many throughout the Washington region have been saying about President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown since he took office earlier this year. The president declared a crime emergency last week in the District — mobilizing federal police agents and deploying the National Guard — and daily arrest sweeps have focused on immigration enforcement.
In Maryland, where many immigrant families reside, lawmakers are mobilizing to raise the issue during the 2026 state legislative session.
“What do we have to lose?” Peña-Melnyk said in an interview after the panel. “What in the world do we need to lose when we’re losing it all?”
While the General Assembly was in session from January to April this year, advocates warned lawmakers about the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics, including detaining people with no history of criminal violations. In one incident, ICE agents in Maryland broke car windows in front of children during arrests, according to the Baltimore Banner.
But the comprehensive policy agenda that was introduced at the start of the session was narrowed in the end, with lawmakers barely beating the clock to pass the Maryland Values Act. That law requires law enforcement to notify officials when they are conducting activity at “sensitive locations,” including schools, libraries and courthouses.
But the law doesn’t include language championed by the Democratic majority in the House of Delegates that would have banned 287(g) partnerships, which are signed agreements between local law enforcement and U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement that enable collaboration among agencies to deport people.
The Senate killed the effort to curtail the 287(g) program, with Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore County) saying he feared the move could provoke the White House amid Trump’s immigration crackdown and threaten critical federal funding amid a budget crisis in Maryland.
Those who championed the proposed law to limit 287(g), many of whom were in Ocean City for Thursday’s panel, said those fears have come true despite the state’s attempts to assuage the president.
“From the start, I believed that they were going to be who they are,” said Del. Ashanti Martinez (D-Prince George’s), chair of the Latino Caucus. “It’s our responsibility to be who we are as a state.”
Passing a ban on 287(g) agreements, Martinez said, would “highlight how we as Maryland are a welcoming state.”
Del Nicole Williams (D-Prince George’s), who championed the effort to ban 287(g) agreements, spoke on the Ocean City panel and announced that she will likely refile legislation that would curtail ICE’s power to deputize local police to enforce federal immigration laws.
“The Trump administration will probably continue to ramp up the enforcement activities that we have been seeing here in Maryland and across the country,” she said, noting that she has received a lot of requests urging her to reintroduce the 287(g) ban.
The panel focused on the relationship between Maryland and ICE, which varies substantially from county to county. Panelist Daniel Galbraith, the warden at the Harford County Detention Center, told the crowd about his county’s participation in the 287G program, a federal partnership between the Harford County Sheriff and ICE.
Baker outlined her agency’s responsibilities and championed its work to prioritize the deportation of violent criminals. She said the Baltimore field office had removed more sex offenders than any other in the nation, and had removed the second-largest number of alleged gang members. She also defended the choice of some of her officers to wear masks while arresting people because of incidents of immigration agents being doxed, threatened or followed home.
During her presentation, Williams called attention to the detention of Kilmar Abrego García, the Maryland man who entered the United States illegally when he was a teenager and applied for asylum in 2019. He was mistakenly deported to El Salvador by ICE and accused, without evidence, of being a gang member. The Supreme Court said in an unsigned ruling in April that his removal to El Salvador was illegal.
Baltimore City council member Odette Ramos, the first and only Latina on the council, recounted reports of masked ICE agents arresting city residents and taking them away in unmarked cars, and criticized the conditions of temporary holding cells in Baltimore that have drawn the attention of the state’s congressional delegation. Ramos urged Baker to use her position to make her agents act differently.
“It’s just really abhorrent that this is happening,” Ramos said. “I’m asking you to resist. I’m asking you to stop doing this.”
Other local officials and immigration reform advocates repeatedly questioned Baker over reported incidents of ICE allegedly violating due process rights and holding detainees in inhumane conditions. Baker’s responses drew mumbled rebuttals from the crowd.
Martinez, who moderated the panel, said he was glad the conference invited a group of people with differing perspectives on immigration enforcement to come together.
“We are having a lot of these conversations but in silos, right?” Martinez said. “Folks that are in support or folks that are opposed of the current enforcement measures of this administration are talking amongst themselves. I think this panel provided us an opportunity to get all the stakeholders in the room to have an honest and truthful conversation in a way that’s respectful of one another’s point of views.”
After the panel, a woman from the audience approached Williams and showed her a picture of her young granddaughter, whose father was deported a few years ago. The woman told Williams that she doesn’t know whether they’ll see him again, and that his absence has had a negative impact on her granddaughter.
“That’s the human side of this story that we’re dealing with,” Williams said. “And this is why I do what I do and why I fight so hard. Because these are actual human beings, these are my friends, these are family members, this is my community.”
