The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office has acknowledged that it improperly transferred a detainee to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody on June 18, a move it later said did not fit the exceptions in the Maryland Community Trust Act. The office said it has since taken steps to make sure it does not happen again.
The timing matters because the transfer was made before the Sheriff’s Office had finished its own review of whether the case could legally be handed over. WUSA9 reported that the issue surfaced when a public defender came to meet the detainee and learned the person had already been transferred, turning a routine custody matter into a public test of how closely the office follows Maryland’s limits on immigration cooperation.
Montgomery County Council President Natali Fani-González seized on the acknowledgment and said she was “extremely frustrated” by reports that Sheriff Maxwell Uy failed to ensure the office’s policies and practices complied with state law. She said she had faced the threat of deportation herself and understood the fear that many families live with, then pointed to the county’s own Trust Act, which she said she helped spearhead with her Council colleagues to prohibit the use of county resources in federal civil immigration enforcement.
The Sheriff’s Office said it released the detainee after receiving a federal detainer request that indicated a risk to national security and public safety. That detail is what made the case look different from an ordinary immigration referral, but the internal review still concluded the transfer was not covered by the legal exceptions in the Maryland Community Trust Act, which limits when local correctional agencies can cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
That gap leaves the most important question less about the transfer itself than about the judgment that led to it. Maxwell Uy said the office does not engage in immigration enforcement, does not ask about immigration status and has not joined legal challenges to the law filed by sheriffs in other Maryland jurisdictions. He also said the office has implemented measures to prevent a similar incident, but the public record still does not show what specific facts convinced personnel the transfer might qualify before the review said it did not.
For Montgomery County, the case is now bigger than a single detainee. It shows how quickly a local agency can cross the line when federal requests and state restrictions collide, and it leaves the sheriff’s office having to prove that the safeguards it says it added are strong enough to keep a second mistake from happening.
