The Department of Justice sued Maryland on Thursday in federal court, accusing the state of using its Community Trust Act to block immigration arrests, detainers and deportations. The lawsuit says the law amounts to an active and deliberate effort to obstruct federal immigration enforcement and violates the Constitution’s supremacy clause.
The case lands at a moment when the Justice Department has been pressing harder on sanctuary policies. Since February 2025, when the U.S. attorney general ordered the DOJ civil division to identify state and local policies that shield illegal migrants, the department has brought 20 other lawsuits, including cases against Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois and New York. Maryland is now the latest state pulled into that campaign, and the complaint makes clear the fight is not over paperwork. It is over who gets to decide whether federal immigration officers can take custody of someone a local jail is holding.
That question sharpened in Worcester County Jail on May 29, 2026, when the warden told a detention and deportation officer the facility would no longer honor ICE detainers, release people to ICE custody or notify ICE when inmates were ready for release. The jail then denied a scheduled pickup that morning and kept the person in custody. DOJ lawyers point to that episode as evidence that the state law is already changing how local facilities handle immigration enforcement.
At the center of the dispute is a plain clash in legal authority. Maryland’s law says correctional facilities may not transfer people into federal custody without a valid judicial warrant, while the Justice Department argues immigration law also allows arrests under administrative warrants. The department says that conflict has led local authorities not to cooperate with ICE and other immigration officers, which is why it now wants the court to strike the law down.
In a statement filed with the case, Stanley Woodward cast federal immigration officers as people who merely enforce laws passed by Congress and said the suit shows the department will not tolerate what he called lawless action from blue-state leaders. Maryland will have to decide whether to defend the Community Trust Act in court on the ground that its warrant requirement is lawful, and the first real test will be whether a judge accepts the state’s view that its jails cannot be forced to hand people over without judicial approval.
