Glass introduces bill to ban county permits for private immigration detention facilities

The latest immigration-related bills introduced to the Montgomery County Council on Tuesday aim to restrict private immigration detention facilities from operating in the county and to help family members of detained individuals recover their loved one’s vehicles.

Councilmember Evan Glass (D-At-large) on Tuesday morning introduced a bill that would effectively ban privately owned and operated immigration detention facilities by prohibiting the county from issuing building and use permits for them.

Also on Tuesday, Councilmember Kate Stewart (D-Dist. 4) introduced a bill she hopes will enable family members of detained individuals to recover their vehicles from tow lots using commonly accepted forms of photo identification and documents demonstrating a relationship to the vehicle’s owner.

The two bills are part of a wider push at the local and state levels to reign in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in Montgomery County and Maryland. Other local bills under consideration by the council include the County Values Act sponsored by Councilmember Kristin Mink (D-Dist. 5) and the Unmask ICE Act sponsored by Councilmember Will Jawando (D-At-large). Both had public hearings Tuesday afternoon.

Last month, the council voted unanimously to pass the Trust Act, which among other changes prevents the county from entering into formal agreements with ICE through the federal 287(g) program. Gov. Wes Moore (D) recently signed a law that has the same effect statewide.

Montgomery County Council President Fani-González (D-Dist. 6) — who led the council in passing the Trust Act — also supported the statewide ban on local agreements with ICE during a January committee hearing in Annapolis.

The bills sponsored by Glass and Stewart appear likely to pass. The two councilmembers are co-sponsors of each other’s bills, as are the other nine members of the council. Public hearings on both of those bills will be scheduled for a later date, Fani-González said Tuesday morning.

ICE Out Act

During a Monday afternoon press conference at the council office building in Rockville, Glass said a private individual or entity seeking to open a privately owned immigration detention center in Montgomery County under current regulations would need to acquire both a building permit and a use and occupancy permit.

Under his bill, called the ICE Out Act, Glass said the Department of Permitting Services would be prohibited from issuing either permit to a private party seeking to operate an immigration detention facility in the county. ICE stands for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“What we’ve learned about ICE is that they are most [often] using third parties to purchase and lease buildings,” Glass said during Monday’s press conference. The permitting process is “where we can stop them.”

Glass’ bill would not prevent private landowners in Montgomery County from selling their land to the federal government for use as an immigration detention facility — as seen in Washington County, where ICE has purchased a warehouse with the capacity to hold 1,500 people.

“If a landowner here in Montgomery County wanted to sell their property to ICE, that gets into a different jurisdictional question,” Glass said Monday, adding the county “would still apply this [proposed law] as much as we can” to such a situation.

The introduction of the ICE Out Act follows similar action by the Howard County Council, which last month passed emergency legislation aimed at stopping a planned immigration detention facility at an office park in Elkridge. The applicant for the building permit in that case was McKeever Services, a construction company in Fairfax, Virginia.

“Our immigrant neighbors are frightened for their safety, and many residents want to know what we are doing to help,” Glass said during Tuesday’s council meeting. “The ICE Out Act ensures that our permitting process cannot be exploited to bring private immigration detention centers to Montgomery County.”

Vehicle Recovery Act

According to a council staff report on Stewart’s bill, county officials have seen an uptick in vehicles left in public rights-of-way and subsequently towed after drivers have been detained by federal agents.

“If the registered owner is unavailable, and a family member is not listed on the vehicle title, that family member is often unable to retrieve the vehicle during the period of detention,” the staff report says.

Under the country’s existing executive regulations, someone who is not the registered owner of a vehicle can only recover it from a tow lot if they have a notarized letter from the owner authorizing them to do so, the staff report says.

The proposed Vehicle Recovery Act would allow towing companies to release a vehicle to someone other than the owner if that person presents a valid form of photo identification and at least one document proving shared residence or a familial relationship with the vehicle’s owner.

Among the acceptable documents listed in the Vehicle Recovery Act are a mortgage statement, lease agreement or marriage license. A notarized letter from the vehicle’s owner would still be accepted. The bill does not address fees associated with recovering towed vehicles.

In her comments while introducing the bill Tuesday, Stewart said the stress experienced by the county’s immigrant families is “compounded” when they lose access to their vehicle.

“They’re experiencing a great deal of hardship and attempting to navigate one hurdle after another when a loved one has been taken,” Stewart said. “This bill would help alleviate one of the struggles they are having.”

Stewart noted that the MoCo Immigrant Rights Collective recently assisted a woman after her husband was detained by ICE.

In that case, the woman tried repeatedly to make contact with her husband while the cost to recover his vehicle kept increasing. The woman had to “travel far just to try to retrieve the keys, only to face closed offices and more confusion,” Stewart said.

Councilmember Kristin Mink (D-Dist. 5) has also spoken about the phenomenon, commenting in a Feb. 10 press release on the passage of the Trust Act that she has come across “empty cars with coffee still hot” after people have been “surrounded and disappeared.”

Other local immigration bills

Dozens of county residents spoke during public hearings Tuesday afternoon on the two other immigration bills currently under the council’s consideration. The vast majority were in favor, with one speaker even admonishing some members of the council and calling on them to “do more” with respect to immigration.

The County Values Act, sponsored by Mink, would prohibit ICE from accessing nonpublic areas of county facilities except in cases where agents have a federal judicial warrant to do so or “exigent circumstances” exist, according to a council memorandum.

The bill would further prohibit ICE from using county-owned or county-controlled parking areas, garages and vacant lots for staging, processing or other immigration enforcement operations.

It would also require county employees to report unauthorized use of county property and require the county executive to develop “comprehensive immigration enforcement guidance” for county departments.

Also on Tuesday afternoon was the public hearing for the Unmask ICE Act, sponsored by Jawando It would prevent federal, state or local law enforcement agents from wearing masks or other facial coverings while on duty in the county, according to a memorandum on the bill.

The proposed Unmask ICE Act includes exceptions for medical-grade masks, masks designed to prevent exposure to smoke or biological or chemical agents; masks used in water rescue operations and those worn by SWAT team agents.

Not all county residents are supportive of the council’s recent efforts to restrict federal immigration enforcement.

In a Monday newsletter titled “I’m Surrounded by Immigrants,” Montgomery County GOP Chair Dennis Melby wrote that the “hype of a threatening ICE” is “not a reality.”

Melby further stated that immigrants in his party came to the U.S. legally and thus do not fear deportation — a sentiment not shared by Democrats such as Fani-González, who has argued that merely speaking Spanish or looking Latino is enough to make someone a target for detention.

The council’s Public Safety and Government Operations committees are scheduled to hold a joint work session on Mink’s bill on March 11, according to Tuesday’s meeting agenda. A Public Safety Committee work session on Jawando’s bill had not been scheduled as of Tuesday.

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