The lawsuit adds to acrimony between the Trump administration and deep-blue Maryland.
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The Justice Department on Thursday filed a lawsuit against the state of Maryland in federal court, alleging that a new law curtailing local jails and law enforcement from cooperating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement thwarts the Trump administration’s authority.
Maryland’s law, called the Community Trust Act, was passed by the supermajority Democratic legislature earlier this year and went into effect at the end of May. It was championed by immigration rights advocates but opposed by Republican lawmakers and a coalition of local law enforcement agencies, some of which pledged to continue communicating with immigration authorities despite the new restrictions.
The lawsuit claims Maryland and the state’s attorney general, Anthony G. Brown, are violating the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution.
“The Act’s purpose and effect is to obstruct federal law enforcement and thwart the constitutional obligation of the President of the United States to take care that the immigration laws enacted by Congress are enforced,” Justice Department attorneys wrote in the suit. “Such blatant disregard for federal laws that have been on the books for decades is not merely a political disagreement or passive abstention; it is deliberate, disruptive action that jeopardizes the public safety for all Americans.”
The attorney general declined to comment, and a spokesperson for Gov. Wes Moore said his office “cannot comment on active litigation.”
“Governor Moore has been clear: Maryland will work with the federal government when that coordination makes our people safer — but we will not let Donald Trump’s untrained, unqualified, and unaccountable ICE agents deputize our law enforcement officers to do immigration work,” Moore spokesperson Rhyan Lake said in a statement. “While Trump’s ICE has ripped mothers out of cars and detained five-year-olds, Maryland’s law allows our law enforcement to continue working with federal officers to get violent offenders off our streets, remain focused on the work that has helped drive historic reductions in violent crime, and protect fundamental civil rights.”
Moore allowed the Community Trust Act to become law this spring without his signature, saying at the time that the bill created “ambiguities around joint investigations” across local, state and federal law enforcement that his office was working with the state attorney general to “clarify.”
The bill does not wholesale ban jail officials and law enforcement from cooperating with ICE. What it does do, according to guidance from Brown’s office to local officials, is dramatically limit the circumstances under which jails and police can facilitate the removal of an undocumented immigrant.
Brown’s guidance said those limitations generally do not apply when a noncitizen has been convicted of a serious crime or if local officials are presented with a valid judicial warrant or court order, or if personal information collected by police is relevant to a criminal investigation involving federal officials.
The Justice Department has sued seven other states over what it deems “sanctuary city” policies friendly to immigrants, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center litigation tracker.
The lawsuit in Maryland follows high-profile antagonism between President Donald Trump and Moore, a rising star in the Democratic Party and a potential 2028 presidential contender.
Trump has called Moore “foulmouthed” and disinvited him from a White House dinner for governors. Among other tussles, the president ridiculed Moore’s leadership on cleaning up a sewage spill in the Potomac River and the pace of golf course renovations at Joint Base Andrews, a military facility in Maryland.
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Moore called Trump “grotesque” this week and accused him of “grifting.” While he praised the president for so-called Trump accounts — investment accounts for children seeded by the government — he also held a dueling Fourth of July celebration speech that heavily criticized Trump’s brand of patriotism as a form of nationalism. Moore also engaged in week-long spat with Trump over the deployment of National Guard troops to U.S. cities and demanded the Trump administration refund Maryland taxpayers for tariffs thrown out by the Supreme Court.
In a state with a large immigrant population, Maryland’s Democratic leaders and advocacy groups have worried for months that the Trump administration might conduct a major ICE operation in Baltimore and elsewhere in the state. Separately, Maryland’s Democratic congressional delegation has challenged efforts from the Department of Homeland Security to erect a massive warehouse detention facility near Hagerstown.
The Community Trust Act was passed as an emergency bill, galvanizing support from Democrats at the tail end of the legislative session. Weeks earlier, Democrats had also rapidly pushed through a ban on 287(g) agreements between ICE and local law enforcement agencies. The ban, which Moore quickly signed into law in February, was a defiant step from Maryland against the Trump administration’s aggressive stance on immigration and aligned the state with others that had enacted similar restrictions.
It forced nine sheriff’s offices in Maryland to immediately sever their ICE agreements — including the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office, which had one of the nation’s longest-running 287(g) partnerships.
Maryland immigrant rights advocates had advocated for more than a decade for both laws.
In the lawsuit, the Justice Department quoted Maryland Senate Minority Whip Justin Ready (R-Carroll), who after the Community Trust Act’s passage called it “one of the most dangerous and wrong bills” he has seen pass through the State House in Annapolis.
Maryland’s Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City) and House Speaker Joseline A. Peña-Melnyk (D-Prince George’s), who both supported the Community Trust Act, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sen. Clarence K. Lam (D-Howard), who sponsored the bill, said lawmakers took great care to ensure the language did not interfere with ICE agents’ ability to enforce federal immigration law.
“This is a massive obfuscation on the part of ICE and an embarrassment on behalf of the Department of Justice to take this tack,” Lam said. “They are trying to make this out to be a policy that is subverting the ability of the federal government to be able to enforce federal immigration law. This has nothing to do with federal immigration law.”
“All it is saying is that our state resources cannot be commandeered by, from my perspective, an out-of-control federal agency like ICE to enforce federal immigration law,” he added.
Justice Department attorneys asked the federal court to issue a permanent injunction barring the implementation of the law.
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