Baltimore Has an Obvious Problem. The Fix is Fairly Obvious Too.

“Baltimore County releases illegal immigrants charged with crimes despite federal requests,” declared a recent headline on the local FOX 45 news site.

It is a headline that evokes Captain Renault’s feigned surprise in Casablanca, “I’m shocked! Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.”

For those who follow the immigration issue, there’s no shock or amazement whatsoever, just a familiar recognition of cause and effect due to Baltimore’s anti-detainer policies that discourage local police from cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). According to a Baltimore County executive order signed in 2017, and updated in 2018, “No Baltimore County Police Officer shall arrest, detain, or extend the stop or detention of an individual on the basis of a civil administrative warrant, a prior deportation order, any other document relating to a civil immigration violation, or an alleged violation of civil immigration laws.”

Consequently, most federal requests (detainers) to hold criminal aliens are not honored, thus those who have completed their local sentences are simply released back onto the streets – in many cases destined to reoffend.

Despite its absurdly apparent opening headline, the FOX 45 News article was an eye-opener, revealing quantitatively just how bad that cause and effect has become; “Federal agents filed 81 detainers in Baltimore County between October 2022 and September 2023. A staggering 70 percent of those detainers were not honored, meaning the individuals in question were released before they could be handed over to immigration officials.”

If that were not serious enough, Baltimore doesn’t – or probably more accurately won’t – maintain a database of crimes committed by the illegal aliens who have detainers lodged against them. Questioned by FOX 45 News, police officials bureaucratically sidestepped the need to do so by explaining that “information about ICE detainers is captured in the ‘arrest narrative’ portion of police reports and, as a result, is not text searchable.”

It’s a lame excuse. Any entry level IT professional could likely solve Baltimore’s database problem, lickety-split in half an afternoon — if indeed, Baltimore actually had any interest in doing so. It should because the “Charm City” has a worsening crime problem and needs to understand just who’s doing what, when, where, and how, and to what extent released criminal aliens are exacerbating it. A new report shows that out of 278 neighborhoods in Baltimore City, crime is up in almost every statistical category by nearly 80 percent in some neighborhoods, including auto theft, burglaries, and aggravated assaults.

Baltimore needs to repeal its sanctuary and anti-detainer policies. If not, the message is clear: Baltimore elected officials don’t care about immigration law violations, they won’t cooperate with federal authorities, and if public safety is put at risk in the process, that’s just too bad.

Deterring illegal immigration by not rewarding it and cooperating with ICE to come get illegal aliens already in lockup represents a basic minimum for immigration enforcement, not to mention common sense. In effect, it’s the easy part of tackling illegal immigration. But the city has to be willing to confidently say “no” to special interests promoting sanctuary policies, notify ICE that an illegal alien is getting released from jail — and hold the individual until ICE arrives. Of course, ICE has to be willing to pick them up, and the administration has to be willing to remove them from the country, which has not generally been the case over the past three and a half years.

It’s all pretty obvious stuff for most Americans.