Democratic Maryland Senate candidate Angela Alsobrooks, while serving as the executive of Prince George’s County in 2019, said she had no interest in helping the federal government enforce immigration laws, according to a resurfaced video.
Alsobrooks, speaking to members of a Latino-focused healthcare nonprofit, vowed not to cooperate with federal immigration authorities as she believed doing so would go beyond her duty as a local official. Agents working at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in Baltimore, the state’s largest city, arrested a record 161 noncitizen sex offenders as of Sept. 9, an all-time record. Baltimore County, like Alsobrooks’ Prince George County, is a “sanctuary” jurisdiction that restricts how local law enforcement can cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
“You probably have heard already, we made a very big statement, and we did so on purpose to say that the local government, I have no interest whatsoever in immigration, in serving detainers and all that kind of stuff is not the business of the local government,” Alsobrooks told workers at La Clinica del Pueblo in 2019. “I don’t care, you know, how long you’ve been here.”
As Prince George County executive, Alsobrooks implemented a policy where the county would only notify ICE of illegal immigrants in cases where they were arrested and charged with gang-related or violent criminal offenses, according to her campaign website. She also advocated to allow unlawful immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses during her tenure as state attorney in 2013.
“As County Executive Alsobrooks runs from her record on this issue, the facts are clear,” Larry Hogan, the GOP nominee for Senate, campaign spokeswoman Blake Kernan told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “In her first year in office, she barred Prince George’s County from complying with ICE detainers, and the results have been devastating. Alsobrooks ignored the detainers of two noncitizen offenders who went on to murder a fourteen year old girl in Anne Arundel County after she let them go. Alsobrooks oversaw the release of sex offenders and MS-13 members who have gone on to commit violent crimes. In 2019, she said ‘we are not participating in immigration enforcement,’ and has lived up to that promise. When she says where she stands, voters should listen.”
Two teenage illegal aliens in Prince George County were arrested for attempted murder in 2018 and released in 2019, Fox Baltimore reported. Detainer requests from ICE were ignored by local officials, and both were charged in May 2019 with murder related to the death of a 14-year-old girl.
More recently, police arrested an illegal alien in the county on suspicion that he murdered a man using a machine gun, a local ABC affiliate reported. William Pavon Mancock, the accused killer, was not deported after being jailed for a drug charge in November 2023.
A September poll conducted by Gonzalez Research & Media Services, Inc. found that 84% of Marylanders believe local law enforcement should be required to cooperate with ICE when a detained migrant has a criminal history. The majority of Americans also support mass deportations, according to multiple polls.
Even when illegal immigrants are detained for sex offenses in Maryland, they are often hit with relatively light sentences. The Baltimore County Circuit Court, for instance, gave unlawful immigrants charged with child sex crimes much lighter sentences than others accused of similar offenses, with one convict getting just 18 months in jail for raping a 14-year-old.
President Joe Biden won the state by over 30 points in 2020, Politico reported. Hogan, meanwhile, trails Alsobrooks by less than 10 points in FiveThirtyEight’s most recent polling average.
The Alsobrooks campaign did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
