After more than a decade of lobbying by immigrant rights organizers, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) signed into law Tuesday emergency legislation that bans local law enforcement agencies from formally facilitating federal immigration arrests.

The ban forces nine sheriff’s offices in the state to immediately sever agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — including the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office, which had one of the nation’s longest-running 287(g) agreements with the federal agency. The agency uses the agreements to help ICE agents take into custody people they allege are in the country illegally.

Just before signing the bill, Moore called ICE an “unaccountable agency with seemingly unlimited resources.”

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Maryland’s ban comes two weeks after New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) signed a similar measure in that state, part of a growing wave of Democratic-led states and cities that are attempting to use local legislation and regulations to curtail the Trump administration’s ramped-up immigration enforcement efforts nationwide.

At least eight other states — Washington, Illinois, California, Oregon, New Jersey, Maine, Delaware and Connecticut — have already either prohibited or set restrictions on 287(g) partnerships involving local police and sheriff’s offices. Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) recently ordered state law enforcement agencies to dissolve any partnership agreements with federal immigration enforcement, and state lawmakers there and in New York are also weighing 287(g) bans.

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Opponents of the agreements have argued in Maryland and elsewhere that the expansion of 287(g) partnerships has not become an alternative to street enforcement, but instead a force multiplier for ICE as its budget and recruitment efforts grow.

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Maryland’s ban, which Moore signed Tuesday, applies to all four types of ICE partnerships: the Task Force Model, the Tribal Task Force Model, the Jail Enforcement Model and the Warrant Service Officer program.

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