The following is Karl Bickel’s response to the September 4th ICE operation in Frederick, published this week as a Community Voices op-ed by Radio Free Hub City. Karl is a Democratic candidate for Frederick County sheriff, and here he pushes back on the claim that Maryland’s ban on local 287(g) agreements is what brought ICE to Frederick.
The September 4th ICE operation in the city of Frederick set off a familiar response: blame Maryland’s ban on local 287(g) agreements. Bickel argues that story doesn’t hold up any better than the sheriff’s own claim that 287(g) made the community safer — the evidence supports neither.
Maryland’s law didn’t end immigration enforcement in Frederick. It ended the formal agreements that let certain sheriff’s office personnel carry out specific federal immigration duties. ICE’s increased presence, Bickel writes, reflects the Trump administration’s broader push to dramatically expand enforcement nationwide — a volume of arrests the old 287(g) agreement was never producing in the first place.
On the safety claims, Bickel points to Maryland’s own legislative analysis, which found no evidence that 287(g) makes communities safer. An analysis for Maryland Matters found steeper crime-rate reductions in neighboring counties that never had 287(g) agreements, even though those counties have larger immigrant populations — a pattern Bickel says is consistent with broader national research.
He also cites a National Institute of Justice-sponsored study using more than a decade of National Crime Victimization Survey data, which found that 287(g) task-force agreements did not reduce crime and were linked to a higher risk of violent victimization among Latino residents. The jail-based model used in Frederick specifically showed no significant impact on violent victimization. A second NIJ-sponsored study, Bickel notes, cautions against assuming unauthorized immigration drives crime rates, since existing research generally finds immigration associated with lower crime.
The real question for Frederick County
None of this means immigration enforcement doesn’t matter, Bickel writes — the federal government has a duty to enforce federal law. But the September 4th operation proved only one thing: ICE can and will operate in Frederick with or without a local 287(g) agreement. The real question, he argues, isn’t whether ICE can enforce the law here. It’s whether the Sheriff’s Office should spend local resources helping it do so, and whether that actually makes Frederick County safer. Frederick County, he writes, deserves leadership that measures public safety by results, not rhetoric.
Karl W. Bickel (karlbickel@comcast.net), a Democratic candidate for Frederick County sheriff, is retired from the U.S. Department of Justice, was previously second in command of the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office and is a former assistant professor of criminal justice.
Read Karl’s full op-ed at Radio Free Hub City: https://radiofreehubcity.com/2026/09/08/community-voices-ice-came-to-frederick-the-287g-ban-didnt-bring-them-here/
