ICE agents clashed violently with Frederick. Where does the city go from here?

The text message went out to the clergy community of Frederick on Sept. 4: There was trouble in Taskers Chance.

It was a moment they had trained for, after the Rev. Chance Martinez-Colon of Grace United Church of Christ took a team to Minneapolis. There, they had witnessed how residents confronted an immigration enforcement surge that sparked protests and violent clashes.

Now it was happening at home.

“We came back, and I said, ‘Well, it’s only a matter of time before it’s here, so we need to prepare,’” Martinez-Colon said. He brought a team of clergy together in downtown Frederick to train to observe U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. “I cannot say that I was surprised, but I was deeply saddened to see it happen here.”

A nearly two-day stakeout by federal agents in the quiet Frederick neighborhood of Taskers Chance attracted dozens of ICE observers, who slept in the area to keep a watchful eye until a violent clash erupted the evening of Sept. 4.

Several elected officials told The Banner the unrest began when two people were held by ICE agents for hours on the morning of Sept. 3, after the agents accused them of interfering in their operation. ICE told Frederick Police officers on the scene that “someone had escaped ICE custody” as a result of the interference, police department spokesperson Jennifer Gerlock told The Banner.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, declined to answer questions about the incident, citing a policy not to comment on pending investigations.

A progressive city surrounded by a more conservative Western Maryland region, Frederick has been growing fast in recent years. It’s now home to more than 90,000 residents and one of the largest cities in the state.

Even before the clash, volunteers at a local elementary school began walking home with kids whose parents were frightened by ICE’s presence in Frederick. Some community members now deliver groceries to struggling families who had a relative deported or detained. And a recent retiree started posting warnings online to his neighbors about nearby ICE agents.

Tatiana Santos, a longtime resident and one of its ICE observers, said she had noticed a ramp-up of immigration enforcement in recent months but the early-September stakeout felt different.

“I didn’t think that Frederick would be a Minneapolis,” she said. “But now I’m not so sure that we won’t be.”

Growing pains

Forty miles northwest of Washington, Frederick is the urban center of Maryland’s seventh-largest county of the same name, and both jurisdictions have been growing rapidly. Reliably Republican for decades, Frederick County voted for Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. It has 10,000 more registered Democratic voters than Republicans.

The county remains squarely “purple,” however. There are 60,000 independent voters. And, although the county is led by a Democratic executive, voters recently returned MAGA Republican Sheriff Chuck Jenkins for a fifth term.

“People may not say it publicly, but they appreciate that this is a safe county to live in,” said Jenkins, who is part of a lawsuit of several Maryland sheriffs against new state restrictions on cooperation with federal immigration efforts. “I believe in proactive enforcement; that soft on crime doesn’t work, never has. And that has come through at the ballot box.”

The city of Frederick, however, is becoming more diverse with a growing Hispanic and Latino population. As of the 2024 Census it made up about 20% of the city, and the population has steadily risen since 2010.

Under its president, César Díaz, the City Council passed a bill this year limiting how city employees and property can be involved in the enforcement of federal immigration policies — a perhaps more symbolic measure to try to counter ICE’s actions in the city.

“We certainly would love to not be dealing with it in Frederick,” Mayor Michael O’Connor said in an interview. “But, if it comes to our doorstep, then we’re going to do the right thing from our perspective and what we think is what our residents expect, and that’s our obligation, to stand in support of our community.”

The Rev. Beth Hutton, senior pastor of Calvary United Methodist Church, said she is not “anti-ICE” but called its recent actions “a moral and ethical concern.”

“We need to have Immigration [and] Customs Enforcement,” said Hutton, who is part of a clergy coalition trained to observe immigration agents. “But my question is, are these practices that are being executed lawful?”

Two days on edge

It was just after 6 a.m. on Thursday, Sept. 3, when Díaz and his City Council colleague Katie Nash received the first call about Taskers Chance. Díaz said, when he arrived, an ICE agent was screaming at two people to get out of their vehicle.

Nash, the council’s vice president who lives nearby, said federal agents blocked off the exit of a cul-de-sac and refused to release an older woman and a teenager whom they had detained. The ICE officers told her they were trying to arrest someone when the duo interfered in their operation, but the two disputed that claim to Nash. Officials did not provide the names of the individuals who were detained.

Eventually, ICE released the people but warned charges could come later, Nash said.

She and other City Council members took turns checking in at the scene that Thursday as ICE observers also kept watch. There were about five or six ICE vehicles parked in the neighborhood at any given time, witnesses said.

“We had never seen something like that at this scale,” Díaz said. “People were scared.”

Agents and observers remained overnight and through the day Friday. It wasn’t until around 8 p.m. that the ICE vehicles began to line up in front of a single house on Stoneybrook Court. Observers also gathered there and lined up on sidewalks.

Around 9 p.m., the ICE vehicles flashed their lights and began to drive onto sidewalks, yelling at people to move. One vehicle nearly crashed into her, Nash said.

Some of the observers sat in the street and linked arms. Nash said she saw one of the vehicles inch closer to them.

“It really looked to me like they were going to hit them,” she said. That’s when she called the city police chief for help. About a dozen officers responded, and at that point the crowd of civilians rose to about 50.

Some of the observers later moved to the house’s front porch and driveway, video posted online showed. Immigration officers with federal Enforcement and Removal Operations walked toward the house minutes later, with some swinging batons at the observers, dragging them from the porch and piling on top of them, according to videos.

Frederick officers approached the home and stood close to federal agents and protesters, but they did not intervene. Nash said she believes their presence brought down the temperature.

“It raises the level of professionalism” when the local officers are around, she said.

Eventually, one of the residents inside the targeted home opened the door and the federal agents poured inside. They came out of the home shortly afterward “empty-handed,” Díaz said.

Then they left the street.

Unanswered questions

O’Connor, Frederick’s mayor, worries that ICE’s recent actions will lead to broader distrust in law enforcement.

“They seem to lack the organization and training necessary to carry out these operations in a way that doesn’t create ripple effects within neighborhoods and adjoining governments and communities all across this country,” he said.

O’Connor said he would sit down with Police Chief Kevin Meyer and other experts to review the body-worn camera footage to make sure city police acted appropriately during the clash between protesters and ICE agents.

Meyer said in an interview with the radio station WFMD that the Frederick officers were placed in “an impossible situation” because they cannot interfere in federal law enforcement activity.

“We’re there to make sure they do it safely, that they don’t use excessive force in our presence,” he said. “It does look like we’re standing around, but our body cameras are rolling. We’re documenting everything we’re seeing.”

He said the federal agents would not discuss with local officers whether they had a warrant.

This year, the state legislature banned local cooperation agreements with ICE. At the time, Maryland sheriffs who had signed so-called 287(g) pacts said they expected blowback from federal authorities.

And Jenkins, the sheriff, thinks that is exactly what’s happened.

Last month, ICE reported the agency carried out a two-week surge of more than 1,300 arrests, dubbed Operation Safe Community, largely targeting the Washington suburbs of Maryland and Virginia.

“The fact that we are now not turning over criminals to ICE at our jail is making a difference,” Jenkins said, adding that Maryland’s new laws “caused the Trump administration to basically say, you know what, we’re going to target criminals in Maryland more than we have in the past.”

“All this was completely avoidable,” Jenkins said.

Local police are often caught in the middle when citizens call to report ICE, because they don’t get advance notice from the federal agency, according to Gary McLhinney, a veteran law enforcement official of several departments who recently retired as a colonel from the Howard County Police Department.

“Normally, when another law enforcement agency is operating in your jurisdiction, for safety reasons, they’re letting you know. You know what you’re getting into,” McLhinney said.

McLhinney said, while officers are duty-bound to act if they see a crime take place, in most cases, the local officers are showing up after the fact and making sure their federal counterparts, as well as people in the community, are safe. Whether ICE acted wrongly before officers’ arrival, he said, is “left up to other people to decide at some other point.”

O’Connor thinks his officers are obliged to intervene when ICE tactics go too far.

“If someone’s rights are being violated and they observe it, there is an obligation to determine what the appropriate level of intervention is to stop someone from having their rights violated,” he said.

Since the incident, there has been outcry from residents and local leaders for an investigation into the actions of the ICE agents in Frederick.

U.S. Rep. April McClain Delaney said in a statement that she was “disturbed by reports that ICE agents used force against Frederick residents.”

“These allegations demand immediate answers and a full, transparent investigation,” she said. “The Frederick community deserves transparency and answers.”