After withholding crime-fighting assistance from Baltimore in 2017 due to its sanctuary protections for undocumented immigrants, the U.S. Department of Justice today added the city to a roster of places receiving help investigating gangs, drug trafficking and other sources of violent crime.
Baltimore is on a list of 10 cities the DOJ is adding to its National Public Safety Partnership initiative, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland announced today. Abbreviated as PSP, the program stewards federal resources toward U.S. cities with “sustained levels of violence that far exceed the national average,” according to a release.
Eligible localities must also “demonstrate a commitment to reducing crime” and “display compliance with federal immigration requirements.”
That last bit was a sticking point when the Jeff Sessions-led DOJ omitted Baltimore from its first batch of announced PSP cities. Former Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis expressed surprise at being left off at the time, which Sessions said weeks later was due to Baltimore’s sanctuary protections for undocumented immigrants. Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Stockton and San Bernardino, California, each received the same treatment.
Sessions, who resigned last November at President Donald Trump’s request, asked that Davis change departmental policy and begin contacting U.S. Homeland Security if police had an undocumented inmate detained in the city jail. What Sessions missed was that the State of Maryland has operated Baltimore’s jail since 1991, meaning the responsibility to call U.S. Immigration Enforcement about undocumented detainees would fall to the state corrections department—not BPD.
Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh at the time advised all of Maryland’s local law enforcement agencies to tread carefully when considering whether to detain immigrants without a warrant, or for extended periods of time. Frosh issued guidance in May 2017 warning that doing so may violate the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Baltimore was also skipped over for the PSP initiative in 2018, when the DOJ added five more cities.
But here we are now, with William Barr having since replaced Sessions as attorney general. We’ll note that even since the funding conflict with Sessions, Baltimore hasn’t adopted any new policies–at least publicly–that would deny promised sanctuary protections to undocumented immigrants, or agreed to help ICE deport immigrant inmates.
Barr said several participating PSP cities “have already seen dramatic reductions in violent crime over the past two years,” and the federal government hopes to “replicate that success” with the new additions.
“Commissioner [Michael] Harrison is very pleased by this announcement,” BPD spokesman Matt Jablow said via email. He noted Harrison “has a lot of experience with the National Public Safety Partnership from his time in New Orleans,” which was among the initial pilot sites for the program, “and he thinks it will be a significant benefit for BPD in our efforts to make Baltimore a safer city.”
Robert K. Hur, U.S. Attorney for Maryland, said in a statement that “all hands are on deck to make Baltimore safer, and the technical assistance available to Baltimore as part of the Justice Department’s Public Safety Partnerships will be crucial to our efforts.”
Joining Baltimore in the list of new recipients for PSP funds are Anniston and Oxford, both in Alabama; Anchorage, Baton Rouge, Cleveland, Davenport, Iowa; Amarillo and Harris County, both in Texas, and Wichita, Kansas.
The full list of PSP cities is available here.
This story has been updated.
