Prince George's County Council Unanimously Passes Emergency Bills Restricting ICE

Citing what she called "terrorist tactics," Council Chair Krystal Oriadha led Prince George's County's council to a unanimous vote on a sweeping six-part legislative package designed to limit federal immigration enforcement across the county's facilities, workforce, and police operations.

The package, which Oriadha shepherded as lead sponsor, includes four bills and two resolutions. The most far-reaching, CB-6-2026, known as the Community Safe Spaces Act, bars federal immigration agents from entering county facilities unless they present a valid warrant. A companion bill, CB-5-2026, co-sponsored by Vice Chair Eric Olson of District 3 and Council Member Dernoga, bans the county from hiring anyone who worked for ICE or U.S. Customs and Border Protection after June 30, 2025, a provision legal experts have flagged as potentially unconstitutional on equal-protection grounds. Two additional measures require county police to verify the identity and authority of anyone engaged in immigration enforcement when a resident calls 911, and direct the creation of a public portal to track ICE detentions occurring within county borders. Several bills carry emergency designations, allowing them to advance through the legislative process faster than standard measures.

The political urgency behind the package has a name: Rabbiatu Kuyateh. The 58-year-old nurse had lived in the D.C. area for 30 years after fleeing civil war in Sierra Leone. On July 1, 2025, she attended what she believed was a routine annual ICE check-in in Maryland and was taken into custody. Transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana, she stayed there for months before an immigration judge ruled in September 2025 that she could not be deported to Sierra Leone due to a credible and high-probability threat of torture. ICE deported her anyway on November 12, 2025, not to Sierra Leone but to Ghana, a country she had never lived in. Video of uniformed officers dragging her across the ground circulated internationally.

Her son, Mohamed Alghali, testified before the council in support of the bills. "These bills are about due process, they're about dignity, they're about preventing unnecessary family separation and they're about making sure that what happened to my mother does not happen to another family here," he said.

The council's action built on groundwork County Executive Aisha Braveboy had already laid. On February 19, 2026, she signed Executive Order No. 9-2026, placing an immediate moratorium on the use of any county property as an immigration detention center and barring the county's Department of Permitting, Inspections and Enforcement from issuing occupancy permits to ICE. U.S. Representative Glenn Ivey and immigration advocacy group We Are CASA were present at that press conference. Braveboy subsequently pledged to push legislation through the council to formally codify those protections.

Prince George's County has taken aim at ICE cooperation before. In 2019, it passed CB-062-2019, prohibiting county law enforcement from honoring ICE detainers in non-criminal interactions. The 2026 package goes substantially further.

The stakes are grounded in the county's demographics. With more than 955,000 residents, Prince George's is the second-most populous county in Maryland; approximately 21.7% of residents are Hispanic or Latino, and 14.5% are non-citizens. More than 80 elected officials across the state have joined a coordinated push to limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, one of the most unified public stands against the Trump administration's immigration policies in the country. Montgomery County Councilmember Evan Glass announced a parallel "ICE Out Act" that would bar privately owned immigration detention centers from operating in that county.

Critics, including some legal analysts, warn that provisions such as CB-5-2026 could violate federal law or trigger constitutional challenges, and that the measures risk placing local police in direct conflict with federal authorities. Prince George's County police declined to comment.