By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews

A federal judge has struck down one of the Trump administration’s broadest immigration restrictions of 2026. But there is a Maryland angle that deserves more attention.

One of the plaintiffs was the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. — CLINIC — a tax-exempt immigration legal organization based in Silver Spring, Maryland. And this is not a small local legal-aid shop.

CLINIC’s own 2024 federal tax filing reports $24.2 million in annual revenue, nearly $25 million in expenses, and $18.2 million in total assets. Its executive director, Anna Marie Gallagher, received $180,177 in reportable compensation, with total compensation of $206,063 once retirement/deferred compensation and nontaxable benefits were included.

That does not make the organization corrupt. But it does make CLINIC a useful example of something conservatives should understand much better: immigration policy in America is contested not only at the ballot box and at the border, but by a large, sophisticated nonprofit legal infrastructure capable of challenging presidential policy in federal court.

What the Trump Administration Tried to Do

In January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a policy suspending the issuance of immigrant visas to applicants from 75 countries. That distinction matters: this was not a suspension of every type of U.S. visa. The State Department said the affected nationalities presented heightened concerns that immigrants could become dependent on public assistance. But the policy went beyond telling consular officers to apply stricter scrutiny.

According to the court record, officers were instructed to refuse immigrant visas to applicants from the 75 designated countries even when an individualized assessment indicated the person was otherwise eligible and unlikely to become a public charge.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas, a Biden appointee in Manhattan, vacated the policy. Her ruling was not that the federal government is powerless to enforce the public-charge provisions of immigration law. Rather, Vargas concluded that the State Department had gone beyond the authority Congress gave the secretary by effectively imposing a nationality-wide rule over immigrant-visa decisions that federal law assigns to consular officers. Reuters reports that she called the policy “patently unlawful.”

CLINIC was one of the plaintiffs, along with African Communities Together, affected visa applicants and U.S. citizens sponsoring relatives.

The Maryland Organization Behind the Case

CLINIC’s 2024 Form 990 lists its address as:

8455 Colesville Road, Suite 960
Silver Spring, Maryland 20910

The filing identifies the organization as a 501(c)(3) and lists Gallagher as executive director.

What matters more than the street address is the organization’s scale. CLINIC describes itself as the country’s largest nonprofit immigration-law organization. Its network includes more than 450 nonprofit immigration-service organizations and collectively serves more than 500,000 immigrants each year.

CLINIC says its work includes training immigration legal representatives, providing direct representation to asylum seekers, assisting families, supporting immigrants in detention and removal proceedings, educating the public about immigration law, and advocating for immigration policies it considers fair and just.

In other words, this is not simply a charity helping people complete government forms. It is also an advocacy and legal-policy organization.

CLINIC says so itself.

Follow the Money — Carefully

The numbers deserve attention, but they should be presented accurately. CLINIC’s 2024 Form 990 reports:

• $24,216,923 in total revenue

• $24,972,699 in total expenses

• $18,239,698 in total assets

• $13,275,088 in net assets

• $19,330,024 in contributions and grants

Those figures show a substantial national nonprofit operation. They do not, by themselves, prove that CLINIC “profits from immigration” or that its litigation is financially improper. In fact, the organization spent more than it took in during 2024, reporting a roughly $756,000 operating deficit.

That distinction is important.

A conservative critique should not depend on claims the records do not support. The stronger point is that America now has well-funded nonprofit organizations with professional legal staffs, national networks, and policy operations dedicated to shaping immigration law and challenging government restrictions.

CLINIC is plainly one of them.

Anna Marie Gallagher’s Compensation

CLINIC’s Form 990 lists Executive Director Anna Marie Gallagher at $180,177 in base/reportable compensation.

Schedule J separately reports $3,000 in retirement and other deferred compensation and $22,886 in nontaxable benefits, bringing her total compensation to $206,063.

Again, that salary is not evidence of wrongdoing. But it helps put the scale of the organization in perspective. This is a professionally staffed national advocacy institution, not an informal volunteer group.

CLINIC Is Open About Its Advocacy

There is also no need to speculate about CLINIC’s political or legal role.

Its own 2026 advocacy priorities say the organization works at the local, state and federal levels to influence law, policy and systems affecting immigrants. The organization says those priorities are informed by its network of more than 450 nonprofit immigration-service providers.

Its website says CLINIC will “fight for the rights of immigrants” and identifies advocacy for immigration-policy changes as one of its core activities.

That is entirely legal. It is also politically relevant.

When voters hear that a president has announced an immigration policy, they may imagine the argument is simply between the White House and Congress.

In reality, there is another center of power: litigation.

The Bigger Conservative Question

This case illustrates the institutional imbalance conservatives regularly run into after winning elections. A Republican administration can announce a policy on Monday. By Friday, national advocacy groups may already be assembling plaintiffs, lawyers, and legal theories to challenge it.

That is their constitutional right.

But conservatives should stop pretending this infrastructure does not exist. CLINIC alone says its network serves more than half a million immigrants annually. It reported more than $24 million in revenue in 2024. It has a nationwide affiliate network. And in this case, it was part of a lawsuit that successfully persuaded a federal judge to invalidate a major immigration restriction imposed by an elected administration.

That does not mean the judge was necessarily wrong. The administration still has to operate within the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the court concluded Rubio exceeded the authority Congress actually gave him. But the policy outcome is unmistakable:

Trump’s 75-country immigrant-visa suspension is gone, at least unless the ruling is stayed or reversed on appeal.

And one of the organizations responsible for bringing the challenge is a multimillion-dollar nonprofit headquartered in Maryland. That is the story worth following.

Not because nonprofit advocacy is illegal.
Not because lawyers should be prevented from suing the government.
And not because immigration organizations should be smeared merely for doing their jobs.

But because voters deserve to understand how immigration policy is actually made — and unmade.

It happens in Congress.
It happens at the White House.
It happens at the border.

And increasingly, it happens through well-financed nonprofit litigation networks capable of turning presidential immigration policy into a federal court fight almost immediately.

That is a power structure worth scrutinizing.

Sources: Reuters reporting on the Aug. 22, 2026 federal ruling striking down the State Department’s 75-country immigrant-visa suspension; the Catholic Legal Immigration Network’s 2024 Form 990 for revenue, expenses, assets, net assets, and executive compensation; CLINIC’s own website and 2026 advocacy materials for its mission, nationwide network size, and number of immigrants served; and the federal court’s opinion and order in Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. v. Rubio for the legal basis of the ruling and the scope of the visa policy.

President Trump signed two executive orders Thursday afternoon that take direct aim at commercial birth tourism and narrow the categories of children eligible for automatic citizenship — a recalibrated second attempt at a policy the Supreme Court gutted just five weeks ago.

The timing tells its own story. On June 30, the Court struck down the broad January 2025 order that tried to redraw citizenship by immigration status, ruling that children born on U.S. soil to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and therefore citizens at birth.

The headline vote was 6-3, but the underlying math is more interesting than the topline number suggests: Justice Kavanaugh concurred only in the judgment, on statutory grounds, declining to join the constitutional reasoning — meaning the actual holding that the Fourteenth Amendment itself compels this result carried just five votes, with Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissenting. Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion leaned hard on Wong Kim Ark, the 1898 case establishing that birth-soil citizenship survives regardless of parental status.

“The actual constitutional holding was 5-4, not the 6-3 headline most people remember.”

It was, by any measure, a decisive loss for the administration’s original theory — but a 5-4 constitutional holding is a narrower foundation than 6-3 implies, and it leaves more daylight for a differently constructed order than the wall-to-wall defeat headlines suggested at the time.

What Thursday’s orders do is different in kind, not just degree. Rather than re-litigating the broad question the Court just settled, the White House is working the margins the Court left alone. One order targets commercial birth tourism directly — denying visas to those entering the country for the express purpose of giving birth here, with Trump himself promising “very big crackdowns” on the travel agencies and consulting firms that package the practice for wealthy foreign clients.

The other narrows citizenship eligibility for children of alien enemies, foreign terrorists, and foreign agents — categories the administration argues fall within jurisdictional exceptions the Court itself has recognized, going back to the diplomatic-immunity and hostile-occupation carve-outs baked into the Fourteenth Amendment from the start.

That is a materially different legal argument than the one Barbara rejected. Nobody disputes that children of accredited foreign diplomats have never been “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States in the citizenship-clause sense — that exception predates the amendment itself. The open legal question is whether birth tourism and the foreign-agent categories can be squeezed into that same narrow tradition, or whether they’re just the Barbara theory wearing a smaller coat.

Roberts himself all but flagged the seam during oral argument, telling Solicitor General John Sauer that birth tourism “has no impact on the legal analysis” the Court was weighing — a signal, deliberately or not, that the commercial-visa-fraud angle sits on different footing than blanket status-based denial.

“The White House isn’t retrying the same case—it is litigating the margins the Court left open.”

It’s also worth noting the administration didn’t invent the birth tourism enforcement mechanism from scratch. A 2020 State Department regulation, dating to Trump’s first term, already bars using tourist or business visas for the primary purpose of securing citizenship for a newborn — violators can face visa denial or fraud prosecution. What’s new here is the intensity and coordination of enforcement, not the underlying legal premise, which gives this order a firmer starting point than the one Barbara struck down.

None of that guarantees survival. The foreign-agent and alien-enemy categories are broader than the settled diplomatic exception, and plaintiffs’ attorneys will argue — with some textual support — that the administration is trying to smuggle status-based reasoning back in through a side door after the front door was shut.

Litigation is a certainty; a preliminary injunction on at least part of the order would not be a surprise. But the administration’s bet is that a narrower, precedent-anchored order survives scrutiny where a sweeping one-page reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment did not — and given how badly Barbara went, that’s a bet worth making rather than simply asking Congress to act, as Trump suggested he might after the June ruling.

“The question isn’t whether diplomats are exempt. It’s whether birth tourism and foreign-agent categories fit inside that same constitutional tradition.”

The birth tourism industry itself has operated for years with minimal federal friction, marketed openly in some overseas markets as a route to a U.S. passport for a child, no immigration status required for the parents. Whatever one thinks of the broader citizenship debate, treating that as a loophole to close — rather than a constitutional entitlement to preserve — is a defensible position, and one with more bipartisan sympathy than the administration’s critics tend to admit.

“Thursday’s orders are less about rewriting the Fourteenth Amendment than testing where its boundaries actually end.”

Even Amanda Frost, a University of Virginia immigration law professor generally skeptical of Trump’s broader push, has argued that if birth tourism specifically is the problem, the fix is enforcing the regulation already on the books. Thursday’s order is, in part, an attempt to do exactly that — with sharper teeth.

Sources: SCOTUSblog case coverage of Trump v. Barbara (25-365); Fox News, CBS News, Axios, Bloomberg, and Reuters reporting on the August 6, 2026 executive order signing; Constitution Center and National Immigration Forum explainers on the June 30, 2026 ruling; Congress.gov Congressional Research Service legal sidebar on Trump v. Barbara oral argument.

A Silver Spring congregation’s federal lawsuit puts a spotlight on a gun law that traces back to a ghost-gun case — and on a growing gap between how Maryland houses of worship pay for security and how they’re allowed to provide it.

The Silver Spring Jewish Center and its rabbi, Menashe Shapiro, filed a federal lawsuit this week against Montgomery County, arguing that a newly signed firearms ordinance strips their congregation of the ability to defend itself against the kind of attack it has already faced twice.

The suit, which invokes the First, Second and Fourteenth Amendments, targets Expedited Bill 23-26 — legislation that bars carrying firearms in or within 100 yards of “places of public assembly,” a category that includes schools, parks, libraries, polling places, courthouses and houses of worship. The law exempts paid security personnel from the ban. It does not exempt volunteers, including the congregation’s own armed members.

Its origin is a broader fight over ghost guns and highway carry rights that only incidentally reshaped the county’s rules for houses of worship.

The U.S. Department of Justice has also weighed in, warning the county it may sue if the law is enforced against houses of worship.

But the ordinance the synagogue is now challenging in court did not begin as a targeted response to threats against congregations. Its origin is a broader fight over ghost guns and highway carry rights that only incidentally reshaped the county’s rules for houses of worship.

A Congregation That Says It’s Already Been Targeted

According to the complaint, the Silver Spring Jewish Center organized an armed volunteer security team after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, drawing on congregants who are military veterans and hold Maryland carry permits. The team trains together regularly. The suit describes an October 2024 attack on a congregant outside the building and an attempted break-in this past June as concrete examples of the threat the congregation says it now cannot legally counter with its own trained members.

The synagogue’s counsel, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, has framed the law in stark terms, arguing it prevents the congregation from defending its members against antisemitic attacks and from fulfilling religious obligations — a violation, the suit contends, of all three constitutional provisions cited.

The law exempts paid security personnel from the ban. It does not exempt volunteers, including the congregation’s own armed members.

The legal theory leans heavily on Wolford v. Lopez, the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 25, 2026 ruling — decided 6-3 in an opinion by Justice Alito — that Hawaii could not bar concealed-carry permit holders from carrying on private property without the owner’s affirmative consent. The synagogue’s argument extends that logic: if a private property owner can authorize carry on its own premises, the county cannot override a congregation’s decision to let its own trained members carry on its own grounds.

The Justice Department’s involvement adds a second front. DOJ demanded written confirmation from the county that it would not enforce the law against houses of worship, warning that it would sue “without further notice” otherwise. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon posted publicly that people are particularly vulnerable to armed attacks during worship — a comment that echoes concerns raised on the floor of the Maryland General Assembly nearly a decade earlier, described below.

The stakes aren’t abstract for Montgomery County’s Jewish community more broadly. The Anti-Defamation League recorded 121 antisemitic incidents in the county in 2025 — roughly two-thirds of Maryland’s statewide total.

The Law’s Real Origin: A Highway Rights Case, Not a Houses-of-Worship Debate

What’s largely absent from coverage of the lawsuit is where Bill 23-26 actually came from — and it isn’t a deliberate policy choice about synagogues or churches. The Maryland Supreme Court actually upheld the county’s authority to restrict carry near houses of worship specifically. What it struck down was something else entirely.

The bill traces back to Engage Armament LLC, et al. v. Montgomery County, Maryland, litigation that began in 2021 when two businesses and eight individual challengers — most of them state handgun wear-and-carry permit holders — sued over the county’s 2021 and 2022 amendments to its firearms code, which expanded the definition of “place of public assembly,” eliminated an exception for permit holders, and separately regulated so-called “ghost guns.”

The Supreme Court of Maryland’s April 28 ruling was a split decision, not a wholesale rejection of the county’s authority. The Court upheld the county’s power to restrict carry near parks, places of worship, schools, libraries, courthouses, legislative assemblies, recreational facilities, multipurpose exhibition facilities, and polling places — all valid “places of public assembly” under state law. It struck down only the newer categories the county had added: hospitals, community health centers, long-term care facilities, childcare facilities, broadly-defined government buildings, and gatherings considered without regard to location.

The Maryland Supreme Court actually upheld the county’s authority to restrict carry near houses of worship specifically. What it struck down was something else entirely.

The provision that actually forced the county’s hand was a different one. The Court held that by eliminating the exception for state permit holders, the county had turned its ordinance into something that bans carry on public highways anywhere they pass within 100 yards of a place of public assembly — sweeping in out-of-county drivers on interstates and state roads that cut through Montgomery County, including I-495, I-270, US-29, and MD-97. Because that reaches people with no connection to the county, the Court held it wasn’t a valid “local law” under Maryland’s Home Rule Amendment — a charter county simply lacks authority to enact a law with that kind of reach, regardless of preemption.

Councilmember Dawn Luedtke (D-Dist. 7), an attorney, introduced the fix on May 12 with Councilmember Kate Stewart (D-Dist. 4) co-sponsoring. “I don’t want anyone to think that by doing this, I’m trying to reduce protections related to firearm violence — exactly the opposite,” Luedtke said at introduction.

The bill drew immediate opposition from gun-rights advocates at a June 9 public hearing — including several who had been plaintiffs in the underlying Engage Armament case. Mark Pennak, the attorney who represented the lead plaintiff before the Maryland Supreme Court, called the proposal “legally stupid” in his testimony and vowed to challenge it in court if enacted as written. One plaintiff who testified in person was Eli Shemony, identified as head of security for Magen David Sephardic Congregation in Rockville — a different Montgomery County synagogue than the one now suing. “The transition from public street to a house of worship is a critical and dangerous moment,” Shemony told the council, arguing the congregation relies on wear-and-carry members for protection when paid guards aren’t on-site. Another speaker, permit holder Karan Singh, raised a disparate-impact argument largely absent from the current federal case: that restricting carry to only those who can afford paid security would disproportionately burden Black and Brown gun owners relative to wealthier, less diverse parts of the state.

The council adopted a fix to the ghost-gun definition on June 21 — now exempting unserialized firearms later serialized by a federally licensed dealer, closing the gap the Supreme Court had flagged — and passed the full bill around July 20. Elrich signed it July 27 at a ceremony where Montgomery County Police Special Investigations Division Director John O’Brien reported more than 600 “shooting events” and over 3,000 firearms seized in the county between 2023 and 2025. “Complying with a court order is not the same as changing our commitment to public safety,” Elrich said. Luedtke pushed back on characterizations that the bill added new restrictions: “This bill passed by the council last week does not add new prohibitions on firearms,” she said, noting it doesn’t affect law enforcement or licensed security guards carrying at places of public assembly, including houses of worship.

The fix that directly answers the Supreme Court’s highway ruling is narrow: the amended law exempts “the possession of a handgun by a person who has a permit to carry the handgun under state law while the person travels on public highways within 100 yards of a place of public assembly.” Permit holders who leave a public highway — turning into a private drive, for instance — remain subject to the restriction.

The Court held that by eliminating the exception for state permit holders, the county had turned its ordinance into something that bans carry on public highways anywhere they pass within 100 yards of a place of public assembly.

The case isn’t over. Luedtke said the amendments are meant to let the county demonstrate “corrective action has been taken” at an August 12 status conference in Engage Armament, now back before the Montgomery County Circuit Court on remand — a date that falls well within the current news cycle around the synagogue’s federal suit.

The Money Question: Who Can Afford Protection, and Who Provides It

The spending is real and rising.

Set the legal fight aside for a moment, and a second, less-litigated question emerges: what does armed protection at a Maryland house of worship actually cost, and who is currently allowed to provide it?

The spending is real and rising. Stephen Sutton, a member of Congregation Kneseth Israel’s board of governors in Annapolis, told Maryland Matters the synagogue spends roughly $90,000 a year on security — cameras, restricted-access entrances and paid personnel — and that the expense wouldn’t be sustainable without grant support. Statewide, Maryland’s Protecting Against Hate Crimes Grant Program had $10 million available this year but received more than $14 million in requests from 116 applicants; only about 84 organizations were funded. Montgomery County itself added $500,000 to its own nonprofit security grant program this year — a move made in anticipation of a rise in hate incidents after the Israel-Iran war began in March, according to Luke Hodgson, director of the county’s Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security — bringing the county’s total security-grant funding to $1.7 million. That money is flowing into cameras, access control and paid guards at the same time the county’s new ordinance narrows who can carry a firearm on-site.

$10 million available this year but more than $14 million in requests from 116 applicants.

That gap between “we can pay for it” and “we can’t” plays out visibly in Baltimore, where the disparity in resources produces very different security postures. New Shiloh Baptist Church uses both plainclothes and uniformed security for every service. But smaller congregations describe a thinner margin. Rev. Rodney Hudson, who leads Ames Memorial Baptist Church and Metropolitan United Methodist Church — both of which can only afford to hire one security guard — now carries a .38 special during every service after being attacked at the pulpit during a eulogy and mugged twice in his own church parking lot. “If they get past him, I’m the second guard,” he told the Baltimore Sun, describing himself, a former Army paratrooper, as the fallback layer of defense his budget can’t otherwise buy.

The Archdiocese of Baltimore doesn’t mandate a uniform security policy across its parishes, but it urges each one to prioritize safety and runs its own training program for volunteers who take on that role — hundreds of them, according to the archdiocese’s director of risk management. One example of what that looks like in practice: St. Joseph Parish in Nottingham, in Baltimore County, maintains a standing Safety and Security Ministry made up of parishioners with professional backgrounds in the military, law enforcement at the local, state and federal levels, anti-terrorism and force protection — a group that coordinates directly with the county police precinct commander.

The scale of the underlying threat helps explain why this infrastructure exists at all. The Family Research Council counted 1,384 acts of hostility — violence, theft or arson — against U.S. churches between January 2018 and December 2024, and that pace has accelerated: 415 hostile incidents in 2024 alone, up from 55 in 2020. Baltimore has not been exempt — a pastor shot an intruder at an abandoned church in Union Square in 2024, a man was fatally shot in front of Adams Chapel AME Church the same year, and a congregant was killed on the grounds of Southern Baptist Church in East Baltimore in 2021.

Not the First Time Maryland Has Had This Fight

The tension between congregational self-defense and state firearms law isn’t new in Annapolis. In 2018, Del. Kathy Szeliga introduced the “Parishioner Protection Act,” which would have let congregations authorize members to carry concealed handguns on church property with written permission from the church’s governing body. Szeliga argued the vulnerability was inherent to the setting itself — worshippers with their backs to the door, their attention elsewhere.

Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler co-announced the bill, saying it grew out of requests from local pastors who had already been asking his office for active-shooter training. The bill, HB 758, was written to apply only in Harford County rather than statewide.

It never became law. The bill got a hearing on March 6, 2018, and died in the House Judiciary Committee when the session ended that April without coming to a vote. Its Senate companion, sponsored by Sen. Wayne Norman, was withdrawn after Norman died suddenly that March. Szeliga said at the time she intended to try again in a future session.

Szeliga’s name recurs elsewhere in Maryland’s gun-law history: her 2022 challenge to the state’s congressional map, Szeliga v. Lamone, is the same case whose legal reasoning is now central to the pending HB2100/SB2100 special-session fight over redistricting criteria in the state constitution.

What’s Still Unresolved

Montgomery County has not yet publicly responded to the Justice Department’s letter or to the synagogue’s lawsuit, which names County Executive Marc Elrich, Police Chief Marc Yamada and State’s Attorney John McCarthy as defendants alongside the county itself. The Silver Spring Jewish Center is represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a separate legal organization — not Mark Pennak, who testified against the bill in June on behalf of Maryland Shall Issue and represented the Engage Armament plaintiffs. The two efforts are parallel, not connected: different clients, different lawyers, different legal theories, arriving at the same ordinance from different directions.

What is clear is that Bill 23-26 was drafted and passed as a court-ordered correction to a case centered on ghost guns and highway travel rights, with the council’s own sponsor emphasizing at both introduction and signing that it added no new restrictions. Eli Shemony’s testimony on behalf of Magen David Sephardic Congregation shows the security concern animating the Silver Spring suit was already raised — by a different Rockville synagogue — during the legislative process itself, months before the current lawsuit was filed. Whatever a federal court ultimately decides about the Silver Spring Jewish Center’s constitutional claims, the law is now colliding with a set of facts on the ground — rising security costs, a state grant program that can’t meet demand, and a patchwork of Maryland congregations already relying on trained volunteers precisely because paid protection is out of reach for many of them. The underlying Engage Armament case itself isn’t finished, either: it returns to Montgomery County Circuit Court for a status conference on August 12.

The law is now colliding with a set of facts on the ground — rising security costs, a state grant program that can’t meet demand, and a patchwork of Maryland congregations already relying on trained volunteers precisely because paid protection is out of reach for many of them.

Sources: This article draws on the Silver Spring Jewish Center's federal complaint against Montgomery County; the New Civil Liberties Alliance's July 30, 2026 press release announcing the filing; reporting on the lawsuit from the Cleveland Jewish News, The Post Millennial, and Bearing Arms; the U.S. Department of Justice's public warning letter and statements from Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon; the Supreme Court's June 25, 2026 opinion in Wolford v. Lopez; the Maryland Supreme Court's April 28, 2026 opinion in Engage Armament LLC, et al. v. Montgomery County, Maryland; Bethesda Magazine's reporting by Ceoli Jacoby on the bill's introduction, June 9 public hearing, and July 27 signing, including on-the-record testimony and remarks from Councilmember Dawn Luedtke, County Executive Marc Elrich, MCPD Special Investigations Division Director John O'Brien, attorney Mark Pennak, Eli Shemony of Magen David Sephardic Congregation, and permit holders Michael McIlhargey and Karan Singh; Mark Pennak's written council testimony on behalf of Maryland Shall Issue; Anti-Defamation League incident data for Montgomery County; Maryland Matters reporting on faith-based security spending, including remarks from Stephen Sutton of Congregation Kneseth Israel and Luke Hodgson of the Montgomery County Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security; the Baltimore Sun's reporting on church security in Baltimore, including remarks from Rev. Rodney Hudson and Tom Alban of the Archdiocese of Baltimore; St. Joseph Parish's (Fullerton/Nottingham, MD) public description of its Safety and Security Ministry; the Family Research Council's "Hostility Against Churches" report series; and contemporaneous 2017-2018 reporting from the Baltimore Sun, WUSA9, WMAR and Patch on the Parishioner Protection Act of 2018.

Maryland’s top election official spent four weeks moving from “under review” to an on-the-record criminal referral — but the target got smaller along the way.

On July 23, State Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis sent a one-page letter to the Office of the State Prosecutor asking it to investigate whether prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket are violating Maryland’s ban on wagering on election outcomes. “From my plain reading of the statute and how the sites operate, I believe they do,” DeMarinis wrote, adding that if the law isn’t clear, the prosecutor’s office should recommend “any action you determine to be appropriate.”

It’s not unprecedented — Arizona pursued criminal charges against Kalshi over election-betting violations first, and lost at the federal level, at least for now. But it’s a rare and serious step for a state official to take, and it asks for considerably less than DeMarinis himself floated a month earlier.

What Changed Since June

When DeMarinis first went public with his concerns, in a June 23 interview with Maryland Matters, he framed prediction-market trading as indistinguishable from a bet: “To me, they are making a wager. They are making a bet.” Speaking to ABC News around the same time, he was noncommittal about whether he’d actually pursue it — “Whether or not I go after the prediction markets — I don’t know,” he said, calling it “definitely under review” — but he described the exact mechanism he’d eventually use: “If we have credible information about illegalities and it’s not within our civil citation authorities, we will of course refer those matters to the office of the state prosecutor for enforcement.”

The July 23 letter asks the prosecutor to examine the platforms and the statute; it does not ask for action against anyone who traded on them.

At the time, DeMarinis left open the possibility of going after individual Marylanders who placed trades — hundreds of thousands of dollars moved through Kalshi and Polymarket on primary races this cycle. The July 23 letter drops that entirely. It asks the prosecutor to examine the platforms and the statute; it does not ask for action against anyone who traded on them.

That’s a meaningful narrowing worth flagging: DeMarinis went from threatening bettors and platforms alike to formally targeting only the platforms, even as his public language got more certain, not less.

DeMarinis went from threatening bettors and platforms alike to formally targeting only the platforms, even as his public language got more certain, not less.

The Statute — and a Federal Court Has Already Weighed a Nearly Identical Case

The law DeMarinis is invoking is narrow. Election Law § 16-902 reads, in full: “A person may not make a bet or wager on the outcome of an election held under this article.” A violation is a misdemeanor carrying a fine of $50 to $500, paid to the state, and the statute separately requires that any money deposited as a bet be forfeited to the governing body of the county where it was deposited — the destination is written into the law itself, even if working out amounts and jurisdiction in practice could get complicated.

Maryland’s own record in court, on the sports-betting side, currently favors the state: a federal judge denied Kalshi’s request for a preliminary injunction against Maryland’s gaming law, ruling state authority can coexist with CFTC regulation. But that’s not final — Kalshi has appealed to the Fourth Circuit, with oral arguments already heard in May, and a ruling is still pending. Nothing about Maryland’s position is settled yet, even on sports contracts.

The far more direct precedent — and the one DeMarinis’s letter doesn’t address — comes from Arizona, which is the one other state that has tried exactly what Maryland is now attempting. In March 2026, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed a 20-count criminal case against Kalshi, including four counts specifically for election wagering — covering bets on the 2028 presidential race, the 2026 Arizona governor’s race, the Arizona GOP gubernatorial primary, and the Arizona secretary of state race. The CFTC intervened on Kalshi’s behalf, winning a temporary restraining order in April and then a preliminary injunction in May, with U.S. District Judge Michael Liburdi ruling that federal law preempts state gambling law as applied to CFTC-regulated platforms. Arizona’s criminal case is, in the words of one legal outlet, “dead in the district court” — though the state hasn’t said whether it will appeal to the Ninth Circuit. If that ruling holds, it means the exact enforcement path DeMarinis is now opening the door to — criminal charges over election-specific wagering on a CFTC-registered platform — has already been shut down once at the federal level, in the case most factually similar to Maryland’s own.

That doesn’t necessarily doom a Maryland version of the same fight — Arizona’s case and Maryland’s statute aren’t identical, and the CFTC’s win there is itself still subject to appeal. But it’s the single most relevant data point for how this could go, and it points toward the referral running into the same federal wall Arizona hit.

The Comparison Nobody Can Actually Make

DeMarinis’s referral treats the trading itself as the problem, and the informal jab in reaction to his announcement — that regulators should be asking why the markets called things better than the polls — assumes there’s data to back that up. There isn’t, at least not for this cycle.

Maryland had exactly two genuinely competitive primaries where markets and polling could theoretically be compared: the crowded MD-05 race to succeed Steny Hoyer, and the McClain Delaney-Trone rematch in MD-06. Neither holds up as a clean test.

In MD-05, Kalshi and Polymarket had Adrian Boafo around an 80% favorite weeks before the primary, climbing toward 90% in the final stretch; he won a fractured 24-candidate field with about a third of the vote. But no independent polling of that race surfaced publicly at all — there’s simply nothing to check the market against.

Nobody can currently point to real data showing whether Maryland’s prediction markets called this primary better or worse than public polling.

In MD-06, the only public polling was released by the McClain Delaney campaign itself: an internal survey putting her up 49%-38% on Trone in a head-to-head trial heat in mid-April, with prediction markets pricing her win probability at around 89% by primary day. She ultimately won with 43.8% to Trone’s 37.4% in the actual eight-candidate field. That looks like confirmation for both polls and markets, but the comparison doesn’t really work: a campaign-commissioned internal poll isn’t an independent baseline, a two-candidate trial heat isn’t measuring the same thing as an eight-candidate field, and “win probability” and “vote share” aren’t the same unit to begin with.

The upshot: nobody — not DeMarinis, not the markets’ critics, not their defenders — can currently point to real data showing whether Maryland’s prediction markets called this primary better or worse than public polling, because usable independent polling barely existed for the one or two races where it would have mattered. That’s arguably the more interesting failure here: a state weighing criminal enforcement against a forecasting tool without any apparatus in place to check whether the tool works.

A state is weighing criminal enforcement against a forecasting tool without any apparatus in place to check whether the tool works.

Context DeMarinis Didn’t Mention

The referral also lands two weeks after DeMarinis’s office received a seven-page letter from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division — signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon — threatening him with criminal conspiracy and civil rights charges over voter-roll compliance and noncitizen voting. DeMarinis called that letter, part of a coordinated push sent to election officials nationwide, “a nice love letter from the Department of Justice threatening my arrest,” and said it was meant to intimidate.

An election official facing a federal criminal threat over voter rolls chose this moment to initiate a criminal referral of his own.

The two matters are legally unrelated — one is a federal voter-eligibility fight, the other a state gambling-law question. But the sequence is notable on its own terms: an election official facing a federal criminal threat over his handling of voter rolls chose this moment to initiate a criminal referral of his own, against an industry whose product is forecasting the elections he administers.

State Prosecutor Charlton T. Howard III has so far declined to say anything about DeMarinis’s letter, citing his office’s standard policy against commenting on the existence, status, or details of any investigation. That means there’s currently no public confirmation Maryland has even opened a file on this — only that DeMarinis asked one to be opened.

There’s currently no public confirmation Maryland has even opened a file on this—only that DeMarinis asked one to be opened.

The National Picture Just Got Louder

The one state that tried criminal charges over election-specific wagering on a CFTC-regulated platform didn’t get far.

New York became the highest-profile state yet to go after Kalshi directly, doing so the same week as this story: Attorney General Letitia James sued the company on July 31, alleging it’s running an unlicensed gambling operation that exposes underage users to betting, and seeking triple the company’s New York gains plus civil penalties. Kalshi called it “political theater” and argued no single state can shut down a federally licensed exchange. The American Gaming Association — the casino industry’s trade group, which has consistently backed state crackdowns — praised the suit.

Maryland’s referral is a small piece of a genuinely unsettled national fight—not an outlier.

That brings the platforms’ active legal exposure to more than 20 lawsuits nationally, from state regulators, tribes, and individuals, with rulings splitting in both directions: state wins in Nevada, Massachusetts, and Michigan; CFTC/platform wins in Minnesota, Tennessee, and (for now) Arizona. Maryland’s referral is a small piece of a genuinely unsettled national fight, not an outlier — but it’s also not the first time a state has tried to use criminal law rather than civil suits to make the point, and the one state that tried that before Maryland didn’t get far.

Sources: DeMarinis’s July 23 letter to the Office of the State Prosecutor and coverage of it in Maryland Matters and The Daily Record; DeMarinis’s June 2026 comments to Maryland Matters and ABC News; Maryland Election Law § 16-902, verified against the 2005 and current 2024 Maryland Code on Justia; the Fourth Circuit docket for KalshiEX LLC v. Martin (No. 25-1892) and reporting on its May 2026 oral arguments from the Maryland Appellate Blog and DeFi Rate; Arizona’s criminal case against Kalshi and its federal-court outcome as reported by Courthouse News Service, Arizona Mirror, PYMNTS, and DeFi Rate; the Justice Department’s July 8 letter to DeMarinis as reported by Maryland Matters; the Office of the Attorney General of Maryland’s statement on the CFTC comment letter; New York Attorney General Letitia James’s July 31 lawsuit announcement and coverage in CNBC, CBS News, and CNN; WTOP and NBC News primary results reporting; and a Montgomery Perspective republication of an April 2026 internal campaign poll, which carries the normal caveats of campaign-commissioned research.

Same statute, opposite readings: AACPS says FERPA required staff to keep quiet. Now the U.S. Department of Education and DOJ are investigating whether that same law required them to speak up.

Anne Arundel County Public Schools is now the subject of a federal investigation that could put its funding at risk — and the paper trail shows it didn’t come out of nowhere.

On Sunday, July 26, 2026 — National Parents’ Day — Education Secretary Linda McMahon told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures” that the Department of Education has “turned over” a Maryland investigation to the Department of Justice, alleging AACPS “found that transgender activities were in place, and that parents not only were not informed, but it was being hidden from parents.” The following day, Monday, July 27, Fox News Digital reported the formal enforcement action in a written exclusive, quoting McMahon: “As a mother and a grandmother, it is unconscionable that any school district would hide the most sensitive information about children in their care from their own parents.” A companion investigation is underway in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which has until Aug. 11, 2026 to justify its gender-identity records policy to the Department of Education or risk losing federal funding — no equivalent public deadline has been reported for AACPS.

McMahon’s federal probe is built on the same underlying facts as a private lawsuit filed three weeks earlier — and both point back to a single Board of Education regulation that has quietly governed AACPS practice since 2021.

The policy at the center

Same statute, two incompatible readings, and now a federal test of which one controls.

Regulation JQ-RA, “Safe and Inclusive Environments for LGBTQ+ Students,” was adopted June 16, 2021, and last revised October 31, 2023. It grew out of a 2019 AACPS guidance document, “Students and Gender Identity: Guidelines for Support.”

The regulation instructs staff to use a student’s “preferred name and pronoun” regardless of legal records, grants access to opposite-sex facilities and sports based on self-identified gender, and requires no medical or legal documentation to do so.

On disclosure to parents, the regulation is explicit — and this is the crux of the current federal fight:

“The federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act generally prohibits the disclosure by schools that receive federal education funding of personally identifiable information from a student’s education records. Accordingly, school staff may not disclose any information that may reveal a student’s gender identity unless legally required to do so with the proper authorization.”

In other words: AACPS cites FERPA — the same federal student-privacy law now driving the Department of Education’s investigation — as the legal basis for withholding gender-identity information from parents. The department’s inquiry is examining whether that withholding itself constitutes a FERPA violation. Same statute, two incompatible readings, and now a federal test of which one controls.

AACPS cites FERPA as the legal basis for withholding gender-identity information from parents.

The Maryland State Department of Education’s own guidance backs the district’s original reading. MSDE’s “Providing Safe Spaces for Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Youth” guidelines state plainly that “no provision of state or federal law requires schools to affirmatively disclose this sensitive information to parents,” and that “sensitive information related to gender identity generally need not be disclosed without the student’s consent.” An MSDE spokesperson told Capital News Service in 2024 that this guidance is advisory — individual districts set their own policies, and Anne Arundel is one of several counties that has adopted disclosure practices in line with it. Carroll County is a notable exception, requiring parental notification by policy.

The lawsuit that came first

The federal probe tracks closely onto Doe v. Anne Arundel County Board of Education (Case No. 1:26-cv-02690-RDB), filed July 8, 2026, in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland by America First Legal and Consovoy McCarthy PLLC on behalf of pseudonymous parents “John and Jane Doe.”

The 35-page complaint lays out a specific, dated sequence of events at an AACPS high school:

• Dec. 10, 2025 — A staff member emailed the Does using a male name for their daughter, “Mary,” then sent a message attempting to recall it, followed by a corrected email — and a fourth message falsely claiming the original had been “sent to the wrong addresses.” When the Does called the next day, the staff member admitted to lying and explained that AACPS staff privately ask each student their preferred name and pronouns at the start of the semester.

• May 1, 2026 — A second staff member sent a field-trip logistics document to all parents on the trip. Mary’s legal name was omitted from the chaperone list; the same male name appeared instead, paired with the Does’ surname — effectively disclosing her gender identity to every other parent on the email. Confronted again, the staff member first claimed it referred to “another student,” then admitted that wasn’t true.

• May–June 2026 — The Does filed a series of written records requests: the policy permitting staff to solicit preferred names/pronouns, documentation of conversations with their daughter, and any records reflecting alternate names in her file. An assistant principal invoked Regulation JQ-RA by name as “the law” and declined to produce most of what was requested. A $334.90 field-trip refund was denied.

• June 6, 2026 — Responding in writing, the school’s principal reinterpreted the regulation’s provision that staff “work with a student and the student’s parent(s)/guardian(s) to develop an appropriate plan” — telling the Does that this language means staff “may help families navigate conversations,” not that parents receive notice or a role in the decision. On the Does’ records request, the principal directed them to a formal FERPA process to review official records, while stating that internal staff emails, notes, and communications would require “appropriate legal process, including a subpoena.”

AACPS spokesperson Bob Mosier has said the district is aware of the Doe litigation but does not comment on pending cases. On the separate federal investigation, Fox News Digital reported it “reached out to the school districts in Maryland and Michigan for comment but did not hear back at time of publication” — meaning AACPS has not yet responded on the record to the federal probe specifically, a distinct question from the private lawsuit.

What’s actually being litigated

The federal ED/DOJ investigation and the Doe lawsuit are separate legal tracks converging on the same regulation.

The Doe complaint doesn’t ask a court to referee FERPA. It’s a constitutional claim: that Regulation JQ-RA violates the Does’ First Amendment free-exercise rights and Fourteenth Amendment due-process rights to direct their daughter’s upbringing, plus parallel claims under Articles 24 and 36 of the Maryland Constitution. It leans heavily on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2026 decision in Mirabelli v. Bonta, which the complaint says held that “unconsented facilitation of a child’s gender transition” by a school can violate parents’ constitutional rights.

Two different bodies of law, two different plaintiffs, converging on the same regulation.

The federal ED/DOJ investigation is a separate track, proceeding under FERPA’s disclosure requirements rather than the Constitution — meaning AACPS could in theory prevail on the constitutional claims in Doe while still facing federal funding consequences on the FERPA question, or vice versa. Two different bodies of law, two different plaintiffs (private parents vs. the federal government), converging on the same regulation.

AACPS could prevail in court while still facing federal funding consequences—or vice versa.

This report is based on primary documents obtained and reviewed directly: the complaint in Doe v. Anne Arundel County Board of Education, No. 1:26-cv-02690-RDB (D. Md., filed July 8, 2026), provided by America First Legal and Consovoy McCarthy PLLC; Anne Arundel County Public Schools Regulation JQ-RA, “Safe and Inclusive Environments for LGBTQ+ Students” (adopted June 16, 2021, revised Oct. 31, 2023), published on AACPS’s board policy site; and the Maryland State Department of Education’s “Providing Safe Spaces for Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Youth: Guidelines for Gender Identity Non-Discrimination,” published via marylandpublicschools.org. Additional reporting draws on Fox News Digital’s July 27, 2026 article by Ashley J. DiMella, which carried Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s on-the-record statement and confirmed that AACPS did not respond to a request for comment by publication; McMahon’s July 26, 2026 interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” with Maria Bartiromo; and secondary confirmation of the Doe lawsuit’s filing and AACPS spokesperson Bob Mosier’s no-comment-on-litigation position via The Baltimore Banner. Background on Maryland’s county-by-county variance in gender-identity notification policy, including Carroll County’s contrasting parental-notification requirement, is drawn from Capital News Service’s Dec. 10, 2024 reporting.

When Republican Del. Ryan Nawrocki told Fox45 two weeks ago that Maryland “will not comply” with the Trump administration’s new election security order, neither his office nor Democratic Attorney General Anthony Brown’s office would say what that actually meant in practice.

Now there’s an answer. Rather than adopt DHS’s security measures — or explain why it wouldn’t — Maryland’s Democratic leadership chose to sue.

Given a checklist, the state’s answer was litigation, not a plan of its own.

The Lawsuit

On July 23, AG Brown filed suit against DHS and FEMA, joined by attorneys general from 20 other states and D.C. — all but two of them Democratic-led — plus the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania, challenging new conditions attached to this year’s Homeland Security Grant Program funding. The conditions, laid out in a July 9 notice of funding opportunity, require states to:

• Devote at least 3% of their Homeland Security Program and Urban Area Security Initiative awards to election-security investments

• Submit a plan to phase out electronic voting systems that use barcodes or QR codes in favor of hand-marked paper ballots

• Comply with a post-election 5% manual audit under guidelines the DHS secretary has yet to set

FEMA says it will withhold 20% of each state’s grant award until compliance is verified, and has warned that continued noncompliance could mean suspension or full termination of the funding.

It’s worth sitting with what Maryland is actually objecting to here. A transition to hand-marked paper ballots and a 5% post-election manual audit are not fringe positions — they’re measures election-security advocates across the political spectrum, including plenty of Democrats, have called for after years of concern about electronic voting system opacity. Maryland isn’t arguing those measures are bad policy. It’s arguing DHS lacks the authority to condition grant funding on them. That’s a real legal question, but it’s also worth naming plainly: the state had the option to adopt stronger paper-trail and audit standards on its own terms, and instead its chosen response was a 21-state lawsuit contesting federal authority. Nawrocki’s “won’t comply” line and Brown’s lawsuit aren’t in tension, whatever the party lines suggest — they’re describing the same outcome from two directions.dy getting lost: Nawrocki, a Republican, is the one saying Maryland “won’t comply”; Brown, a Democrat, is the one actually taking action — and the action is a lawsuit against the federal government, not a move toward the administration’s checklist.

What This Doesn’t Touch — Yet

To be precise about what’s alleged and what isn’t: Maryland’s inclusion in DHS’s recent statements is tied to an 18-state data-compromise claim, not the separate noncitizen-voter-roll claim DHS has directed at California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada.

But absence of an allegation isn’t the same as a clean bill of health. Unlike the 23 states that cooperated with DHS’s SAVE citizenship-verification program — where DHS says it found roughly 23,000 noncitizens and 400,000 deceased individuals still on the rolls — Maryland has not run that check. No state audit of Maryland’s voter rolls against SAVE or similar citizenship data has been conducted or made public. The state’s position, through DeMarinis and Brown, has been to defend its processes as secure, not to produce a citizenship-verification result. Those are different claims, and Maryland has so far offered the former while the latter remains untested.

The Cheverly Fight — And What’s Missing From It

That gap between “we say our systems are sound” and “we’ve actually checked” shows up again, in miniature, in Prince George’s County.

Two weeks ago, the American Center for Law and Justice sued the town of Cheverly on behalf of the American Accountability Foundation, demanding records tied to Cheverly’s noncitizen voter registry. AAF says it filed a Maryland Public Information Act request on October 17, 2025, simply asking for records of who’s on the registry — and says the town never meaningfully responded, despite repeated follow-ups, for nine months.

Nine months of silence on a routine records request is not a technicality. It’s the story.

Some context is worth adding, in fairness: Cheverly’s underlying policy wasn’t adopted in secret. Charter Amendment Resolution CAR-2-22, which allows noncitizen voting in town elections, passed 5-1 (one abstention) at a public hearing on July 28, 2022, with named council members — Jenny Garcia, Micah Watson, Nicole Bryner, Mayor Kayce Munyeneh, and Amy Fry voting yes. CASA publicized the vote at the time. So the ACLJ’s “what is Cheverly hiding?” framing overstates the case on the policy itself — that part was always public.

But that context doesn’t get the town off the hook for the actual complaint, which isn’t about the policy — it’s about records. A Maryland town ignoring a legal public-information request for nine months, on a subject this politically charged, is exactly the kind of institutional non-responsiveness that invites suspicion, warranted or not. Silence is a choice, and in this case it’s the town’s, not the requester’s.

As of this writing, no one from the Cheverly town government — the mayor, the town clerk, or any council member — has gone on record addressing the lawsuit or the original records request.

The Bigger Context

Maryland municipalities allowing noncitizen voting in local elections aren’t a new phenomenon—they span more than a century.

Cheverly isn’t unique, and the practice itself isn’t new — Maryland municipalities allowing noncitizen voting in local-only elections go back over a century. But the pace is worth noting on its own terms, because it cuts against the idea that this is settled, static policy nobody needs to keep an eye on:

• Barnesville — 1918

• Somerset — 1976

• Takoma Park — 1991 referendum; first noncitizen votes cast 1993

• Chevy Chase Section 3, Garrett Park, Glen Echo, Martin’s Additions — various dates, Montgomery County

• Hyattsville, Mount Rainier, Riverdale Park — Prince George’s County, mid-2010s

• Cheverly — 2022

• College Park — passed 2017 (after an initial vote was ruled invalid on a technicality), in effect since 2019

• Edmonston — November 2024

• Brentwood — requires one year of residency

• Greenbelt — September 2024, 6-0 council vote

• Frederick — September 2024, 4-1 vote; the largest municipality in the state to adopt the policy, with roughly 6,400 noncitizens estimated eligible for the first time in the November 2025 election

That’s at least 15 municipalities. Three of them — Edmonston, Greenbelt, and Frederick — passed their versions within a single two-month stretch in the fall of 2024. Whatever one thinks of the policy itself, “this has been quietly normal for decades” and “this expanded to three more towns, including the state’s largest municipality to do it, in the last two years” are both true — and the second part is the one getting less attention.

Maryland has defended its processes. It has not produced a citizenship-verification result.

What’s Still Open

• Whether Cheverly responds to the lawsuit, and what its actual registry numbers show

• Whether Maryland will run any citizenship cross-check on its voter rolls, comparable to what 23 cooperating states have already done under SAVE, or continue to decline

• Whether Frederick’s fall 2025 election produced any public accounting of noncitizen turnout — none appears to exist yet

• Whether DHS’s CISA plan, promised within 30 days of Secretary Mullin’s mid-July remarks, actually materializes and what it says about Maryland specifically

• Whether AG Brown’s lawsuit succeeds, given a federal judge already ruled against DOJ’s separate attempt to compel Maryland’s full voter file, on privacy grounds, in June — a result Maryland officials are likely to lean on

MDBayNews will follow up as these develop.

Sources: AG Brown v. DHS/FEMA complaint (filed July 23, 2026); DHS Homeland Security Grant Program notice of funding opportunity (July 9, 2026); Fox45/WBFF interview with Del. Ryan Nawrocki (July 17, 2026); DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin press remarks on SAVE program results (July 2026); ACLJ press statement, “What Are They Trying to Hide?” (July 10, 2026); CASA press release on Cheverly Charter Amendment CAR-2-22 (2022); Cheverly, MD public meeting agenda/minutes archive; Ballotpedia, “Laws permitting noncitizens to vote in the United States”; City of Frederick 2025 election records; prior MDBayNews reporting, “Maryland Named Twice by DHS” (July 19, 2026).

A coalition of Second Amendment groups is urging the Supreme Court of Maryland to take up the case of a D.C. man convicted of carrying a handgun in Prince George’s County with a valid District of Columbia permit. But the record shows the argument at the center of their amicus brief — a colonial-era “traveler’s exemption” to concealed-carry laws — was never actually considered by the court whose ruling they’re asking to be reversed.

The Stop

On November 21, 2021, Darius Pernell Duvall was a passenger in a car pulled over for speeding in Prince George’s County. Officer Ashley Wigmore, approaching the vehicle, smelled burnt cannabis and a faint odor of alcohol. When backup arrived and the occupants stepped out, Wigmore searched the car and found a loaded handgun in a jacket pocket in the back seat.

Duvall told her he had a permit in his wallet. It was a valid Washington, D.C. concealed carry permit — but Maryland doesn’t recognize any out-of-state permit, so Wigmore arrested him. He was originally charged with five offenses, including one for carrying while under the influence; the trial court granted him a judgment of acquittal on that count at the close of the State’s evidence, before the jury began deliberating. In November 2022, the jury convicted him on two of the remaining four charges — transporting a handgun in a vehicle and transporting a loaded handgun in a vehicle — and acquitted him on the other two. He was sentenced that December to probation, with the underlying prison term entirely suspended.

Two Years in Limbo, Then an Affirmance

Duvall’s appeal, filed in January 2023, sat stayed for roughly two years — a period that lines up closely with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Rahimi and the Maryland Supreme Court’s decision in Fooks v. State, both of which tested how far Second Amendment protections extend post-Bruen and were working their way through the courts over that same span. The stay lifted in mid-2025, and briefing continued, with several extensions on both sides, into January 2026. The case was argued February 6, 2026, before Judges Kathryn Graeff, Rosalyn Tang and Donald Beachley of the Appellate Court of Maryland.

On May 21, 2026, the panel affirmed Duvall’s convictions in an unreported opinion authored by Judge Beachley. The ruling turned less on the merits of Duvall’s Second Amendment claim than on what he’d actually argued below.

The panel found that argument came too late and too thin.

At the circuit court, Duvall’s trial counsel framed the issue almost entirely around the D.C. permit itself, telling the judge that “the gravamen of this Motion is the fact that Mr. Duvall is in possession of a concealed/carry weapons permit from the District of Columbia” and invoking, in a single aside, a “freedom to travel” theory tied to the Commerce Clause. The prosecutor’s response ran a little over a page: Maryland has no reciprocity law with any state.

On appeal, Duvall’s brief shifted toward a more developed argument — that requiring a Maryland permit imposes an “undue burden” on interstate travelers with no historical analogue. But the panel found that argument came too late and too thin. In a footnote, Judge Beachley wrote that the traveler’s-exemption theory “is not sufficiently briefed on appeal” and that Duvall “does not provide any authority” for it beyond a passing reference in his reply brief. Under Maryland Rule 8-131(a), the court declined to consider it at all.

That’s the argument the Second Amendment Foundation is now asking the Supreme Court of Maryland to embrace, in an amicus brief filed July 23, 2026, joined by Maryland Shall Issue, the NRA, the California Rifle & Pistol Association, the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, the Second Amendment Law Center, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and the Cato Institute. The brief leans on a body of colonial- and early-republic-era law exempting travelers from local carry restrictions, tracing it to a 1686 East Jersey statute and citing more than 80 comparable examples compiled in related litigation. “History is clear: travelers from other states were given greater leeway to carry arms than residents,” SAF Director of Legal Research and Education Kostas Moros said in a statement, arguing the theory follows from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in Bruen, Wolford and Hemani. It’s a serious historical argument. It is also not the argument the Appellate Court of Maryland ruled on.

It’s a serious historical argument. It is also not the argument the Appellate Court of Maryland ruled on.

What the Court Actually Decided

On the narrower question Duvall did preserve — whether Maryland’s refusal to recognize any out-of-state permit is constitutional as applied to a validly licensed visitor — the panel rejected the claim on the merits, and did so by leaning on the same court’s own prior ruling in a nearly identical case.

In Gardner v. State, an unreported opinion from April 2025 involving a Virginia permit holder charged in Montgomery County, the Appellate Court held that Bruen‘s approval of “shall-issue” licensing regimes doesn’t require states to honor each other’s permits, and that “reciprocity is not mandated under Bruen” absent further guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court or an act of Congress. The Duvall panel found “no reason to deviate from Gardner’s analysis,” and pointed to a 2025 Massachusetts high court ruling reaching the same conclusion on a nonresident permit requirement.

Gardner’s own case went further up the ladder than Duvall’s has so far — and came back empty. The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in Gardner v. Maryland on April 20, 2026, in a one-line order, despite amicus support from the Cato Institute, the Heller Foundation, twelve U.S. senators and two dozen states. One factor commentators have pointed to: Gardner litigated much of her case pro se before securing counsel, arguably leaving a messier record for the justices to work with.

Duvall’s case, by contrast, has been handled primarily by the Office of the Public Defender’s Appellate Division — standard indigent-defense representation, with the Second Amendment coalition’s involvement limited to amicus support rather than direct litigation. Whether that makes for a cleaner vehicle is an open question the Maryland Supreme Court hasn’t yet had reason to answer, since Duvall’s petition asks the court to consider an argument the lower court expressly declined to reach.

Where This Fits

Duvall’s petition lands amid a cluster of Maryland Second Amendment litigation moving through the courts at roughly the same time. The Maryland Supreme Court itself split 6-1 in June 2025’s Fooks v. State, upholding the state’s felon-equivalent firearm dispossession statute over a lone dissent from Justice Jonathan Biran, who argued the majority’s historical-tradition analysis was too permissive. Separately, the Second Amendment Foundation has a “sensitive places” cert petition, Novotny v. Moore, pending before the U.S. Supreme Court since May.

Justice Peter Killough, appointed to the Maryland Supreme Court by Gov. Wes Moore in 2024, has no prior record on a Second Amendment case — Fooks was argued and decided by a panel that didn’t include him. His vote, whenever the court rules on Duvall’s cert petition, will be untested territory.

For now, the question isn’t whether Maryland’s carry-reciprocity policy survives constitutional scrutiny. It’s whether the state’s highest court is willing to consider an argument its own intermediate appellate court never reached.

Sources

This report is based on the Appellate Court of Maryland’s unreported opinion in Duvall v. State, No. 1979, September Term 2022 (filed May 21, 2026), and its unreported opinion in Gardner v. State, No. 1496, September Term 2022 (filed April 18, 2025), along with the Maryland Supreme Court’s opinion in Fooks v. State, No. 24, September Term 2022 (filed June 6, 2025); docket records from the Circuit Court for Prince George’s County (Case No. CJ220120), the Appellate Court of Maryland (ACM-REG-1979-2022) and the Supreme Court of Maryland (SCM-PET-0227-2026), obtained via Maryland Judiciary Case Search; the U.S. Supreme Court’s docket in Gardner v. Maryland, No. 25-5961; the Second Amendment Foundation’s July 23, 2026 press release, “SAF Urges Maryland Supreme Court to Review Interstate Carry Rights Lawsuit”; and reporting from Bearing Arms (”Second Amendment Groups Urge Maryland Supreme Court to Recognize Non-Residents’ Right to Carry,” July 23, 2026) and Second Call Defense’s case analysis of Gardner v. Maryland.

One signature can stop a custody case in its tracks before a judge ever hears the other side.

A commissioner — not a judge — can issue a protective order in Maryland based on one person’s word, with no one else in the room. Once it’s filed, it can stop a custody case in its tracks, regardless of what else is pending. Lawmakers in Annapolis are starting to notice the same gap in a related part of the system. The gap in protective orders themselves remains wide open.

On July 17, 2026, a protective order surfaced in the ongoing Reichert v. Hornbeck custody case in Anne Arundel County — the latest in a case that has run for more than a decade and produced, by court record, protective order filings from both sides of the dispute. The petition arrived in the name of Grant Reichert, now 16, while three of his father Jeffrey Reichert’s own motions — for contempt, for custody modification, and to enforce the court’s own supervised-communication order — sat pending, unresolved, before the same court.

The mechanism that produced this latest filing is not unusual at all. It’s how Maryland’s protective order system is built to work.

The case is unusual in its length and its acrimony. The mechanism that produced this latest filing is not unusual at all. It’s how Maryland’s protective order system is built to work.

How a protective order gets filed

Under Maryland Family Law § 4-504.1, when the courthouse is closed, a person seeking a protective order doesn’t need to find a judge. A District Court commissioner — not a judge, and not necessarily an attorney — can issue an interim protective order on an ex parte basis: the person the order is filed against isn’t present, isn’t notified in advance, and doesn’t get to respond before the order is signed. The standard is “reasonable grounds to believe” abuse occurred — a real but comparatively low bar, assessed on one side’s account alone.

The order is already in effect by then, and in an active custody case, ‘in effect’ can mean a scheduled visit or call doesn’t happen, a pending motion gets overtaken, and a case’s momentum shifts to whoever filed last.

That order takes effect once served. It can restrict contact, require someone to leave a home, and — in a custody dispute — reshape who talks to whom while the underlying case is still being litigated. A hearing in front of an actual judge comes later, typically within days. But the order is already in effect by then, and in an active custody case, “in effect” can mean a scheduled visit or call doesn’t happen, a pending motion gets overtaken, and a case’s momentum shifts to whoever filed last.

A related gap, and an attempt to close it

HB 336 questioned commissioner authority for arrest warrants. The same structural question for protective orders remains unanswered.

Lawmakers in Annapolis have been looking at a version of this problem — not for protective orders, but for criminal arrest warrants, which run through a similar commissioner system. House Bill 336, which would bar private citizens from obtaining criminal arrest warrants directly from a District Court commissioner without police or prosecutorial review first, passed the House of Delegates 125–10 on March 23, 2026, and the Senate 35–11 on April 13, 2026. Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates testified in support, arguing that letting private citizens swear out warrants on their own word, unreviewed, invites abuse of the system by people with a personal stake in the outcome.

The bill addresses arrest warrants specifically. It would not change how protective orders are filed or issued — that runs through a different statute, with its own commissioner process, and nothing currently moving through the legislature targets it directly. But the reasoning behind HB 336 — that a single unreviewed accusation to a commissioner can trigger serious consequences before anyone in authority checks the underlying facts — applies just as directly to protective orders in contested custody cases. If lawmakers found that logic persuasive enough to restrict it for arrest warrants, family law attorneys and reform advocates say the same argument hasn’t yet been made, or hasn’t yet landed, for the protective order system itself.

What it looks like when it’s misused in a custody fight

Family courts don’t currently distinguish, at the moment of filing, between a protective order sought by someone in genuine danger and one filed as a tactic in an ongoing custody dispute. Both go through the same commissioner process, the same low initial bar, the same immediate effect.

Researchers who study high-conflict custody litigation have a name for the pattern when it’s a tactic: litigation abuse — not any single filing being provably false, but the use of continued filings themselves, including reopening matters already resolved, to extend restrictions and exhaust the other parent, independent of whether a judge ultimately agrees with any individual petition. It’s difficult to measure at a system level, because family court records are often sealed and the same filing looks identical on paper whether it’s protective or tactical.

The system is built for speed and low initial scrutiny rather than for sorting tactical filings from urgent ones.

The Reichert case offers a specific, documented illustration of the pattern, regardless of how the underlying custody dispute is ultimately resolved: a protective order that surfaced the same week the court’s own neutral, court-appointed visitation supervisor moved to force a hearing on why scheduled contact had stopped; a response from opposing counsel, when asked what recent conduct justified the filing, that pointed to an order from 2022 rather than anything from the relevant period; and a family court docket showing protective order filings from both parents across more than a decade, with at least one prior filing denied outright for lacking “any statutory basis for relief.”

None of that determines whether this specific petition is legitimate — that’s for a judge to decide, and the case remains open. What it shows is how easily the mechanism itself can be used procedurally, by either side, regardless of intent, in a system built for speed and low initial scrutiny rather than for sorting tactical filings from urgent ones.

A second case, and an appellate court saying it plainly

Reichert’s case isn’t the only one on record showing this pattern — and the second example comes with something Reichert’s case doesn’t yet have: an appellate court calling it out directly.

In Y.B. v. T.B. (Appellate Court of Maryland, No. 1650, Sept. Term 2022, decided December 1, 2023, arising from the Circuit Court for Charles County), a mother obtained a final protective order against the children’s father based on threatening phone calls. Notably, the court made no finding that he had abused or neglected the children themselves, and didn’t order a Department of Social Services investigation — the standard step when a court has reasonable grounds to believe a child has been abused.

Reichert’s case isn’t the only one on record showing this pattern — and the second example comes with something Reichert’s case doesn’t yet have: an appellate court calling it out directly.

She then cut off all contact between the father and the two children for two months, citing her own fear. At trial, the same judge who had issued the protective order didn’t credit her fear, telling her directly, on the record: “I don’t find that credible really.” The court found her in contempt for denying court-ordered visitation and awarded the father shared physical custody and tie-breaking legal authority. On appeal, the custody award and the contempt finding were both affirmed.

The shape is the same as what’s playing out in Reichert v. Hornbeck: a protective order obtained without any finding of danger to the children specifically, then used to justify cutting off a parent’s court-ordered access — until a judge looked closely enough to say, on the record, that the justification didn’t hold up.

The reform question nobody’s asked yet

The system that let a protective order arrive in Grant Reichert’s name while his father’s own motions sat waiting for a hearing is still exactly the system it was before HB 336 passed.

HB 336’s path through the legislature this year suggests Annapolis is willing to revisit how much power a commissioner should have to act alone, on one person’s word, with real consequences attached. Family law advocates on multiple sides of the custody-reform debate — both those focused on domestic violence protections and those focused on parental access — say the protective order system raises the identical structural question the arrest-warrant bill was built to answer, and that it hasn’t yet gotten the same legislative attention.

Whether that changes in the next General Assembly session is an open question. The system that let a protective order arrive in Grant Reichert’s name last week, while his father’s own motions sat waiting for a hearing, is still exactly the system it was before HB 336 passed.

Sources: Maryland Code, Family Law § 4-504.1 (interim protective orders, ex parte process). House Bill 336 (2026 Regular Session), Maryland General Assembly — House vote 125–10, March 23, 2026; Senate vote 35–11, April 13, 2026. Y.B. v. T.B., No. 1650, Sept. Term 2022, Appellate Court of Maryland (filed Dec. 1, 2023), arising from the Circuit Court for Charles County, Case Nos. C-08-FM-21-000522, C-08-FM-21-000534, and C-08-FM-22-807900. Reichert v. Hornbeck, Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County: Verified Report of Gena Caruana (June 15, 2026); Verified Declaration of Gena Caruana (July 6, 2026); correspondence between counsel for Jeffrey Reichert and Brennan McCarthy, Esq. (July 2026); Case No. C-02-FM-24-812286 (denied protective order, Feb. 23, 2024).

You don’t need to repeal a law to kill it. You just need to make sure no one can enforce it.

In Maryland, that project is well underway — and the evidence is hiding in plain sight across three separate policy tracks that, taken together, point in one direction.

Close the jails. Shrink who gets held. And when the system can’t absorb serious enforcement, call it a capacity problem.

The Facilities

In September 2025, the Moore administration announced the closure of the Maryland Correctional Institution at Jessup, a 44-year-old facility housing more than 700 inmates. The official rationale: the building was falling apart. Estimates put the necessary capital repairs at roughly $200 million — foundation work, drainage, plumbing, electrical, roofing. The closure was framed as fiscal prudence.

Months later, the Maryland Reception, Diagnostics, and Classification Center in Baltimore suffered an emergency transfer of its entire inmate population. The facility’s conditions had deteriorated to the point that human waste was dripping from ceilings due to failing plumbing infrastructure, alongside malfunctioning heating and cooling systems and inoperable fire alarms. That one wasn’t announced — it was an emergency. The result was the same: more beds gone.

The failures are real. The question is who allowed the conditions to deteriorate to the point of closure.

The state is now planning a billion-dollar replacement facility in Baltimore — a hybrid jail, hospital, and mental health and substance use treatment center it calls the Baltimore Therapeutic Treatment Center. Estimated completion: 2029. Estimated annual operating cost: more than $100 million. In the meantime, the gap between what has closed and what doesn’t yet exist is where policy quietly lives.

The infrastructure rationale is unchallengeable on its face. Nobody votes against fixing crumbling plumbing. But the maintenance backlog that produced these failures didn’t arrive overnight — it accumulated under an administration that chose what to defer and what to fund. The failures are real. The question is who allowed the conditions to deteriorate to the point of closure.

The Population

While bed count shrinks from one end, the Moore administration has simultaneously worked to reduce who gets held in the first place — through three distinct policy moves in the 2026 legislative session alone.

Juvenile charging reform. Senate Bill 323, the Youth Charging Reform Act, raises the age at which a juvenile can be automatically tried as an adult for most crimes from 14 to 16. It also eliminates five of the 33 offenses previously eligible for automatic adult charging for 16-year-olds. The House passed it 92-39 in April; Moore was expected to sign it. Effective October 1, 2026.

What is not in dispute: the bill moves cases that previously entered adult court into a system that, by design, does not produce adult incarceration.

Supporters argue — with some supporting data — that most cases automatically charged in adult court were eventually dismissed or sent back to juvenile court anyway. Critics, including Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates, argued the system needed better juvenile programming before expanding its reach. What is not in dispute: the bill moves cases that previously entered adult court into a system that, by design, does not produce adult incarceration.

Advocates who championed the bill openly called it a first step and said they intend to push further in future sessions.

ICE detainers — two bites. In February, Moore signed emergency legislation banning 287(g) agreements — formal cooperation arrangements between local law enforcement and ICE — across the nine Maryland counties that had them. Eight counties immediately terminated their agreements. The ninth, Washington County, said it would not enforce its agreement even while it remained on the books.

He also declined to veto it, allowing it to become law without his signature — a maneuver that let him distance himself from the political liability while accepting the policy outcome.

Then, in the final days of the session, the General Assembly passed the Community Trust Act (SB 791), which went further: it bars state and local correctional facilities from honoring ICE detainer requests unless accompanied by a federal judicial warrant. It also prohibits jails from providing advance notice of an individual’s release date or transferring people to ICE custody without a court order.

Moore declined to sign it. He also declined to veto it, allowing it to become law without his signature — a maneuver that let him distance himself from the political liability while accepting the policy outcome.

Harford County Sheriff Jeff Gahler, one of 17 Maryland sheriffs who filed a federal lawsuit challenging the law, was direct about the practical consequence: the legislation “forbids us from sharing information with federal authorities and prohibits us from honoring immigration detainers, forcing us to release criminal illegal offenders right back into the streets of our Maryland communities.”

Gahler said he checked how many individuals were being held under detainers — which had previously allowed authorities to notify ICE and hold someone for 48 hours after completing a local sentence so ICE could take custody. That process is now functionally over.

The Human Cost

If the policy argument requires connecting abstractions — capacity, intake, enforcement gaps — the human cost does not.

Colin Wolf, 32, was found dead in his cell at the Roxbury Correctional Institution in Hagerstown on May 20. He may have been dead for days. Decomposition had already begun. A boot print was found on his head.

Officers are required to conduct prisoner counts three times daily and perform rounds every 30 minutes. An internal prison report reviewed by The Baltimore Banner indicates that an officer performing rounds on the day Wolf’s body was discovered was told by his cellmate that Wolf was sleeping and was not awakened. The officer entered the cell, found him unresponsive, and called for medics. The cellmate told a corrections officer that Wolf had been dead “for hours” — a statement that contradicted a logbook entry claiming rounds had been completed an hour earlier without incident.

Wolf was the ninth prisoner killed in Maryland this year. Thirty-three inmates have been killed across the state’s 13 facilities since 2023. Roxbury alone saw two killings within two weeks in May, followed by a gang stabbing that injured eight more.

In the wake of Wolf’s death, Roxbury’s warden and chief of security were both removed. Nineteen officers were administratively charged. Eight medical staffers were banned from state facilities statewide.

What is not in dispute: the same administration closing facilities for reasons of human decency is presiding over a system where people are dying in their cells for days while officers sign off on rounds they didn’t complete.

State Sen. Paul Corderman, a Republican representing Frederick and Washington counties, made an unannounced visit to Roxbury and found air conditioning in one wing that hadn’t worked for months. He sent a letter to Corrections Secretary Carolyn Scruggs — appointed by Moore in 2023 — that did not mince words: “The current situation and climate in the correctional facilities in this region is worse now than before your appointment.”

Scruggs, in a statement, said she was “outraged” and pledged accountability. She declined an interview.

The union representing correctional officers points to chronic understaffing as the root cause. The department disputes it.

What is not in dispute: the same administration closing facilities for reasons of human decency is presiding over a system where people are dying in their cells for days while officers sign off on rounds they didn’t complete.

The Pattern

The cumulative result of these decisions — made by the same administration, in the same period, pointing in the same direction — is a correctional system with fewer beds, fewer people being held, and a documented inability to meet basic oversight obligations for those who remain inside.

Each of these developments has a standalone explanation.

Jessup was crumbling. The juvenile charging system was an outlier nationally, with Maryland sending more 14-to-17-year-olds to adult court than almost any other state except Alabama. Immigration detainers raise legitimate constitutional questions about the use of administrative warrants. Prison violence is a national problem tied to staffing shortages that no state has fully solved.

None of that is fabricated.

That is not a capacity problem that happened to Maryland. It is a capacity problem that was built.

But the cumulative result of these decisions — made by the same administration, in the same period, pointing in the same direction — is a correctional system with fewer beds, fewer people being held, and a documented inability to meet basic oversight obligations for those who remain inside.

That is not a capacity problem that happened to Maryland. It is a capacity problem that was built.

When the jails are full of fewer people and the system is stretched too thin to function, the argument that there is no room to enforce the law writes itself. No one has to say it out loud.

Sources: Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services; Baltimore Banner reporting by Justin Fenton, Ben Conarck, and Dylan Segelbaum; Maryland Matters; WTOP; The Baltimore Sun; Fox Baltimore; WYPR; Maryland General Assembly legislative records (SB 323, SB 791/HB 1575); Harford County Sheriff’s Office; letter from Sen. Paul Corderman to Secretary Carolyn Scruggs, July 2026.

Every errand, every commute, every trip to see a friend, folded into a searchable database neither agreed to join and can’t opt out of.

Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington aren’t criminals. Neither has ever been named a suspect in anything. But over four months in 2025, cameras in Norfolk, Virginia, logged Schmidt’s car 475 times and Arrington’s 325 times — every errand, every commute, every trip to see a friend, folded into a searchable database neither agreed to join and can’t opt out of. With the Institute for Justice representing them, they sued, arguing that kind of comprehensive tracking amounts to a warrantless search under the Fourth Amendment. In January, a federal judge disagreed, ruling that Norfolk’s 176 cameras across 75 locations didn’t track enough of a person’s movements to count as the “whole” of their life — the same legal standard that shields most ALPR systems, including Maryland’s, from constitutional challenge. Schmidt and Arrington appealed to the Fourth Circuit — the same appellate court that covers Maryland — where the case now sits as Schmidt v. City of Norfolk, backed by amicus briefs from the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, all urging reversal.

The ground shifted under Norfolk’s winning argument.

Then, in the last two weeks, the ground shifted under Norfolk’s winning argument. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Chatrie v. United States that police conducting a geofence search of Google location data need a warrant — and, more importantly for Schmidt’s case, the Court explicitly rejected the argument that a narrow, time-limited slice of a massive dataset is constitutionally fine just because it’s small. That was exactly the reasoning Norfolk used to win: 21 days of storage and 176 scattered cameras, the city argued, didn’t add up to tracking someone’s “whole” life. Chatrie says the size of the slice isn’t supposed to be the test at all. Legal analysts following the case now say Norfolk’s defense looks considerably weaker than it did in January.

There’s also a Maryland case sitting inside this fight already, and it cuts the other way from Norfolk’s win. In 2021, the full Fourth Circuit ruled en banc in Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department that Baltimore’s own aerial surveillance program — a spy plane that photographed nearly the entire city and could retrace anyone’s movements for up to 45 days — violated the Fourth Amendment. Schmidt and Arrington’s own appellate briefing leans on that Baltimore precedent directly, arguing Norfolk’s ALPR network does the same thing at street level that Baltimore’s plane did from the sky. Maryland, in other words, already has binding appellate precedent suggesting sustained government tracking of ordinary people can be unconstitutional — a precedent that predates almost every Flock camera now running in the state, and one that Maryland’s own legislature and law enforcement agencies haven’t been asked to reckon with in that context.

Maryland already has binding appellate precedent suggesting sustained government tracking of ordinary people can be unconstitutional.

That’s the part of Maryland’s automated license plate reader buildout that gets lost when the conversation turns to ICE and federal data-sharing, as it should — that’s a real and urgent problem. But it’s not the only one. Long before anyone’s data reaches a federal agency, it’s already been captured, logged, timestamped, and stored by a private company on behalf of a police department, about a person who was never suspected of anything. That fact doesn’t depend on who else eventually sees it.

What gets collected, and about whom

Flock Safety’s cameras don’t wait for probable cause.

Flock Safety’s cameras don’t wait for probable cause. Maryland’s own ALPR statute is explicit about this: officers need no reasonable suspicion to use the system, and it’s designed to run continuously, cataloging every plate that passes rather than searching for a specific one. A camera on a Baltimore County commuter route or an Anne Arundel neighborhood street photographs the same law-abiding driver on the way to work, to church, to a medical appointment, to a lawyer’s office, day after day — building, plate by plate, what amounts to a movement history for anyone who drives regularly through a monitored area. Newer Condor-model cameras extend that further, using AI to detect and follow pedestrians in frame, not just vehicles. Leonardo’s SignalTrace add-on, deployed on the ELSAG cameras already confirmed operating in the Baltimore metro area, goes a step past that: it captures the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and RFID signals emitted by phones, smartwatches, fitness trackers, and even a car’s own infotainment system, building what the company calls an “electronic fingerprint” that can identify a specific person’s device constellation even when no plate is visible at all.

None of this requires anyone to have done anything. It requires only driving, or walking, somewhere a camera can see.

When it goes wrong for someone with nothing to hide

“You can’t get a breath of fresh air in or out of that place without us knowing.” — Sgt. Jamie Milliman

In Colorado, Sgt. Jamie Milliman of the Columbine Valley police used Flock data to accuse a woman named Chrisanna Elser of stealing a $25 package. Ring doorbell footage later obtained by the Colorado Sun captured Milliman telling her, “You know we have cameras in that town. You can’t get a breath of fresh air in or out of that place without us knowing.” The charges were dropped. Elser told reporters it took her weeks of combing through her own metadata to prove her innocence, and that the experience left her sleepless — less bothered by being wrongly accused than by how ordinary it was for an officer to speak as though total tracking were simply the water everyone now swims in.

Less bothered by being wrongly accused than by how ordinary it was.

That’s a wrongful accusation. A separate, more personal category of harm shows up nationally in cases that have nothing to do with solving crimes at all. The Institute for Justice has documented more than 20 cases since 2021 of officers using ALPR networks to track romantic partners, exes, and in at least one case a stranger — a Kansas lieutenant tracking his estranged wife, a police chief tracking an ex-girlfriend hundreds of times, patterns that surfaced only because the people being tracked eventually found out and complained, not because any internal audit caught it first. Five Albany, Georgia, officers were fired and arrested this month for the same category of misuse, caught only after Flock introduced a new internal audit tool specifically built to flag it. None of the documented cases are in Maryland yet. That is different from there being none.

None of the documented cases are in Maryland yet. That is different from there being none.

The scale most residents don’t see

It’s an almost absurd image… exactly what happens when a surveillance system’s scale outpaces any city’s capacity to actually govern it.

Dayton, Ohio, offers the clearest illustration of what routine, unremarkable overreach looks like once someone finally audits it. After resident pressure forced the release of its Flock search logs this June, the city found more than 7,000 searches tagged to immigration enforcement over about a year and a half — the single most common search reason logged simply as “ICE,” 1,776 times — despite a city policy explicitly banning that use. City workers responded by pulling black trash bags over all 72 of Dayton’s fixed cameras, unable to confirm whether their contract even allowed them to switch the system off outright. Evanston, Illinois, did the same thing with its own cameras months earlier, for the same reason. It’s an almost absurd image, repeated in at least two cities now, and it’s exactly what happens when a surveillance system’s scale outpaces any city’s capacity to actually govern it.

None of that requires a driver to be a suspect in anything. It only requires having driven.

Maryland’s version of this question remains open, not answered. Montgomery County’s police department alone ran roughly 110 million plate reads in 2025. Anne Arundel has operated fixed cameras since 2012. Baltimore City, as MDBayNews has reported separately, is now layering a data platform on top of existing scans that can cross-reference ten years of a driver’s location history, activity history, and social media activity — and identify “connections between cars that happen to be within a quarter mile of each other,” according to contract documentation reviewed by Baltimore Brew. None of that requires a driver to be a suspect in anything. It only requires having driven.

Maryland’s version of this question remains open, not answered.

What thirty days of retention actually means

Thirty days of continuous, warrantless tracking… is still enough to reconstruct a detailed picture of where a specific person goes, how often, and with whom.

Flock’s standard policy — and Maryland’s own §3-509 — caps most local retention at 30 days unless the data becomes evidence in a case. That sounds like a meaningful limit until it’s weighed against volume: 30 days of continuous, warrantless tracking of every vehicle passing a fixed point is still enough to reconstruct a detailed picture of where a specific person goes, how often, and with whom, for anyone with database access and a reason — legitimate or not — to look. And Maryland’s own fusion center, the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, holds submitted data for up to a year once it reaches the state server, a materially longer window than the 30-day figure most residents would recognize if they’d heard of the limit at all.

The question Maryland hasn’t asked yet

No Maryland official has said anything, on the record, about what a reversal would mean here.

This isn’t a settled area of law where Maryland can safely assume its own ALPR programs are in the clear — it’s a live, moving fight, and Maryland already has a stake in it that neither state officials nor the legislature has publicly addressed. The Fourth Circuit, which governs Maryland along with Virginia, is currently deciding whether Norfolk’s ALPR network violates the Fourth Amendment, weighing its own 2021 Baltimore aerial-surveillance precedent against a Supreme Court ruling from two weeks ago that undercuts the exact defense Norfolk used to win the first round. If the Fourth Circuit reverses, the reasoning would apply directly to Maryland’s own ALPR networks — the same court, the same circuit, the same constitutional question, just a different state’s cameras. No Maryland official has said anything, on the record, about what a reversal would mean here.

What’s missing from Maryland’s own version of this debate is anyone testing it independently.

What’s missing from Maryland’s own version of this debate is anyone testing it independently of that appeal. Illinois found its problem through a state-ordered audit. San Francisco found its problem through a routine compliance check. Dayton found its problem by finally reading its own audit logs, after residents demanded them. Maryland has never run any of those exercises publicly, on the record, focused specifically on how many ordinary, uninvolved residents’ movements are sitting in a database at any given moment — not because of who might eventually access it, but because of what it means that it exists at all.

This piece is a companion to MDBayNews’ earlier reporting on Flock/ALPR data-sharing with federal immigration authorities in Maryland. No Maryland resident has yet come forward publicly to describe being wrongly flagged, tracked, or investigated using ALPR data. If that’s happened to you, MDBayNews wants to hear from you.

A June 23 ruling gave the state a narrow legal win on a 1970s abuse claim — and, in the process, spelled out exactly how exposed Maryland’s budget already is to a liability lawmakers have spent three straight sessions declining to fund.

Maryland’s Supreme Court handed the state a win on June 23 — and used the occasion to hand the General Assembly a bill nobody in Annapolis has figured out how to pay.

The case, Bd. of Education for Wicomico County v. Sturm, is narrow on its face. Rhonda Sturm alleges a teacher abused her at a Wicomico County elementary school between 1967 and 1971. The Wicomico County Board of Education argued sovereign immunity: the state didn’t authorize school boards to carry liability insurance for claims like hers until July 1, 1971 — months after her allegations end — so there was never a mechanism to pay a judgment on conduct before that date. Chief Justice Matthew Fader, writing for a unanimous court, agreed. Sturm’s case was dismissed without prejudice; she can refile only if the legislature someday builds a way to pay claims like hers.

The Court effectively wrote the fix into its own opinion and left it on lawmakers’ desks.

The Court didn’t pretend this was a satisfying outcome. It found that the Board’s underlying obligation to compensate Sturm was real, but that the state itself never created the financial plumbing to honor it — and only the General Assembly can build that plumbing now. Two attorneys who’ve represented Child Victims Act survivors put the same point more bluntly to The Daily Record after the ruling: the Court effectively wrote the fix into its own opinion and left it on lawmakers’ desks.

That’s the real story here, and it’s bigger than one plaintiff. Sturm is a preview of a reckoning Maryland has been deferring since 2023.

Sturm is a preview of a reckoning Maryland has been deferring since 2023.

A Law Passed Without a Way to Pay for It

The Child Victims Act, signed by Governor Wes Moore in April 2023, eliminated Maryland’s statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse claims against public and private institutions alike. It passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, and survivor advocates are right that it did something real: it opened a courthouse door that had been sealed on many victims for decades, some of them abused in the state’s own juvenile detention system.

What it didn’t do — and what nobody in Annapolis has done since — is identify how the state pays the resulting bill. More than 12,305 claims have now been filed against state government entities, the overwhelming majority tied to alleged abuse in Maryland’s juvenile justice system. The Maryland Attorney General’s Office told the Supreme Court in its own petition that pre-1982 claims alone — roughly 1,300 of the total — could expose the state to more than $1 billion.

Using the current $400,000 per-claim cap against public institutions, Spotlight on Maryland calculated the full claim volume could run at least $4.9 billion — a figure that excludes higher-value claims, federal cases exempt from the cap, and a separate legal dispute the Banner reports remains unresolved over whether survivors are entitled to compensation per incident rather than per claim.

That same unresolved dispute is why the numbers vary so widely depending on who’s doing the math: in January 2026, a Department of Legislative Services fiscal analyst told budget committees that, under the previous $890,000 cap in effect when most claims were filed, a full settlement of all claims could cost the state almost $10.7 billion. Legislators briefing reporters this spring, including Sen. Chris West (R-Baltimore/Carroll), have floated a worst-case figure as high as $60 billion if the per-incident theory prevails in court.

The General Assembly has taken exactly one concrete step to limit its own exposure: a 2025 amendment that cut the payout cap for claims against the state from $890,000 to $400,000 per claim, over objections from survivors’ attorneys who say the retroactive cap change is likely unconstitutional as applied to claims already filed. That’s a liability-management move, not a funding plan. Three budget cycles in, Maryland still has not built a reserve, a bond mechanism, or a claims-processing structure — the kind of dedicated vehicle other states have used to manage comparable exposure — to actually pay what it now owes.

Why Sturm Matters More Than Its Facts

Sturm’s own claim is about conduct from more than fifty years ago and turns on an insurance-authorization technicality specific to pre-1971 school abuse. Read narrowly, it’s a footnote. Read as a signal, it’s a preview of the fight that’s coming on the roughly 1,300 pre-1982 juvenile-facility claims — and, eventually, on the thousands of claims filed after that date, where the state’s sovereign-immunity defenses are weaker, but the dollar amounts are far larger.

The Court has now shown its hand twice on how it will rule when the state’s checkbook and a survivor’s claim collide.

The Court has now shown its hand twice on how it will rule when the state’s checkbook and a survivor’s claim collide: sympathy for the survivor, a real legal obligation acknowledged on the record, and immunity upheld anyway when the legislature never built a way to pay. Of the 200-plus motions to dismiss pre-1982 claims the state has already filed on sovereign-immunity grounds, at least four have been granted and at least 48 denied, according to the Attorney General’s own petition — meaning most of these fights are still live, and Sturm is the template the state will keep citing.

The Accountability Question Annapolis Keeps Deferring

Every year the legislature balances its budget without addressing CVA liability is a year the bill gets passed to the next General Assembly, the next governor, or the next credit rating review — Moody’s already downgraded Maryland’s credit rating in May 2025 for the first time in nearly three decades, and rating agencies have told state officials the CVA exposure has come up, in Senate President Bill Ferguson’s words, “in a general sense,” in meetings with analysts. That’s not a plan. It’s an acknowledgment that the problem exists, filed away for later.

Sturm gives Annapolis a legal roadmap it didn’t have before: the Supreme Court has now said, explicitly, that a funding mechanism is what stands between survivors and compensation the state itself doesn’t dispute they’re owed. The question for the legislative session ahead isn’t whether lawmakers know the bill is coming. Every budget hearing since March has made clear they do. The question is whether the state that moved with real urgency to open the courthouse door in 2023 will move with matching urgency to make good on what walks through it — or whether, three years and 12,000 claims later, Maryland keeps choosing not to decide.

Will Maryland move with matching urgency to make good on what walks through the courthouse door—or, three years and 12,000 claims later, keep choosing not to decide?

MDBayNews will track CVA-related budget language in the next legislative session, along with any funding mechanism the General Assembly proposes in response to the Sturm ruling.

Sources: This report draws on the full text of Bd. of Education for Wicomico County v. Sturm, No. 54, Sept. Term 2025 (Md., filed June 23, 2026), and the Maryland Attorney General’s petition for certiorari in that case, both published by the Maryland Judiciary. Budget and liability figures were drawn from reporting by Spotlight on Maryland (FOX45 News/WJLA/The Baltimore Sun), The Baltimore Banner, The Daily Record, and the Maryland Department of Legislative Services’ published budget projections. Legislative quotes attributed to Sen. Chris West, Senate Budget and Taxation Chair Guy Guzzone, Senate President Bill Ferguson, and Del. C.T. Wilson were reported contemporaneously by Spotlight on Maryland and The Baltimore Banner during 2026 budget proceedings; MDBayNews did not independently interview these officials for this piece.

A divided Fifth Circuit panel ruled Wednesday that federal law preempts Texas’s in-state tuition policy for undocumented students. Maryland has an almost identical law — but it survived a statewide referendum, and its real vulnerability isn’t Washington. It’s the tax return.

In a 2-1 ruling handed down July 9, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that federal law preempts the Texas Dream Act, the state’s 2001 law allowing undocumented students who graduated from Texas high schools to pay in-state college tuition. The panel — Judge Jerry Smith writing, joined by Judge Don Willett, with Judge Irma Ramirez dissenting — sided with the Trump administration’s Justice Department, which sued Texas last year, arguing the tuition break violated federal restrictions on state benefits for people in the country illegally.

Texas didn’t put up much of a fight. When DOJ filed suit, the state’s own attorney general declined to defend the 24-year-old law, and a federal district judge struck it down within hours in June 2025 — the same kind of consent-judgment maneuver the administration has used against several blue-state tuition laws. Advocacy groups and Austin Community College tried to intervene and appeal on their own. The Fifth Circuit just told them no.

Maryland has never faced that fight. But it has the exact same law on the books.

The Maryland Version

The Maryland Dream Act — Senate Bill 167, passed by the General Assembly in 2011 — lets undocumented students who attended a Maryland high school for at least three years and graduated from one pay the in-county or out-of-county community college rate, and eventually in-state university tuition, instead of the full out-of-state rate. It’s codified at § 15-106.8 of the Education Article. In 2018, lawmakers extended eligibility for state financial aid to the same students under SB 532 and HB 262.

The requirements aren’t casual. A student or their parent has to file Maryland income tax returns for three consecutive years, submit an affidavit promising to pursue permanent residency, and register for Selective Service if applicable. Roughly 11,700 undocumented students are currently enrolled in Maryland colleges, and the state graduates an estimated 2,000 undocumented high schoolers a year, according to the Higher Ed Immigration Portal and reporting from the Baltimore Banner.

“States control education, so they have a right to enact these policies.”

— Elizabeth Keyes, immigration law professor, University of Baltimore

Why Maryland’s Law Is Harder to Kill

Federal law doesn’t actually ban states from offering in-state tuition to undocumented residents.

Federal preemption law — specifically Section 505 of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act — doesn’t actually ban states from offering in-state tuition to undocumented residents. It bans states from offering any residency-based higher education benefit to undocumented immigrants without offering the identical benefit to out-of-state U.S. citizens who meet the same criteria. Maryland’s law, like most of the roughly twenty state tuition-equity laws still standing, is written to clear that bar: it turns on high school attendance and graduation, not immigration status alone.

Texas’s law had the same structure. What Texas lacked was a defender. When DOJ sued, the state simply didn’t show up.

Maryland’s law has a defender built in: the voters.

Maryland’s law has a defender built in: the voters. Opponents of SB 167 gathered enough signatures to force it onto the November 2012 ballot as Question 4, and it passed with roughly 58 percent support — making it one of the few state Dream Act laws in the country to survive direct popular referendum rather than surviving only in a legislature or a courtroom. If the Trump Justice Department eventually pointed the same preemption theory at Annapolis, the political optics of unwinding a voter-ratified law are considerably worse than nullifying an unopposed consent judgment out of Austin.

The Real Pressure Point Isn’t the Fifth Circuit — It’s the IRS

Maryland’s law survives a legal challenge that Texas never got to test. But it has a structural weakness Texas’s law didn’t carry in the same way: eligibility depends on the student’s family filing Maryland income tax returns for three straight years, and, since earlier this year, the IRS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have operated under a data-sharing agreement that lets ICE access taxpayer information to help locate people in the country illegally.

That collision is already showing up in Maryland classrooms. Families who would otherwise qualify their children for the reduced tuition rate are increasingly reluctant to file the very tax returns the law requires, according to reporting from the Baltimore Banner — worried that establishing a paper trail with the IRS now doubles as establishing one with ICE. Advocates have spent three years lobbying Annapolis to drop the tax filing requirement; that effort has gone nowhere in the General Assembly.

It’s the kind of quiet contradiction this outlet has tracked across Maryland’s broader ICE-cooperation fight.

It’s the kind of quiet contradiction this outlet has tracked across Maryland’s broader ICE-cooperation fight, from the Community Trust Act to the state’s license plate reader data-sharing protections: a state law built to extend a benefit to undocumented residents, conditioned on paperwork that a separate piece of federal machinery can now use against the same population it was meant to help. Nobody has to sue Maryland to make the Dream Act less useful. The IRS-ICE agreement is already doing it.

Nobody has to sue Maryland to make the Dream Act less useful. The IRS-ICE agreement is already doing it.

Sources U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, No. 25-10898, United States v. Texas, filed July 9, 2026 · Maryland Education Article § 15-106.8 · Maryland Higher Education Commission · Higher Ed Immigration Portal (Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration) · The Baltimore Banner · National Immigration Law Center, “Basic Facts About In-State Tuition”

Flock Safety cameras are now widespread across Maryland. The state’s legal safeguards are, too. The missing piece is an independent audit.

Nobody in Maryland has smashed a Flock Safety camera. Nobody has cut one down with vice grips and thrown it off a highway overpass, the way an Air Force engineer in Suffolk, Virginia, is accused of doing to 13 of them. There’s no GoFundMe for a Maryland defendant’s legal fees, no viral video of a severed pole on I-295. Cross the Potomac and the story is different — Virginia has one of the most closely watched vandalism cases in the country. In Maryland, automated license plate readers have gone up in every county, but one, and the pushback so far has been limited to a handful of petitions and a longshot congressional candidate’s platform — nothing close to the scale of the fight playing out elsewhere.

The question nobody appears to have asked yet: is the law solving a problem that’s actually been documented in Maryland, or getting ahead of one nobody here has looked for?

That quiet matters, because Maryland has spent the past two years building one of the more legally elaborate ALPR frameworks in the country — and this year passed two laws specifically designed to keep the data those cameras collect away from federal immigration enforcement. The question nobody appears to have asked yet: is the law solving a problem that’s actually been documented in Maryland, or getting ahead of one nobody here has looked for?

Maryland has spent the past two years building one of the more legally elaborate ALPR frameworks in the country.

What the cameras do

Flock Safety’s automated license plate readers are solar-powered units that photograph every passing vehicle, log the plate, and — on newer models — track Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals from devices inside the car. The company’s Condor cameras add pan-tilt-zoom capability and can follow pedestrians in frame. The data uploads to a cloud platform that, depending on an agency’s settings, can be queried by any other subscribing law enforcement agency in the country. Flock has said its policy prohibits sharing with agencies conducting civil immigration enforcement, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The real answer depends on which camera model is installed where.

Even that basic distinction — plate-only versus pedestrian-tracking, depending on model — gets lost in the noise once the subject reaches social media. Verified accounts with tens of thousands of followers routinely assert the opposite of each other as settled fact: one widely shared post this month insisted Flock cameras “DO NOT record or photograph people” and have no tracking capability beyond plates, while another, equally uncredited, claimed the opposite — that the same cameras are deployed at reproductive clinics and children’s gymnastics facilities specifically to track people. Neither cited a source, a location, or an incident. Both are wrong in the specific way that matters most: the real answer depends on which camera model is installed where, a fact that’s publicly documented and not actually in dispute, but that gets flattened into confident, contradictory assertions on both sides before anyone checks.

The fact that matters most gets flattened into confident, contradictory assertions before anyone checks.

Flock is the dominant vendor in Maryland, but not the only one. A review of crowdsourced camera-mapping data across the state turned up at least four other brands operating alongside Flock units — Motorola Solutions, Leonardo, Mesa Technologies, and a company identified only as Cyber Secure — though Flock cameras outnumbered every other brand combined in every sample checked. That matters beyond simple market share: Leonardo, whose ELSAG-brand cameras were found operating in the Baltimore metro area and Harford/Cecil corridor in this review, introduced a product this year called SignalTrace — a sensor add-on, independently reported by 404 Media and others, that clips onto existing ELSAG hardware and adds Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and RFID device-signature collection on top of plate reading. Multiple industry sources describe it as requiring no new procurement process to deploy on cameras already in the field. Whether any Maryland agency has added it is unconfirmed and would need to be asked directly.

Flock itself is expanding in a parallel direction. The ACLU reported in August 2025 that Flock is planning to connect its plate-reader network to commercial data brokers offering “people lookup” services, explicitly marketed as letting police “jump from LPR to person” rather than stopping at a vehicle record. The company separately launched a “Flock Business Network” that same June, described as a hub for private-sector organizations to share crime-prevention data among themselves — extending Flock’s infrastructure beyond law enforcement customers entirely. Neither expansion is Maryland-specific, and whether any Maryland agency or private Flock customer has opted into either program is unconfirmed. The rest of this piece focuses on Flock specifically, both because it’s the dominant vendor and because it’s the one with a documented federal-sharing history; the other vendors’ data-sharing practices in Maryland remain unreported.

The Maryland footprint

By spring 2026, a Flock spokesman told the Baltimore Sun that roughly 100 Maryland police agencies were running the technology. Anne Arundel County alone operates 88 fixed locations. Salisbury’s City Council unanimously approved a three-year Flock contract in December 2025 worth roughly $1.1 million total — about $350,000 a year, per Mayor Randy Taylor — covering 40 security cameras and 40 separate license plate readers, 80 units in all, concentrated in downtown and high-crime areas. Taylor called it “a revolutionary way of doing policing”; Lt. Brandon Caton of the Salisbury Police Department said placement decisions weighed which areas, including downtown event spaces, most needed coverage. Montgomery County’s police department runs nearly 800 units and recorded about 110 million plate reads in 2025 alone, up from 52.3 million just two years earlier. Calvert County, Glenarden, and Hyattsville all run programs. New cameras appeared on I-295 north of Laurel this spring — among the first documented federal-highway installations in the state — drawing criticism from the ACLU’s national policy staff, though Maryland’s own ACLU affiliate deferred comment to Washington. Maryland State Police confirmed they do not operate Flock-brand cameras.

Montgomery County’s police department recorded about 110 million plate reads in 2025 alone.

The stated use case does show up in practice. In March, Montgomery County’s 4th District used an LPR hit to locate Judith Woodard, a Long Island woman with Alzheimer’s and dementia who had driven nearly 24 hours through three states after going missing under a Silver Alert — found safe at Randolph Road and New Hampshire Avenue after her cellphone ping narrowed the search to the county. It’s a real example of the recovery function the technology is marketed on, and it’s worth weighing against everything that follows.

The recovery function the technology is marketed on is real—and worth weighing against everything that follows.

A county-by-county review of crowdsourced mapping data, cross-checked against news coverage and a 2011 state intelligence bulletin obtained by the ACLU, found evidence of ALPR activity in 23 of Maryland’s 24 jurisdictions — missing only Dorchester County, where two independent, zoomed-in map checks centered directly on Cambridge turned up no cameras at all. That absence, in a state where every other county has some documented footprint, is itself worth a question to the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office.

Only one Maryland jurisdiction is on record trying to walk away, and even that isn’t fully settled. The town of Hancock in Washington County voted unanimously on Nov. 18, 2025, to have Flock remove its cameras after a trial period revealed that the state wouldn’t allow the system to share data with neighboring agencies — a technical compliance failure, not a privacy revolt. But mapping records show at least two of Hancock’s cameras were actively documented, tagged, and repeatedly fine-tuned by a contributor on OpenStreetMap on Nov. 8 and 9, 2025 — ten days before the council’s vote — and haven’t been updated since. Separate crowdsourced mapping pulled as recently as this month still shows roughly eight camera-shaped markers clustered in the same spot along Hancock’s Main Street. Neither data source can say for certain whether the cameras are still physically there or whether the map simply never caught up to their removal. Evanston, Illinois, provides a cautionary precedent: that city formally canceled its Flock contract in August 2025, only to discover months later that some cameras had been quietly reinstalled without its permission and were still collecting data — full removal didn’t happen until early 2026.

A second system, no cameras required

Baltimore’s plate-tracking capacity built up in three distinct stages, only the last of which involved software rather than hardware. In February 2022, Baltimore Police added 15 city-owned stationary readers — bringing its total to 35 — after then-Council President Brandon Scott pushed for expansion following a pair of carjackings in Upper Fells Point caught on a resident’s Ring doorbell. In 2023, five more cameras went up along the South Baltimore Peninsula, this time funded by a roughly $250,000 state housing grant secured by the Federal Hill and Riverside neighborhood associations rather than the city itself; those units are Leonardo’s ELSAG brand, according to Leonardo’s own account of the project, not Flock.

The largest single dollar investment in plate-tracking technology in Maryland sits outside the state’s ALPR-specific laws.

Then, in March 2026, Baltimore’s Board of Estimates approved a $1.46 million, four-year contract with Thomson Reuters CLEAR over public objection — a data platform that lets Baltimore police cross-reference existing plate scans against ten years of a driver’s location history, activity history, social media activity, and even, per contract documentation reviewed by Baltimore Brew, “connections between cars that happen to be within a quarter mile of each other.” “This provides [Baltimore Police Department] access to public records, to proprietary data sources, provides us information and reference to people, phone numbers, addresses, asset searches,” Col. Jack Herzog told the board. Residents, including Kenisha Daley and Karien Laurent, spoke against the contract, citing distrust of the department and fear the tool would be turned toward federal immigration enforcement sweeps already underway in the city; a majority of the board, including Mayor Scott, approved it anyway. The contract runs through January 2030 — longer than any Flock camera contract found in this reporting — and represents the largest single dollar figure attached to plate-tracking technology anywhere in the state. It sits entirely outside the ALPR-specific statute and outside HB 444 and HB 711’s coverage, because CLEAR isn’t a plate-reader system; it’s a records aggregator layered on top of data plate readers already collect, requiring no new cameras at all.

CLEAR isn’t a plate-reader system; it’s a records aggregator layered on top of data plate readers already collect.

Two details buried in a separate resident’s written opposition, published a day before the vote, matter more than the headline dollar figure. First, the contract’s new plate-reader component doesn’t come from Thomson Reuters’ own infrastructure — it runs on “Motorola/Vigilant Solutions’ live gateway of commercial license plate data,” pulling in what Thomson Reuters describes as more than 7 billion plate-location records collected over a decade, a direct link to the Motorola Solutions brand already found operating on the ground in Maryland. Second, and more directly relevant to everything else in this piece: Thomson Reuters’ own marketing materials, quoted in that submission, describe the company as having been “successfully supporting DHS’s investigative research needs and initiatives since the agency’s inception” — a vendor stating, in its own promotional language, that its plate-data product was built with ICE’s parent agency specifically in mind. Baltimore had also held a narrower CLEAR contract with Thomson Reuters since roughly 2020; March’s vote didn’t create the relationship, it expanded it, doubling the monthly cost from about $11,000 to about $23,000 specifically to add the plate-tracking layer.

The legislative arc

Maryland’s ALPR statute — Public Safety Article §3-509 — already required agencies to show a “legitimate law enforcement purpose,” conduct annual audits, and restrict access to trained personnel before Flock ever became a household name in the state. In 2024, Del. N. Scott Phillips’s House Bill 1081 opened the door to cloud-based storage while tightening the rules: captured data could no longer be sold, and vendors were barred from uploading it to outside agencies without express authorization. Flock Safety testified in support, citing company figures claiming its cameras help solve roughly 700,000 crimes a year — about 10% of reported crime nationwide, by the company’s own estimate.

The law’s central tension—between enabling modern cloud storage and controlling who else gets access—was debated on the record years before HB 444 and HB 711.

The bill’s path through committee wasn’t as uniformly friendly as the final 47-0 Senate and 119-17 House votes suggest. Maryland State Police submitted a formal letter of information warning that HB 1081, as introduced, would let third-party vendors share captured plate data with non-law-enforcement entities through subscription services — which the department said would violate the original intent of Maryland’s ALPR law, a framework MSP noted had been built through a prior agreement between legislative sponsors, the ACLU, and the state’s police chiefs and sheriffs. MSP said it would drop its objection only if specific data-protection amendments were adopted; they were, and the Maryland Chiefs of Police Association and Maryland Sheriffs’ Association similarly shifted from conditional to full support once the amendments were in place. A nonprofit consumer group, Auto Consumer Alliance, backed the bill anyway but flagged the same underlying risk in its own testimony, citing ACLU reporting on ICE’s use of driver-location data and Wired’s reporting on the use of plate-reader data to track people traveling for abortion care — meaning the eventual law’s central tension, between enabling modern cloud storage and controlling who else gets access to it, was debated on the record two years before it became the subject of HB 444 and HB 711.

This year, lawmakers moved further and faster. House Bill 444, sponsored by Del. Nicole Williams and backed by 80 co-sponsors, banned Maryland agencies from entering so-called 287(g) agreements with ICE and ordered existing ones terminated. Introduced as emergency legislation weeks after federal immigration officers fatally shot two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, it cleared the House Judiciary Committee 12-7 over Republican floor delays and was signed by Gov. Wes Moore on Feb. 17 — one of the session’s first enacted bills. House Bill 711, the Data Privacy Act, followed close behind: sponsored by Del. Lorig Charkoudian and pushed hard by the immigrant-advocacy group CASA, it bars data controllers from knowingly selling personal information to a government unit that has engaged in civil immigration enforcement within the prior six months. It became law without the governor’s signature under the state constitution’s default-enactment provision.

Where the documented ICE contact actually happened

The one confirmed instance of federal immigration enforcement touching Maryland tracking infrastructure didn’t run through a local police department’s Flock account. Court records filed in a Department of Homeland Security class-action lawsuit showed the U.S. Park Police — which has jurisdiction over the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, a federal, not state, entity — cooperated with ICE by making stops tied to at least 10 immigrant arrests between September and February, several involving workers in commercial vehicles. The Park Police did not respond to Baltimore Sun and Maryland Matters requests for comment on the reporting.

The documented Maryland case involved a federal agency operating on federal land under federal authority.

That’s a federal agency operating on federal land under federal authority. Neither HB 444 nor HB 711 reaches the Park Police, because neither bill can bind a federal law enforcement agency. If the documented Maryland case is the baseline for what lawmakers were responding to, the two headline 2026 privacy bills may not have closed the specific door that was actually open.

The two headline privacy bills may not have closed the specific door that was actually open.

The unanswered question at the center

If a similar arrangement exists today, it would mean ICE has had a standing role inside the very center that houses Maryland’s plate-reader data.

Maryland’s ALPR data flows through the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, the state’s post-9/11 fusion center, which HB 1081 explicitly authorized as a repository for cloud-based ALPR records. A Department of Justice description of MCAC’s structure — dated 2013, and not independently confirmed as current — described a four-person management team drawn from local, state, and federal agencies, with an ICE Supervisory Intelligence Analyst holding one of the center’s Assistant Director seats. If a similar arrangement exists today, it would mean ICE has had a standing role inside the very center that houses Maryland’s plate-reader data — a materially different question from the “backdoor” data leaks that triggered mass contract cancellations in California, Illinois, and Washington state. It would not be a leak. It would be a seat at the table.

It would not be a leak. It would be a seat at the table.

That detail is 13 years old and requires current verification before it can be reported as fact rather than flagged as an open question. A separate, older MCAC document — a “law enforcement sensitive” intelligence bulletin from January 2011, obtained by the ACLU — shows the center has served as Maryland’s central ALPR clearinghouse since well before Flock existed, networking agencies in nearly every county to a shared server. A 2014 Capital News Service Maryland report put hard numbers on the growth that followed: the state ran 411 total LPR scanners by 2014, up from 295 in 2011, with 68 agencies participating and 55 feeding data into the fusion center — up from just 32 agencies three years earlier. MCAC’s current Standard Operating Procedure for the LPR program, adopted in 2024, states that data submitted to its central Operations Center server is held for up to one year unless it becomes evidence, a longer window than the 30-day retention period individual agencies like Anne Arundel County cite for their own local systems — worth clarifying which retention period actually governs data once local agencies upload it to the state server. But no audit of MCAC’s current, Flock-era access has been published by any state auditor or legislative committee. Unlike Mountain View, California (600,000 unauthorized law enforcement queries uncovered by its own police chief) or Illinois (a state audit that found a Customs and Border Protection pilot program Flock said its own leadership didn’t know about), Maryland has not had that reckoning — or at least, not one that’s been made public.

What audits found everywhere else they looked

None of the discoveries were self-reported. Every one came from someone choosing to look.

Maryland’s silence looks different once you know what turned up in the states that actually checked. None of the discoveries below were self-reported by Flock. Every one came from an outside records request or a compliance audit that someone chose to run.

Maryland’s silence looks different once you know what turned up in the states that actually checked.

Illinois

In Illinois, a reporting outlet obtained Flock search logs from the Danville Police Department through a public-records request and found more than 4,000 nationwide lookups between June 2024 and May 2025 listing reasons like “immigration,” “ICE+ERO,” or “ICE WARRANT.” Illinois law and Flock’s own policy both prohibit that use. Local departments denied running immigration searches themselves; the pattern showed ICE reaching the data indirectly, through informal requests to local and state police who had nationwide lookup access enabled. Every lookup that explicitly listed “immigration” as its reason came after January 2025.

Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias ran his own audit that June, sampling just 12 local agencies. He found U.S. Customs and Border Protection had been accessing Illinois camera data through a federal pilot program — one Flock’s own leadership said it hadn’t known was running. He ordered it shut off. Flock paused the CBP pilot nationwide as a result, not just in Illinois.

Virginia

Virginia turned up a similar pattern independently. Audit logs from two jurisdictions, Bridgewater and Mecklenburg County, showed nearly 3,000 searches using terms like “ICE,” “ERO,” “immigration,” and “deportee” — despite local police insisting their own departments didn’t conduct immigration enforcement. The nationwide lookup network let outside agencies reach Virginia’s cameras regardless of what local officers intended.

California

San Francisco’s version came from inside the department, not outside pressure. In June 2026, the police chief disclosed at a public commission meeting that a routine compliance audit had caught the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center querying the city’s Flock network on behalf of federal and out-of-state agencies — 299 improper queries over roughly a year. A separate class-action filed that February alleges federal and out-of-state agencies queried San Francisco’s cameras more than 1.6 million times in seven months. California’s ALPR Privacy Act carries a $2,500-per-violation statutory penalty, which puts the lawsuit’s potential exposure in the billions.

Even jurisdictions that thought they’d locked their data down found otherwise. Oxnard, California, had its sharing setting explicitly configured to “California only” — a vendor-side error silently re-enabled nationwide query access without the department’s knowledge. Flock has been responding to these discoveries reactively rather than proactively: nationwide lookup access was pulled for Illinois, California, and Virginia in June 2025, after the Danville reporting broke; self-enrollment filters to auto-block “Immigration” and “Reproductive Care” search reasons arrived that November; a single admin toggle letting an agency disable all federal sharing at once wasn’t introduced until January 2026.

Georgia

The most recent example is playing out in Georgia as this piece goes to publication. Five former Albany police officers were fired and arrested this month after an internal audit — run through a new “audit assistance tool” Flock introduced specifically to flag anomalous search patterns — found they had repeatedly pulled license plate data for personal, non-law-enforcement reasons. Two Cherokee County sheriff’s supervisors and a Greene County deputy were separately fired and charged on the same grounds within weeks. Unlike the institutional-access stories out of Illinois and California, this is individual misuse caught by the system’s own internal tooling — proof that the audit mechanism can work, but also a reminder that it only surfaces what someone bothers to run it against. Barrow County’s sheriff is separately investigating a case of suspected camera vandalism as a felony, the kind of public friction that, per the earlier section of this piece, Maryland has yet to see any version of.

The audit mechanism can work, but it only surfaces what someone bothers to run it against.

National

A parallel, more personal pattern of misuse has emerged nationally alongside the institutional-access stories: the Institute for Justice’s ongoing review of ALPR abuse has documented more than 20 cases since 2021 of officers using plate-reader networks to track romantic partners, exes, and, in at least one case, a complete stranger, with most incidents surfacing only after victims reported the officers themselves rather than through internal audits. Confirmed cases span Pennsylvania, Kansas, California, Georgia, Florida, Wisconsin, Illinois, and elsewhere. None are in Maryland, at least not yet publicly. One resource born from this pattern, HaveIBeenFlocked.com, lets individuals check whether their own plate has turned up in Flock audit logs that agencies have voluntarily made public — a tool built specifically because, as with Georgia’s cases, most of this abuse doesn’t surface until someone goes looking.

Maryland has no audit result, no lawsuit, and no disclosed lookup count.

None of this sorts neatly along party lines, and it’s worth being clear about that. Days after the Albany arrests, Rep. Andrew Clyde, a Georgia Republican, posted that Flock cameras have “quietly become one of the most sweeping surveillance systems in American history” and said he’s “fighting to DEFUND Flock cameras” at the federal level — skepticism of mass plate-tracking coming from the right, not just from the ACLU and privacy advocates typically associated with the left. At the same time, law enforcement officials who use the technology daily continue to defend it in detail rather than in slogans. Rappahannock County, Virginia, Sheriff Connie Compton — whose county sits roughly 90 miles from the Maryland border — discloses her own usage numbers publicly: her cameras logged 35,168 vehicles in a recent 30-day period, and she personally queried the system six times, all tied to specific vehicles connected to possible crimes. Her department’s posted policy states plainly that the cameras don’t capture faces, that data isn’t sold to third parties, and that immigration enforcement is a prohibited use. Compton has said a neighboring county’s Flock feed helped recover a stolen vehicle within 30 minutes, and her county administrator has said he has confidence in how she’s applying the policy. It’s a version of the same case Flock made in its own Maryland testimony — that the tool works when the guardrails hold — made by someone with no financial stake in the answer.

That could mean Maryland’s systems are clean. It could also mean nobody with subpoena power or a well-crafted records request has looked yet.

Maryland has none of this on the record — no audit result, no lawsuit, no disclosed lookup count, favorable or not. That could mean Maryland’s systems are clean. It could also mean nobody with subpoena power or a well-crafted records request has looked yet. Illinois, Virginia, and California all discovered their gaps only after someone did.

Illinois, Virginia, and California all discovered their gaps only after someone did.

Why the silence is itself notable

Maryland also has no modern public-records trail on Flock. A review of MuckRock’s archive — the clearinghouse where the Electronic Frontier Foundation and local journalists nationwide have filed and posted Flock contract requests — turned up no prior Maryland Public Information Act requests for any Maryland agency’s Flock contract, invoice history, or data-sharing partner list. Denver, Daly City, Atherton, and dozens of other jurisdictions have that record. Maryland does not.

Los Angeles shows what it looks like when a records request doesn’t get answered and someone escalates anyway. The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition filed a public-records request with the LAPD in February 2024 for every contract and memorandum of understanding the department has signed with Flock. As of this spring, the department had produced exactly one document — an already-expired 2025 memo — despite what the coalition’s subsequent lawsuit alleges is at least a seven-year data and hardware relationship between LAPD and the company. The lawsuit, filed this year, accuses the department of deliberately withholding records ahead of a major MOU’s expiration to avoid public scrutiny. Separately, LAPD’s chief ordered an internal audit after allegations surfaced that the department and several county sheriff’s offices had run Flock searches supporting ICE and CBP enforcement, and the nearby city of South Pasadena declined to renew its own Flock contract in March, decommissioning 14 cameras after learning regional data it had access to was reached by out-of-state and federal agencies. No Maryland agency has faced a comparable records fight, in part because — as far as this reporting found — no one has filed the initial request that would have to go unanswered first.

No one has filed the initial request that would have to go unanswered first.

That doesn’t mean Maryland has seen no organized pushback at all — it’s just been modest, scattered, and mostly candidate-driven rather than spontaneous. Ethan Wechtaluk, a minor Democratic primary candidate in this year’s MD-6 congressional race, built an entire platform around ALPR oversight across the district’s five counties and started a Change.org petition that had drawn 30 signatures as of this reporting; he lost the June 23 primary to the better-funded Trone-McClain Delaney contest. Josh Kyte, running for St. Mary’s County Commissioner, started a separate petition in May calling for a ban on Flock cameras countywide, which had reached 182 signatures. And in February, a West Hyattsville resident published an on-record column in the nonprofit Hyattsville Life & Times urging the city council to reconsider its Flock contract, citing Illinois’s CBP data-sharing lapse directly — notable because Hyattsville’s own police department describes its 24-camera, 3-vehicle ALPR program as “fully compliant” with the city’s own sanctuary-city ordinance, a specific pairing of claims that neither this piece nor, apparently, anyone else in Maryland has independently tested. None of these efforts have translated into a contract cancellation, a council vote, or anything close to the scale of opposition seen in Illinois or Virginia — but they establish that some Maryland residents and candidates have been paying attention, even if county and state officials haven’t yet had to answer to it.

Maryland passed two of the nation’s strongest anti-ICE data-sharing laws without the kind of public reckoning that preceded similar legislation elsewhere.

Combine the modest scale of that pushback with the absence of any documented Maryland camera vandalism, and a state that just passed two of the more aggressive anti-ICE-data-sharing laws in the country did so without the kind of sustained local controversy, contract cancellation wave, or public-records excavation that preceded similar legislation elsewhere. That’s not proof that the laws were unnecessary. It’s a sign nobody with real institutional leverage has yet checked whether the systems those laws govern are doing what lawmakers assumed — including, this reporting found, whether one town’s own decision to get rid of its cameras actually stuck.

That’s not proof the laws were unnecessary. It’s a sign nobody with real institutional leverage has yet checked whether the systems those laws govern are doing what lawmakers assumed.

Sources: This piece draws on Maryland legislative testimony and committee documents for HB 1081, HB 444, and HB 711, including formal positions submitted by Flock Safety, the Maryland State Police, the Maryland Chiefs of Police Association and Maryland Sheriffs’ Association, and the Auto Consumer Alliance; a 2011 Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center intelligence bulletin and a 2013 Department of Justice description of MCAC’s governance structure, both obtained and published by the ACLU; MCAC’s 2024 Standard Operating Procedure for its LPR program; a 2014 Capital News Service Maryland report on statewide ALPR growth; and public program pages maintained by Anne Arundel County and Hyattsville police departments. Reporting on specific incidents and contracts draws on the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore Brew, the Frederick News-Post, the Hancock News, The BayNet, WMDT, Maryland Matters, and Yahoo News, along with national reporting from 404 Media, the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Institute for Justice, CBS Los Angeles, Fox 11 Los Angeles, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on comparable ALPR disputes in Illinois, Virginia, California, and Georgia. Maryland-specific camera locations were independently verified using DeFlock’s crowdsourced mapping data and OpenStreetMap node histories, and cross-checked against MuckRock’s public records archive to confirm the absence of prior Maryland Flock-related requests.

The U.S. Department of Justice sued Maryland and Attorney General Anthony Brown… the second federal lawsuit against the law in six weeks.

The U.S. Department of Justice sued Maryland and Attorney General Anthony Brown on July 9, seeking to block enforcement of the state’s Community Trust Act — the second federal lawsuit against the law in six weeks, and the clearest sign yet that Maryland’s sanctuary-style immigration policies are headed for a sustained fight in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.

The clearest sign yet that Maryland’s sanctuary-style immigration policies are headed for a sustained fight in federal court.

What DOJ Filed

The 33-page complaint, filed in the Northern Division in Baltimore, argues Senate Bill 791 violates the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause by obstructing “the operation of federal immigration law” and impeding the consultation between federal, state and local officials that the government says immigration enforcement requires. DOJ is asking a judge to bar the state from enforcing the law and asserts President Trump has “authority to arrest, detain, and remove aliens unlawfully in the U.S.”

“When sanctuary jurisdictions enact laws to shield illegal aliens from federal law enforcement, it is not merely federal law that is violated, but the voices of everyday American voters silenced.” — Stanley Woodward

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, head of DOJ’s Civil Division, both issued statements framing the law as an affront to federal authority. Woodward’s statement, posted by the department July 9: “Federal immigration officers merely enforce the laws that our Nation’s elected representatives in Congress passed, reflecting the will of We the People. When sanctuary jurisdictions enact laws to shield illegal aliens from federal law enforcement, it is not merely federal law that is violated, but the voices of everyday American voters silenced. Today’s suit proves that this Department will never stand for such lawless action from blue state leaders.” Shumate added: “The American people are ultimately the ones who suffer when states pass these irresponsible sanctuary policies.”

“The American people are ultimately the ones who suffer when states pass these irresponsible sanctuary policies.” — Brett Shumate

Maryland is not an outlier target — DOJ has filed similar suits against roughly 20 other states, including Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois and New York, under a directive from Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche instructing the Civil Division to identify state and local laws, policies and practices that facilitate violations of federal law or impede federal immigration operations.

Brown’s office declined to comment on the suit — the same response it gave when 17 Maryland sheriffs sued over the same law in May.

Not the First Challenge

DOJ’s suit runs on a nearly identical legal theory to one already pending: Gahler v. Moore, filed May 26 in the court’s Southern Division (Greenbelt) by 17 of Maryland’s 24 sheriffs, backed by the Federation for American Immigration Reform. That case — Civil Action No. 8:26-cv-02057, assigned to Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher — names Gov. Wes Moore, Brown, and the state as defendants and argues the Community Trust Act violates the Supremacy Clause four separate ways: by forcing sheriffs into conduct federal law criminalizes as harboring, by standing as an obstacle to federal immigration law, by express preemption under the Immigration and Nationality Act, and by violating intergovernmental immunity.

DOJ argues the Community Trust Act violates the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause by obstructing the operation of federal immigration law.

The overlap in language between the two complaints is striking. The sheriffs’ suit calls the law’s passage “deliberate, disruptive action that jeopardizes the public safety of all Americans” and “not merely a political disagreement or passive abstention.” DOJ’s complaint, filed six weeks later, uses nearly identical phrasing: “deliberate, disruptive action that jeopardizes the public safety for all Americans,” also “not merely a political disagreement or passive abstention.” Whether that reflects independent legal drafting converging on the same language or direct borrowing is worth asking DOJ and FAIR directly.

‘Deliberate, disruptive action that jeopardizes the public safety of all Americans’ appears in both lawsuits.

As of this writing, no hearing has been publicly scheduled in Gahler, and the Community Trust Act remains in full effect statewide.

An Escalation With a Longer Paper Trail

Thursday’s suit is not the administration’s first move against Maryland specifically. It follows an April 2025 executive order directing DOJ to identify jurisdictions that obstruct federal immigration enforcement, and an August 2025 round of demand letters then-Attorney General Pam Bondi sent to sanctuary jurisdictions nationwide, warning that officials who carry out sanctuary policies could face individual criminal liability. Baltimore County appeared on DOJ’s list of such jurisdictions at that time — more than half a year before the Community Trust Act itself passed. It is not yet clear what, if anything, Baltimore County did in response to that letter.

DOJ’s complaint also makes a specific factual allegation beyond the constitutional theory: that Maryland’s “refusal to cooperate with federal immigration authorities” has already caused “negative operational consequences,” alleging facilities have refused to transfer individuals to federal custody “even when presented with a routine detainer.” That claim is untested — it has not been adjudicated by any court, and no specific facility or county has been named publicly in reporting on the complaint so far.

What the Law Actually Does

The Community Trust Act, sponsored by Sen. Clarence Lam (D-Anne Arundel and Howard) and passed as emergency legislation on the final day of this year’s General Assembly session, took effect in May. Moore allowed it to become law without his signature, citing “real implementation challenges,” but has said the state will not let “untrained, unqualified, and unaccountable ICE agents deputize our law enforcement officers to do immigration work.”

The law bars local correctional facilities and law enforcement from detaining someone for ICE, or notifying ICE of a release date, without a judicial warrant — administrative ICE warrants no longer qualify. There are exceptions for felony convictions and sex-offense registrants. It followed an earlier bill banning formal 287(g) cooperation agreements between local agencies and ICE.

Contrary to how the law is sometimes characterized in the current political fight, it is not a blanket non-cooperation policy.

Contrary to how the law is sometimes characterized in the current political fight, it is not a blanket non-cooperation policy. AG guidance issued after passage requires state correctional facilities to notify ICE 48 hours before releasing someone subject to a detainer accompanied by a Form I-205 warrant of removal — meaning cooperation is mandatory once a qualifying federal warrant is actually in hand.

Cooperation is mandatory once a qualifying federal warrant is actually in hand.

County Laws Are Also Exposed

DOJ’s and the sheriffs’ shared legal theory — Supremacy Clause preemption — would not stop at the state line if a court accepts it. Montgomery County has gone further than the state law: its own Trust Act (Bill 35-25), signed in February, bars county employees from asking about immigration status and requires 48-hour notice to a person if an immigration agency requests information about them; the county also launched an ICE-activity reporting portal for residents on July 8, one day before DOJ’s suit. FAIR has separately criticized Montgomery’s sanctuary policy as more extreme than New York City’s or California’s, with no exceptions even for serious crimes.

A ruling against the state law on Supremacy Clause grounds would be difficult for county governments to distinguish from their own ordinances.

Several other Maryland jurisdictions maintain local policies limiting cooperation with ICE beyond what state law requires, though the specifics vary by county and have not been comprehensively reviewed for this piece. None have been named as defendants in either federal suit so far, but a ruling against the state law on Supremacy Clause grounds would be difficult for county governments to distinguish from their own ordinances.

What’s Unresolved

• No case number or judge assignment for DOJ v. Maryland has yet appeared on public court trackers.

• No hearing date has been reported in Gahler v. Moore since its May 26 filing.

• Brown’s office has not offered a public legal defense of the law beyond declining comment.

• Sen. Lam, the law’s sponsor, called the sheriffs’ suit “thinly veiled” and “poorly constructed” in May but has not yet commented publicly on the DOJ suit specifically.

• House Minority Leader Jason Buckel (R-Allegany) has argued the administrative-warrant process the law eliminated “has always been an acceptable method” and processes faster than judicial warrants — a practical, non-constitutional critique distinct from DOJ’s and the sheriffs’ legal theory.

Sources: This report draws on the U.S. Department of Justice's July 9 complaint and public statements from Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate; the sheriffs' complaint in Gahler v. Moore (Case No. 8:26-cv-02057-SAG, U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland); Gov. Wes Moore's office and spokesperson Rhyan Lake; Senate President Bill Ferguson's public statement; and reporting from Reuters, The Baltimore Banner, CBS News Baltimore, WBFF Fox45 Baltimore, Fox 5 DC, Townhall, The Epoch Times, WCBM, Maryland Matters and News from the States. Additional detail on Montgomery County's local ordinance comes from county government records and public FAIR advocacy materials. Direct quotations are taken from primary statements and court filings where available.

Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates posted a statement on X Thursday declaring that “Maryland’s juvenile system is broken.“ “Over the past two weeks, we have seen several juveniles charged with and/or convicted of horrific violent crimes ranging from rape and homicide to carjacking, robbery, first-degree assault, illegal handgun possession, and more,” Bates wrote. Most of those offenders, he said, “were released back into the community with little regard for the impact their release may have on our neighborhoods and with no meaningful accountability for their actions.” His conclusion: “It’s long past time to fix Maryland’s juvenile justice system.”

It’s the latest entry in a fight Bates has been waging since spring, and the receipts he’s citing aren’t hypothetical.

The Case Bates Keeps Pointing To

On June 25, Bates stood alongside Mayor Brandon Scott and Police Commissioner Richard Worley to announce charges against five juveniles and three adults tied to a nine-person crew Baltimore Police say was responsible for 39 separate violent incidents — a homicide, 21 robberies, six carjackings, two aggravated assaults, and nine auto thefts — stretching across Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and Howard County between April 23 and May 24.

The most serious charge: a 17-year-old, facing counts in 23 separate cases, charged with the first-degree murder of 38-year-old Jamal Ferguson, shot during an attempted carjacking at the 4400 block of Fairview Avenue on May 7. The same juvenile faces attempted first- and second-degree murder charges tied to a second victim, plus assault and gun charges.

Three adults were also charged: Dash Hayne, 22, and Colekela Hamilton, 18, each in three armed robbery cases from April 23; and Mekhi Clark, 21, in four cases involving car theft, armed robbery, and armed carjacking from June 10. Four additional juveniles — ages 15 and 16 — were charged with offenses ranging from armed robbery to illegal handgun possession to an outstanding warrant.

“Violent juvenile crime is not a Baltimore City problem; it is a statewide problem that crosses jurisdictional boundaries and impacts entire communities.” — Ivan Bates

“These cases underscore a reality we have been warning about for years, that violent juvenile crime is not a Baltimore City problem; it is a statewide problem that crosses jurisdictional boundaries and impacts entire communities,” Bates said in the June 25 release. He made a point of flagging the timing: because of when the arrests occurred, the eligible juvenile defendants will be prosecuted in adult court by his office’s Homicide Division. “Had these same offenses occurred next year, many of these defendants would have automatically started in the juvenile system under Maryland’s new automatic charging law,” Bates said.

“Had these same offenses occurred next year, many of these defendants would have automatically started in the juvenile system under Maryland’s new automatic charging law.” — Ivan Bates

That October 1 date is not incidental. It’s the effective date of the law Bates has spent months fighting.

The Fight Behind the Statement

In late May, Gov. Wes Moore signed the Youth Charging Reform Act, which raises the age at which a juvenile can be automatically charged as an adult from 14 to 16, gives judges discretion over how 16- and 17-year-olds are charged for a defined set of offenses, and keeps 14- and 15-year-olds charged with murder or rape in adult court. It takes effect Oct. 1.

Bates opposed it — not alone. He was joined by a broad swath of the Maryland State’s Attorneys’ Association, including Prince George’s County’s Tara Jackson, Montgomery County’s John McCarthy, Anne Arundel County’s Anne Colt Leitess, and Baltimore County’s Scott Shellenberger, among others. Bates has said prosecutors asked legislative leaders for a three-year delay in implementation to give the Department of Juvenile Services time to build out adequate treatment and supervision capacity before the law expanded who qualifies for it. That request went nowhere, and Bates has said prosecutors were criticized by the General Assembly for raising it.

Thursday’s statement reads as a continuation of that argument, timed roughly three months before the law takes effect: Bates using the most serious cases his office has prosecuted this year as evidence for the position legislative leadership rejected in the spring.

Not Just Bates

Mayor Scott, appearing alongside Bates at the June 25 announcement, framed the problem differently — not as a case against the new law specifically, but as a call for structural reform. “We need to build a new system for juvenile accountability from the ground up,” Scott said, while also cautioning that “the young people arrested as part of this case are not representative of the vast majority, who are on the right path.” Police Commissioner Worley put it more starkly: “This investigation highlights both the outstanding work of our detectives and the serious challenges we continue to face with violent juvenile crime... The allegations in this case are alarming, particularly given the age of many of those involved.”

“We need to build a new system for juvenile accountability from the ground up.” — Mayor Brandon Scott

The cases have continued since the takedown. On July 7, two 16-year-olds — one charged as an adult — were arrested in North Baltimore after an armed carjacking of a rideshare driver. Days earlier, two juveniles carjacked a 39-year-old man on Murphy Lane in West Baltimore; as of the most recent reporting, no arrests had been made.

House Minority Whip Jesse Pippy has been raising the same underlying concern from Annapolis since at least February, when he cited a shooting at Thomas S. Wootton High School in Montgomery County — allegedly involving a suspect on an ankle monitor for a prior offense — as evidence the General Assembly’s majority was, in his words, prioritizing politics over public safety.

What’s Not Connected — Yet

Bates’ statement lands the same week Senate President Bill Ferguson and House Speaker Joseline Peña-Melnyk called a special legislative session for Aug. 3-5 to consider a constitutional amendment on congressional redistricting — a session Republican leaders, including Pippy, have separately criticized as a distraction from affordability and public safety concerns. As of this writing, no elected official or campaign has explicitly tied the two storylines together into a single message. They are, for now, running on parallel tracks: one a prosecutorial argument about a law set to take effect in three months, the other a partisan fight over a ballot question this fall.

Whether they merge into a single “Moore is focused on the wrong things” narrative before Oct. 1 is worth watching.

Sources: Ivan Bates’ July 9 statement via X; Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office press release, June 25, 2026 (”Juveniles and Young Adults Charged with Murder and Other Violent Offenses in Multi-Jurisdictional Takedown”); WBFF Fox Baltimore reporting on the June 25 takedown and the July 7 North Baltimore carjacking; The Baltimore Banner’s June 25 coverage of the carjacking crew case; coverage of the Youth Charging Reform Act’s May 2026 signing and prosecutor opposition, including statements from Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Tara Jackson, Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy, Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney Anne Colt Leitess, and Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger; CBS Baltimore coverage of Gov. Moore’s February 2026 State of the State address and House Minority Whip Jesse Pippy’s response; and reporting from the Cecil Whig and The Daily Record on the Aug. 3-5 special legislative session on redistricting, including statements from Pippy, Senate Minority statements from Sen. Steve Hershey, and House Minority Leader Jason Buckel.

The Supreme Court of Maryland on Tuesday ended the largest citizen petition drive in Frederick County history without a single vote being cast on it.

In a brief per curiam order issued June 30 — hours after hearing oral argument that same morning — the state’s highest court affirmed a Frederick County Circuit Court ruling that keeps the referendum on the county’s 2,615-acre data center zone off the November general election ballot. The court said its reasoning will come “in an opinion to be filed later.” It ordered the referendum committee, the losing party, to pay costs.

The timing was no accident. Ballot language for the November election was due to the State Board of Elections by Wednesday. The court heard argument Tuesday morning and disposed of the case Tuesday afternoon, opinion to follow.

What the Order Says

The order affirms Circuit Judge James A. Bonifant’s June 18 ruling on both of its grounds. First, that Frederick County Council Ordinance 26-01-001 — the ordinance establishing the Critical Digital Infrastructure Overlay north of Adamstown — is “not a subject matter about which a referendum may be pursued” under the Frederick County Charter. Second, that the petition itself was deficient under Maryland Election Law § 6-206(c)(6) because it failed to provide a “full and accurate text of the law” as required by Article 3, § 308(b) of the county charter.

The first holding is the one with statewide reach. If zoning ordinances are not “laws” subject to referendum, then the referendum — one of the few direct checks Maryland residents hold over their local governments — is unavailable for the land-use decisions that most directly shape their communities. The court’s written opinion, whenever it arrives, will tell every Maryland county how far that principle extends.

Twenty-one thousand and twenty-nine signatures, undone in part by a printer cartridge.

The second holding is the one residents will remember. At the circuit level, Judge Bonifant found the fatal defect was that the committee printed the overlay zone maps in black and white. The county’s original maps used a ten-color legend; in grayscale, the judge ruled, a signer could not tell what the ordinance actually did, rendering the signatures invalid.

Twenty-one thousand and twenty-nine signatures, undone in part by a printer cartridge.

How Frederick Got Here

The record on this is not complicated, and it does not flatter the process.

In October 2025, the Frederick County Planning Commission recommended a data center overlay of roughly 1,600 acres — essentially the footprint of the existing Quantum Frederick campus at the former Eastalco aluminum smelting site. In December, the County Council overrode its own Planning Commission and approved a map covering 2,615 acres, adding roughly 1,000 acres that cut into rural and agricultural land. The expansion took effect as Ordinance 26-01-001.

Residents responded with the petition drive. Under the county charter, the Frederick County Data Center Referendum Committee needed 15,611 signatures — seven percent of the county’s registered voters — collected within 59 days. Volunteers gathered 21,029 valid signatures through the winter, more than ten percent of the county’s registered voters. On April 3, the Frederick County Board of Elections certified the petition as sufficient and approved the ballot question.

Then the industry went to court. Property owners and data center operators, including Quantum Maryland, filed five separate lawsuits challenging the election board’s certification. Judge Bonifant sided with them on June 18. The committee appealed directly to the Supreme Court of Maryland, which took the case — and on Tuesday, affirmed.

They cleared every bar they were told to clear.

The sequence deserves to be stated plainly: the county’s own election board told these residents their petition was sufficient. They cleared every bar they were told to clear. The signatures were counted, validated, and certified. And the effort was extinguished afterward, in litigation brought by the parties the referendum would have inconvenienced.

Even the bench seemed troubled by the shape of it. “You want the citizens to have the ability to participate in local government,” Justice Joseph Getty said at Tuesday’s argument, observing that when hearings begin after developers have already secured land and negotiated zoning, citizen efforts are “500 steps behind.” Hours later, the court ruled against those citizens anyway.

Keith Forst of Quinn Emanuel, arguing for the developers and property owners, told the court the circuit judge was right to keep the question off the ballot — the position that prevailed.

The Reaction

Elizabeth Bauer, the referendum committee’s lead organizer, told The Daily Record the group was disappointed and disagreed with the outcome, but that the fight now shifts to electoral politics: supporting candidates who want to scale back data center development. She said the effort had opened residents’ eyes and that the committee still believes change is coming to Frederick County.

“The fight now shifts to electoral politics.” — Elizabeth Bauer

The sharpest structural critique came from the Green Party’s candidate for governor. Andy Ellis, who has worked on petition-access issues for years, called the outcome proof that Maryland’s petition process is “broken at its core.”

“No one should be able to collect 21,000 signatures after being told the petition was sufficient, only for a court to strike it down at the end of the process,” Ellis said in a statement Wednesday. “This is bad for democracy, by design. We must fix this.”

Ellis said the people of Frederick County “can still reject the rapid buildout of data centers by voting for candidates who stand in opposition,” and pledged his campaign would spend significant time in the county before November. The Ellis/Andrews campaign backs modernizing Maryland’s petition and referendum laws — including making a board of elections sufficiency determination binding, so certified petitions cannot be unwound on technicalities after the signatures are collected.

“This is bad for democracy, by design. We must fix this.” — Andy Ellis

Ellis is a long-shot candidate, and his interest in the ruling is not disinterested. But on the narrow point, he is describing something real: a process in which the government certifies a petition as sufficient, and courts then void it after the work is done, is a process no reasonable volunteer can trust. Whether the fix is his is a separate question. That it needs one is harder to argue with after Tuesday.

A process in which the government certifies a petition as sufficient, and courts then void it after the work is done, is a process no reasonable volunteer can trust.

What Comes Next

The overlay zone stands. Quantum Frederick — a hyperscale campus the county says would rank among the largest on the East Coast — proceeds, alongside the federal data centers already operating at the site.

The referendum question is dead, but the underlying fight is now fully electoral, exactly as Bauer and Ellis both describe. Every County Council seat and the county executive’s office are on the November ballot, and the December vote to expand the overlay — 5-2, over the Planning Commission’s recommendation — is now the central land-use record of this cycle in Frederick County.

The referendum question is dead, but the underlying fight is now fully electoral.

And the court’s forthcoming opinion will land in a state where the data center question is anything but settled. Harford County’s council voted unanimously last month to ban data centers outright, a move its own members concede may be legally vulnerable. Other counties are drafting overlays of their own. When the Supreme Court of Maryland finally explains why 21,029 Frederick County signatures could not produce one ballot question, every one of those counties — and every resident thinking about circulating a petition — will be reading.

MDBayNews will publish analysis of the court’s written opinion when it is filed.

Sources: This article is based on the Supreme Court of Maryland’s per curiam order issued June 30, 2026, affirming the Frederick County Circuit Court’s June 18 ruling in the consolidated challenges to Ordinance 26-01-001, with the court’s full opinion to follow. Details of the circuit court’s findings, the petition drive, signature totals, and the Board of Elections’ April 3 certification are drawn from court filings and contemporaneous reporting by The Frederick News-Post, The Daily Record, WYPR, WFMD, and Technical.ly. Accounts of the June 30 oral argument, including Justice Joseph Getty’s remarks and arguments by counsel for the developers and property owners, are drawn from The Daily Record’s coverage. Statements from Data Center Referendum Committee lead organizer Elizabeth Bauer were made to The Daily Record following the ruling. Statements from Andy Ellis are drawn from a July 1 press release issued by the Ellis/Andrews campaign. Background on the Planning Commission’s October 2025 recommendation and the County Council’s December 2025 adoption of the expanded overlay is drawn from public county records and prior reporting. Details on Harford County’s data center prohibition are drawn from contemporaneous Maryland press coverage of the council’s June vote. Quantum Frederick, Frederick County government, and counsel for the plaintiffs had not issued public statements on the ruling as of publication.

The Supreme Court’s decision… doesn’t touch any Maryland race directly this cycle — but it changes the financial rules for the one Maryland congressional contest both parties are actually contesting.

The Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday in NRSC v. FEC, striking down federal limits on how much money political parties can spend in coordination with their candidates, doesn’t touch any Maryland race directly this cycle — but it changes the financial rules for the one Maryland congressional contest both parties are actually contesting, and it hands the state party apparatus on both sides a tool it didn’t have four months ago.

No Senate race, so the immediate exposure is narrower than it looks

Maryland has no U.S. Senate election in 2026. Angela Alsobrooks (elected 2024) and Chris Van Hollen (reelected 2022) aren’t up again until 2031 and 2029, respectively. The ruling’s biggest practical effect — unlimited coordinated spending between national party committees and Senate candidates, where the dollar caps run into the millions — doesn’t apply here this year.

What is on the ballot: all eight U.S. House seats.

Where it actually matters: District 6

Seven of Maryland’s eight House districts are not competitive. The 1st District (Andy Harris) is safely Republican; the other six are safely Democratic by double-digit Cook PVI margins. The exception is the 6th District — currently held by April McClain-Delaney, who won the seat in 2024 after David Trone vacated it for an unsuccessful Senate run — which remains the state’s one district where national money has historically moved the needle.

That cap is gone.

Before Tuesday, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee could each spend only $65,300 to $130,600 in coordination with a House candidate — meaning money spent jointly with the campaign on messaging, polling, or strategy. That cap is gone. Independent expenditures by outside groups were never capped to begin with, but coordinated spending is different in kind: it lets the national committee and the local campaign run a single, unified operation rather than two parallel ones that aren’t allowed to share notes.

For District 6, that means the NRCC and DCCC can now write a much larger check directly into the McClain-Delaney race — she won her June 23 Democratic primary and heads into the general as the incumbent nominee — and work hand-in-glove with the campaign on how to spend it, instead of being walled off from the candidate’s own strategy team.

The state party layer

The ruling doesn’t change Maryland’s own campaign finance law, which governs state and local races and operates independently of FECA.

The ruling doesn’t change Maryland’s own campaign finance law, which governs state and local races and operates independently of FECA. But it does change what the Maryland Democratic Party and Maryland Republican Party can do with money that passes through their state committees toward federal candidates. Justice Kagan’s dissent in the case laid out, in granular detail, how joint fundraising committees route money: a donor writes one check to a “Victory Fund” structure that includes a federal candidate’s committee, the national party committee, and close to 50 state party committees; each state committee accepts its capped share and transfers it up to the national committee, often within a day. The Maryland Democratic and Republican state committees are functionally line items in that pipeline for any Maryland federal candidate who sets up a joint committee with the national party — which is now a structure capable of delivering far more money, with fewer downstream restrictions, directly into in-state House campaigns.

Readers who followed our reporting on the mail-in ballot vendor error series and the state party’s own financial entanglements should note this is a separate mechanism — but it’s the same underlying question this newsroom keeps coming back to: who is actually paying for Maryland elections, and how much of that money moves in ways the public can trace.

What to watch

• District 6 fundraising filings. The next FEC quarterly reports will be the first test of whether the NRCC or DCCC actually increases coordinated spending now that the ceiling is gone, or whether the practical change is smaller than the doctrinal one.

• Joint fundraising committee filings for Maryland’s federal candidates. Any candidate — incumbent or challenger — who sets up a “Victory Fund”-style joint committee with the state and national party committees is now positioned to move significantly more money than before.

• Whether the Maryland General Assembly responds. Watson v. RNC (decided the day before NRSC) reaffirmed that states retain broad authority over their own election administration; nothing in NRSC forecloses Maryland from imposing its own disclosure requirements on coordinated spending in state races, even though it cannot regulate federal candidates’ coordination with national committees.

This is a developing story. MDBayNews will track FEC filings for Maryland’s federal candidates as the general election approaches.

Sources: The Supreme Court’s slip opinion in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, No. 24-621, decided June 30, 2026, is the primary legal source; Justice Kagan’s dissent is the basis for the joint fundraising committee mechanics and dollar-flow analysis described above. Coordinated-expenditure dollar limits for House races are drawn from the FEC’s published 2025–2026 coordinated party expenditure limits schedule. Maryland congressional district race ratings and PVI figures are from the Cook Political Report and Ballotpedia’s 2026 Maryland House elections tracker. District 6 candidate and incumbent history sourced from Ballotpedia’s Maryland 6th Congressional District election page. Maryland’s lack of a 2026 Senate race is confirmed against the FEC’s active candidate filings for Maryland.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Folarin Balogun did something Wednesday night that only one other player in World Cup history has done: score in a knockout match and get sent off in the same game. The other was Zinedine Zidane, in the 2006 final, for headbutting an opponent in the chest.

Balogun’s offense was landing awkwardly.

The United States beat Bosnia and Herzegovina 2-0 in the Round of 32 — the program’s first World Cup knockout win since 2002 — and did most of it with ten men. Balogun opened the scoring in the 45th minute, his third goal of the tournament. Nineteen minutes later, chasing down Bosnian defender Tarik Muharemovic, his trailing foot came down on the back of Muharemovic’s leg and ankle. Both players went to ground. Brazilian referee Raphael Claus played on — until the video assistant referee called him to the monitor, where he watched the collision in slow motion and produced a straight red card for serious foul play.

Balogun will now miss Saturday’s Round of 16 match against Belgium. And here is the part worth dwelling on: under FIFA’s own rules, there is functionally nothing anyone can do about it.

The Protocol Problem

This column isn’t interested in relitigating a judgment call with feelings. It’s interested in the paper trail. So start with the document that governs how VAR is supposed to work: the IFAB Laws of the Game, VAR protocol.

The referee judged it in slow motion. A former elite official said, in real time, that the result failed the standard.

That protocol draws a specific distinction. Slow-motion replay is for establishing facts — point of contact, position of an offense, whether the ball crossed a line. But when the question is the intensity of a challenge — the thing that separates a foul from serious foul play — the protocol directs officials to use normal speed. The reason is well understood in refereeing circles: slow motion makes everything look deliberate. A half-second stumble, stretched to five seconds, reads like a stomp.

The question of whether Balogun’s challenge was a red card is, by definition, a question of intensity and force. Claus was summoned to the monitor and shown the freeze-frame and the slow-motion sequence. He then made his decision.

You don’t have to take an American’s word for what that footage showed in real time. FOX’s rules analyst Mark Clattenburg — a former FIFA World Cup and Champions League final referee, not a man with a rooting interest in the Stars and Stripes — said on the broadcast, “I don’t believe it’s a good use of VAR.” His assessment: viewed at normal speed, this was an accident, a coming-together lacking the force and intensity that the serious-foul-play standard requires, and inconsistent with how similar challenges have been handled across this tournament. This was the twelfth red card of the 2026 World Cup, every one of them a straight red.

So the tournament’s own protocol says intensity gets judged at normal speed. The referee judged it in slow motion. And a former elite official said, in real time, that the result failed the standard. That’s not fan grievance. That’s a process contradicting its own written guidance.

The Accountability Vacuum

The mechanism created to correct errors has become a mechanism for laundering them: once a call has been ‘checked,’ it acquires a presumption of infallibility that a snap on-field decision never had.

Now the second half of the paper trail: what recourse exists when the process gets it wrong.

None, effectively. Under the FIFA Disciplinary Code, decisions taken by the referee on the field of play are final. The one-match suspension that attaches automatically to a red card cannot be rescinded or downgraded after the fact. FIFA said as much earlier in this tournament when Paraguay’s Miguel Almirón was sent off under the new mouth-covering rule and forced to sit the final group match: the decision was not subject to appeal.

U.S. Soccer can make a submission to the FIFA Disciplinary Committee. But that committee’s post-match review powers run almost entirely in one direction — it can extend a suspension or add a fine if it deems the offense serious enough. The narrow grounds for correcting an on-field decision, historically, amount to obvious errors like mistaken identity. “The referee misjudged the intensity of contact after being shown footage in a manner the protocol discourages” does not qualify. The realistic best-case outcome of any American filing is confirmation that the ban stays at one match.

Sit with that structure for a moment, because it would not survive scrutiny in any other context. FIFA built a review system — VAR — specifically because referees make mistakes. It wrote a protocol governing how that review system must be used. And when the review system itself is used contrary to the protocol, the governing body’s answer is that the outcome is final, unreviewable, and appealable only in the direction of more punishment. The mechanism created to correct errors has become a mechanism for laundering them: once a call has been “checked,” it acquires a presumption of infallibility that a snap on-field decision never had.

What It Costs

The least FIFA owes the tournament is an explanation of why its safeguard was used in precisely the manner its own laws warn against.

The stakes here are not abstract. Balogun has been the breakout American player of this World Cup — three goals, plus two more chalked off for offside Wednesday night. The U.S. now faces Belgium, the same opponent that ended the American run in the Round of 16 in 2014, and Belgium arrives having just come back from 2-0 down to beat Senegal 3-2 in extra time. The U.S. will play the biggest match of a home World Cup without its most in-form forward, on the strength of a call that the sport’s own broadcast rules expert rejected the moment it was made.

There is one structural mercy. FIFA’s revised 2026 disciplinary framework wipes yellow-card accumulation clean after the group stage and again after the quarterfinals, and Balogun’s ban is a single match. If Mauricio Pochettino’s side survives Belgium — and Wednesday’s ten-man defensive performance, capped by Malik Tillman’s 82nd-minute free kick, suggests it can — Balogun returns for the quarterfinal with a clean slate.

But “hope the team survives the punishment” is not a remedy. It’s the absence of one. The receipts are straightforward: a written protocol, a review conducted against it, and a rulebook that makes the result untouchable. Balogun will watch Saturday from the stands either way. The least FIFA owes the tournament is an explanation of why its safeguard was used in precisely the manner its own laws warn against — and why, when that happens, no one is permitted to ask the question officially.

Sources: This column draws on the IFAB Laws of the Game (2026 edition), including the VAR protocol's guidance distinguishing slow-motion review of facts from normal-speed review of intensity, and on the FIFA Disciplinary Code governing the finality of on-field decisions and post-match review by the FIFA Disciplinary Committee. Match details are drawn from ESPN's match report and live coverage of USA–Bosnia and Herzegovina (July 1, 2026), including the Zidane 2006 parallel; Mark Clattenburg's on-air assessment was made during the FOX Sports broadcast and reported by FOX Sports. Sports Illustrated reported the referee's stated grounds and the IFAB protocol language cited above. The Almirón precedent — FIFA's statement that his group-stage red card was not subject to appeal — was reported by the Associated Press. Tournament card and suspension rules, including the 2026 yellow-card reset structure and the Disciplinary Committee's power to extend suspensions, were detailed by USA Today. Additional match chronology via NBC Bay Area's live coverage.

How a 25-year-old dissent became the law of the land — and what it means that nobody on the winning side wanted to defend the old rule

Dead Reckoning

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court did something it rarely does: it let a party walk away from defending its own statute. The Federal Election Commission, under the Trump administration’s Solicitor General, told the justices that the coordinated-party-expenditure limits Congress wrote into the Federal Election Campaign Act were unconstitutional. The Court had to appoint an outside lawyer, Roman Martinez, just to make the case the government wouldn’t make for itself.

That’s the detail buried under the 6-3 vote count, and it’s the detail that matters most for understanding National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC.

The mechanism

The case turned on a narrow but consequential question: can political parties spend unlimited money on advertising and other campaign activity in coordination with their candidates, or does Congress get to cap that spending to stop donors from using parties as pass-throughs around the $7,000 individual contribution limit?

For 25 years, the answer was no — parties couldn’t coordinate without limit. That answer came from FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee (2001), known as Colorado II, which upheld the caps 5-4 over a dissent from Justice Thomas, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice Scalia, and Justice Kennedy.

On Tuesday, Justice Kavanaugh wrote the opinion that overruled it. He was joined by Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, Justice Gorsuch, and Justice Barrett. Justice Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson.

The headline write-ups call this a predictable 6-3 split along ideological lines. That’s true as far as it goes. But the more interesting story is in what Kavanaugh’s majority opinion actually does with Thomas’s 2001 dissent: it treats it as having already won the argument, just 25 years early.

The vindication thesis

A minority position doesn’t change. The Court does

Kavanaugh’s opinion spends a full section walking through Thomas’s Colorado II dissent point by point — the claim that earmarking rules and disclosure requirements already do the anti-corruption work the coordinated-spending caps claim to do; the claim that parties and candidates “naturally” work together and that limiting coordination doesn’t prevent corruption so much as it weakens parties relative to outside spenders; the claim that the Court’s 2001 majority was applying a deferential standard of review it had no business applying to a First Amendment claim.

The opinion doesn’t just cite Thomas’s dissent as supporting authority. It calls Colorado II “a doctrinal dinosaur” and says Thomas’s reasoning has been “amply vindicated” by everything the Court has decided since — McCutcheon v. FEC in 2014, FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate in 2022. Twenty-five years is a long time for a four-justice losing position to wait around for a sixth vote. But that’s the shape of the thing: a minority position doesn’t change: the Court does.

This is the same pattern Riptide has been tracking all week in the separation-of-powers context with Trump v. Slaughter — a dissent that lost decisively becomes, decades later, the controlling opinion, not because the underlying facts changed but because the bench did. The difference here is that the Court is candid about it. Kavanaugh doesn’t pretend this is incremental; he says outright that the “core disagreement” with Kagan’s dissent is narrow but says the result rests on rejecting Colorado II’s entire framework, not distinguishing it.

The Court treated a 25-year-old dissent as though it had already won the argument—just a quarter century early.

The “prophylaxis upon prophylaxis” line

The mechanical argument for striking the caps is that Congress already has three tools to stop donors from laundering oversized contributions through parties to candidates: the $7,000 base contribution limit, earmarking rules that treat directed donations as if given straight to the candidate, and disclosure requirements that put every contribution on the public record. A fourth layer — capping what parties can spend in coordination with candidates even absent any earmarking — is, in Kavanaugh’s phrase, “prophylaxis upon prophylaxis upon prophylaxis,” and the First Amendment doesn’t tolerate that much redundancy when each additional layer restricts speech.

Kagan’s dissent doesn’t dispute that earmarking and disclosure exist. She disputes that they do anything. Her dissent walks through, in granular and somewhat damning detail, exactly how a joint fundraising committee works: a donor writes one check to something like a “Victory Fund,” which is really the candidate’s committee plus the national party committee plus close to 50 state party committees bundled together. The state committees, which can each accept $10,000, almost immediately transfer that money up to the national committee — Kagan cites real examples from both the 2024 Harris and Trump joint committees doing exactly this, often the same day money arrives. None of it counts as “earmarking” under FEC rules because no one has to say the word “earmark.” The candidate doesn’t need to ask for it explicitly, and the party doesn’t need to violate any rule to funnel the money back to the campaign — once the coordinated-spending caps are gone, there’s no rule left to violate.

Her math: a single donor can now route roughly $551,300 to one candidate’s effective use, against a $7,000 base limit that nominally still applies. Whether that gap matters constitutionally is exactly the question the majority and dissent disagree about, and it’s worth noting that disagreement is about as concrete as constitutional disagreements get — it’s arithmetic, not abstraction.

The disagreement isn’t abstract. It’s arithmetic.

What it does to the map

The practical effect lands in an election year. The national party committees — RNC, DNC, NRSC, DSCC, NRCC, DCCC — can now spend without statutory limit on advertising, polling, and other campaign costs produced in direct consultation with their candidates, four months before the midterms. Kavanaugh frames this as restoring competitive balance between parties and the Super PAC ecosystem that’s grown up since Citizens United and SpeechNow — parties raised $2.7 billion in the last cycle against $15.7 billion for outside PACs, a gap the opinion cites directly.

Whether that reasoning holds up is a separate question from whether it was foreordained. Justice Thomas wrote in 2001 that coordination between a party and its candidates is “the essence of our Nation’s party system of government” and that the Court had no business treating it as inherently suspect. He lost that argument 5-4. On Tuesday, six justices agreed with him.

The corruption Colorado II was built to prevent hasn’t gone away as a theoretical risk — what’s changed is who’s counting the votes.

Sources: The primary source for this column is the Supreme Court’s slip opinion in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, No. 24-621, decided June 30, 2026, including Justice Kavanaugh’s majority opinion and Justice Kagan’s dissent. Background precedent drawn from FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee, 533 U.S. 431 (2001) (Colorado II); McCutcheon v. FEC, 572 U.S. 185 (2014); and FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate, 596 U.S. 289 (2022). The FEC’s coordinated-party-expenditure limits at issue appear at 52 U.S.C. § 30116(d). Victory Fund joint-committee mechanics and the dollar figures cited in Kagan’s dissent are drawn from public FEC filings for the 2024 Harris Victory Fund and Trump 47 Committee joint fundraising structures. The SpeechNow.org v. FEC reference (D.C. Cir. 2010) is cited for the Super PAC parallel, as noted in prior Riptide campaign finance coverage.

Dead Reckoning is Riptide’s recurring analysis column tracking the through-lines in institutional and legal accountability stories. Methodology: pattern recognition across cases, explicit citation to primary sources, and a refusal to treat outcomes as inevitabilities until the receipts say otherwise.

A national infrastructure crisis is erasing court records across the country. Maryland can’t tell you whether it has the same problem — because it isn’t looking.

On May 26, 2026, New York’s Court of Appeals confronted a transcript so defective it was essentially fictional. The stenographer assigned to People v. Meyers had filled the official record with “blah blah blah,” “omitted,” and “untranscribable” where testimony should have appeared. Three days of jury selection, opening statements, summations, and the verdict itself were missing entirely. The court called it “utterly inexcusable.”

If the record of a proceeding doesn’t exist, does the right to appeal mean anything?

The ruling landed in the middle of a national reckoning over court reporter shortages that has forced state court systems to confront a basic question: if the record of a proceeding doesn’t exist, does the right to appeal mean anything?

Maryland has not publicly asked itself that question. It should.

What Maryland Does — and Doesn’t — Know

Maryland’s circuit courts converted from stenographers to digital audio recording decades ago — Montgomery County made the switch in 1982, and the system is now statewide. On paper, this means Maryland avoided the California-scale collapse, where 72 percent of family law and civil hearings were conducted with no verbatim record at all between April 2023 and June 2025.

But digital recording and certified transcript are not the same thing. An audio file captures a proceeding. A transcript makes it reviewable. The conversion of one into the other requires a qualified transcriptionist — and Maryland pays those workers less than any other state in the country.

Maryland ranks 50th out of 50 states in court reporter compensation, according to current Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Dead last. In a profession experiencing a 21 percent national workforce decline over the past decade, a state that pays the least is structurally positioned to attract the fewest workers and retain them the shortest time.

The Maryland Judiciary does not publish data on transcript backlogs, unfilled transcriptionist positions, or average wait times for certified transcripts. MDBayNews found no publicly available report tracking how often litigants in Maryland circuit courts are unable to obtain transcripts within the timeframes required to protect their appellate rights.

That absence of data is itself a finding.

The Cliff Edge in Maryland Rule 8-411

Maryland Rule 8-411(a) requires appellants to order transcripts within ten days of filing a notice of appeal. Miss that window and the appeal may be dismissed — not on the merits, but on a procedural default triggered by a deadline the court sets and the court’s own staffing problems may make impossible to meet.

The rule does not pause for backlog. It does not account for audio files that turn out to be inaudible. It does not provide relief for cases where the transcriptionist position handling that courtroom has been vacant for months. It simply sets a deadline and attaches a consequence.

The National Center for State Courts found in August 2025 that 20 percent of court systems nationwide reported delays affecting more than 30 percent of their cases. Maryland has not reported comparable figures — because Maryland does not appear to be collecting them.

That absence of data is itself a finding.

The Transcript Assistance Fund Gap

Maryland does operate a Transcript Assistance Fund for appellants challenging custody or visitation rulings who fall within legal services income guidelines. The fund is real and serves a genuine need. It is also narrow enough to leave the majority of affected litigants unhelped.

The fund addresses cost. It does not address availability.

The fund addresses cost. It does not address availability. A parent who earns slightly above the income cutoff, whose audio recording is degraded, or whose case involves proceedings from several years ago — when the transcriptionist who handled that court may no longer be employed there — is not helped by the fund at all.

And the fund covers only custody and visitation appeals. A litigant appealing a protective order, a contempt finding, or any civil proceeding outside that narrow category is on their own.

What Maryland’s Courts Owe the Public

The administrative apparatus of Maryland’s court system sits under the jurisdiction of the Maryland Judiciary, which reports to the Court of Appeals. The Administrative Office of the Courts produces annual reports covering caseloads, filings, and dispositions. Those reports do not, as a matter of standard practice, include transcript production timelines, backlog figures, or vacancy rates for court reporting and transcription staff.

In California, the transcript shortage became visible because advocates tracked it, litigants documented it, and eventually, the presiding judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court called it a constitutional crisis in public. The California Supreme Court put the data in an opinion. The problem became undeniable because the evidence accumulated somewhere that people could see it.

In Maryland, there is no equivalent accumulation point. The data either isn’t being collected or isn’t being published. The result is that the Maryland Judiciary can neither confirm nor deny whether its transcript infrastructure is functioning adequately — which means the public cannot know whether the right to appeal a Maryland court ruling is real or theoretical for litigants who lack the resources to force the question.

That is not a defensible position for a court system to occupy.

What Should Happen Next

The Maryland Judiciary should publish, at minimum, annual data on transcript request volume, average fulfillment timelines, unfilled transcriptionist positions, and the number of appeals in which transcript unavailability was cited as a factor in dismissal or delay. The Administrative Office of the Courts has the infrastructure to collect this information. The question is whether there is institutional will to do so.

The General Assembly has jurisdiction over the court system’s funding and accountability obligations. A legislative request for a performance audit of transcript production timelines — modeled on the kind of access-to-justice audits other states have conducted — would be a reasonable starting point.

Until then, Maryland litigants appealing court rulings are operating on the assumption that the record exists, that it is accurate, and that it will be available when they need it. People v. Meyers is a reminder of what happens when those assumptions are wrong. Maryland has not checked whether they are.

Sources: People v. Meyers, New York Court of Appeals (May 26, 2026); California Judicial Branch hearing data (April 2023 – June 2025); National Center for State Courts workforce survey (August 2025); Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational employment data; Maryland Rule 8-411(a); Maryland Judiciary Transcript Assistance Fund guidelines.