The GoFundMe page Julia Leverone created in February for legal fees and bond payments to get Minoska Maldonado-Deras out of Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody was successful, helping to get her out of custody and back with her family in Carroll County.
That’s until Maldonado-Deras, a cousin of Leverone’s husband, was hauled back into custody during an appointment with ICE in October. She’s now in an ICE detention facility in Lousiana, and the GoFundMe page is back in business.
Maldonado-Deras was “doing everything she was supposed to do” following her first detainment, said her husband, Patrick Sortino, including probation meetings with ICE.
Sortino, a U.S. citizen, says he doesn’t have “any straight answers,” about what will happen to his wife, whether she will be granted bail or deported to Honduras — her native country that she has not been to in nearly 20 years.
“This was her new life, you know — here,” Sortino said. “We were hoping to spend the holidays together.”
Maldonado-Deras is one of the more 3,200 people in Maryland who were arrested by ICE from Jan. 21, 2025, the day after President Donald Trump returned to office, through Oct. 15, 2025. The data comes from the Deportation Data Project.
All told, ICE had arrested 3,308 people in Maryland from Jan. 1 to Oct.15, 2025, the last date for which the Deportation Data Project provided numbers. That compares to 1,353 for all of 2024 and 387 for the last four months of 2023, according to the data.
ICE did not respond to Maryland Matters’ request for data.
Only one-third (1,073) of those arrested in Maryland had criminal convictions, and 50.9% (1,652) had no criminal charges whatsoever. The remaining 519 have or had criminal charges pending at the time of their detention.
“The administration comes out promising to deport millions and millions of illegal criminals, and what they’ve done instead is started picking up moms and grandfathers … who have no criminal convictions,” said Ben Messer, a senior immigration attorney at Wilkes Legal.
Nearly all of those detained originally went to holding rooms or field offices in Maryland, most often in Baltimore, with many then transferred to out-of-state locations — some being thousands of miles away.
Messer says there are more people asking for help since the Trump administration took over in January, but the ways that attorneys are able to help are dwindling because of the administration “closing off areas of relief.”
“Some people who would have had a case before are going to be unable to succeed under drastic changes in interpretation of law,” Messer said. “The cases that do remain are just quite a bit more difficult for the same reason.”
There has been a “bloodbath” of immigration court judges due to actions by the Board of Immigration Appeals and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Messer said. Judges who have previously represented immigrants or worked at pro-immigrant organizations have been fired, he said, with some of them being replaced by military lawyers.
“We have a few of these temporary immigration judges now in our area — the DMV [D.C., Maryland, Virginia] — and they’ve supposedly gotten a crash course in immigration law, but none of them have any experience in it,” Messer said.
Messer noted that the Board of Immigration Appeals and Bondi’s decision to overturn “decades of practice and precedent” by determining that anyone who came to the U.S. without a visa does not have bond eligibility — a decision which many federal courts have rejected — as one of the new challenges.
The Justice Department, in a statement, disagreed with Messer’s assessment, saying the new interpretations of the law are common sense.
“The Executive Office for Immigration Review is restoring integrity to the immigration adjudication system, and Board of Immigration Appeals decisions reflect straightforward interpretations of clear statutory language,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.
“President Trump and the Department of Justice will continue to enforce the law as it is written to defend and protect the safety and security of the American people,” the statement said.
By Nicole Pilsbury, Maryland Matters January 11, 2026
Maryland Matters is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: editor@marylandmatters.org.
