The complaint started when two sheriff's deputies, one of whom has yet to be identified, took her into custody last year concerning her immigration status.

Roxana Orellana Santos and her lawyers with LatinoJustice PRLDEF, CASA de Maryland and Nixon Peabody LLP will file the $1 million suit in the U.S. District Court at Greenbelt today.

According to a copy of the complaint, the suit is over Orellana Santo's alleged unlawful and unconstitutional interrogation and detention by sheriff's deputies based solely on her race or ethnicity.

By doing so, the defendants violated the Fourth and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the complaint states.

The complaint states Openshaw did not have the authority, as he had not been trained to participate in the 287(g) program, to detain Orellana Santos at the time.

The board of commissioners is being sued because it funds the sheriff's office.

County attorney John Mathias said Monday he could not comment on this particular case.

Mathias said under state law, the sheriff is an elected official and that the county does not generally have liability for the sheriff's actions.

Other officials and agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are being sued for their responsibilities under an agreement with the sheriff's office that allowed its trained deputies and corrections officers to enforce federal immigration law.

Complaint allegations

Orellana Santos is from El Salvador. She entered the United States in October 2005 and has lived with her husband in Frederick County for about four years, the complaint states.

The complaint alleges Orellana Santos was eating lunch as she sat on a curb behind a food co-op near Evergreen Square on Buckeystown Pike on Oct. 7, 2008.

The deputies asked her for identification and at first, she told them she did not have any. After a few minutes, she remembered she had a national ID card and gave that to the deputies, the complaint states.

Because she did not speak much English, and the deputies did not speak Spanish, she did not understand why she was being detained, the complaint states.

After about 15 minutes, she tried to stand up and collect her things to leave, but officers cuffed her and took her to the Frederick County Adult Detention Center, the complaint states. She was then transferred to other immigration detention centers in Maryland.

She was not deported. Rather, on Nov. 11, 2008, authorities granted Orellana Santos supervised release for humanitarian purposes, the complaint states.

The complaint includes claims that federal law does not allow state or local police to enforce federal civil immigration laws and prevents these officers from making civil immigration arrests beyond narrow circumstances not relevant to Orellana Santos' arrest.

Deputies authorized?

Jenkins said he became aware of the complaint Monday. He said he's looking into the circumstances of the encounter and the arrest. He said LatinoJustice left out some of the facts surrounding the arrest.

Jenkins has repeatedly denied any deputies have engaged in racial or ethnic profiling in the past and maintained that immigration status under the 287(g) program is checked only after a person is arrested for committing a crime.

Jose Perez, one of Orellana Santos' lawyers at LatinoJustice, said her only apparent crime was eating a sandwich while looking Latina.

"The only reasonable conclusion anyone can draw is that they were profiling," he said.

Perez said the case emphasizes a potential problem with allowing local law enforcement to handle what should be the responsibility of the federal government.

"Since 287(g) agreements went into effect, clearly Latinos are being profiled, stopped and arrested for no other reason than the color of their skin and their appearance," he said.

A 287(g) agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which gives local trained police to enforce federal immigration laws, became effective in Frederick County in April of 2008. To date, it's the only such agreement with a county law enforcement agency of its kind in Maryland.

According to a sheriff's office press release, about 500 criminal aliens have been processed in Frederick County from April 2008 to mid-October.

Perez said Orellana Santos now lives at an undisclosed location in the United States with her family and has an immigration lawyer.

News-Post staff writer Meg Tully and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

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