Hoping that someone else would step up and throw their hat in the ring, Lana Foley waited until the last day to file her candidacy for the top elected law enforcement job in Wicomico County on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Foley, a wedding and portrait photographer, has no law enforcement background nor had she ever intended to run for office. Now, she is challenging the incumbent Republican sheriff of 20 years who faced no opposition in the last four elections.

“I’ve had people ask me, why didn’t you run for board of education?”Foley said. “Why didn’t you run for county council? Why didn’t you run for county executive? I felt like the sheriff role is one of the most influential roles that you can have in a community.”

Foley grew up in a Republican household in Indiana but she has called Maryland home for decades. After being denied coverage for treatment of a thyroid cancer in 2013, Foley said she switched her allegiance to the Democratic Party because of Obamacare. She supported Kamala Harris in 2024 and, when Donald Trump was re-elected, she started Crabs on the Shore, a local branch of the national women-led mobilization group Red, Wine & Blue The chapter began as a support system.

“We do have a pretty big red area down here,” she said, “and I just didn’t want people to feel alone in their fear or concerns.”

Then, last year, Foley and others started speaking up against a proposed collaboration between the county and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Her opponent Sheriff Mike Lewis—running for sixth consecutive term—was an enthusiastic proponent of a 287(g) agreement that would allow local officers to serve and execute administrative warrants on immigrants in jail to transfer them to ICE custody, and he sought to bring it to their community.

“He’s a firm believer in wanting immigrants out of our country,” Foley said, even though this might not be a popular position in Wicomico County, which has the largest of Haitian residents of any county in the state. She added that one possible explanation for his long tenure could be as simple as having no other option to even question his success as a sheriff.”Encouraged by friends and family, in February, Foley decided to make the leap and launch her campaign.

This November, she’s looking to offer an alternative on the ballot and, against the odds, defeat a popular law-and-order sheriff in a Republican-leaning rural county. Working in her favor is the growing rejection of the Trump administration’s draconian anti-immigration policies that have spread fear across US communities.

“While Trump rode the wave of discontent back into office in 2024,” said Niambi Carter, a University of Maryland associate professor who researches public opinion and political behavior around immigration, “his cruelty turned the tide on that same anti-immigration sentiment.”“While Trump rode the wave of discontent back into office in 2024, his cruelty turned the tide on that same anti-immigration sentiment.”

The potential backlash in Wicomico County and in many jurisdictions across the country is a reflection of President Trump “misreading” the extent to which his supporters would stand by his efforts to deport the undocumented population, Carter explained. Conservative voters, she said, view immigrants as a “manifestation of the discomfort they feel financially and culturally.”And while they “were fine with the mass deportations of ‘bad’ immigrants—the ‘worst of the worst’—they did not want to see their neighbors and co-workers being rounded up and their lives upended.”What has led to “Trump’s undoing on this issue,” she noted, has been his administration’s indiscriminate enforcement.”

Largely blue Maryland has seen a ramp up in immigration enforcement since Trump returned to the White House. Between January 2025 and March 2026, ICE made 6,596 arrests in the state—a 257 percent increase compared to the same period the year before, according to the Maryland Immigrant Rights Protection Task Force. In the last couple of months, the agency has continued to conduct enforcement operations throughout the state, often arresting people without a warrant.

This September, a 40-hour blitz in one neighborhood of Frederick turned violent, with reports and videos showing ICE agents beating protesters with batons. The clash prompted Maryland’s Democratic congressional delegation to request an investigation into the agency’s tactics, noting that the vast majority of people caught in the surge of ICE arrests lacked a criminal record.

In Wicomico County, the immigration sweeps have had a chilling effect. The county seat, Salisbury, is home to more than 3,000 Haitians—or roughly 10 percent of the city’s population—many of whom are employed in farms and poultry processing plants, the region’s main economic engine. After the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, making that community more vulnerable to ICE enforcement, flyers advising poultry workers not to leave the house circulated and church attendance noticeably dropped When Sheriff Mike Lewis publicly signaled his interest in entering a formal partnership with ICE last year, he said it would allow his office to “better protect our citizens while upholding the rule of law.”

A long-time law-enforcement officer who grew up in the city, he gained national prominence as a “drug warrior” state trooper conducting seizures of cocaine, heroin, and contraband. Lewis has been a vocal Trump supporter and once described Maryland as “a Disneyland for illegal immigrants.”

In 2025, the right-wing think tank Claremont Institute named Lewis sheriff of the year. Fellow Sheriff Jeff Gahler of Harford County lauded him as “one of America’s top conservative voices for our sheriffs.”

The proposed Wicomico County 287(g) agreement championed by Lewis would be the first of its kind on the Eastern Shore. These voluntary cooperation deals between local jurisdictions and ICE have multiplied in Maryland in Trump’s second term, jumping from three to nine in less than a year, according to Sebastian Brown, an advocacy strategist on the ACLU of Maryland’s public policy team. Brown lives in Frederick County, whose immigration hardliner sheriff was one of the first in the country to adopt a 287(g) agreement. (He’s also up for re-election this November.)“The state of fear that folks have been in across the state and the country under the second Trump administration has been the reality here since 2008,” Brown said.

“The fear that any interaction with police, including a simple traffic stop, could be a deportation trap.”

That pioneering controversial agreement has faced resistance—and legal challenges—for a long time. In 2020, Frederick County settled a lawsuit brought by a woman from El Salvador who challenged her arrest by local law enforcement and subsequent transfer to ICE as unlawful and motivated by racial profiling. The following year, the sheriff’s office reached a $125,000 settlement with a Latina immigrant who claimed her detention under 287(g) over a supposed “broken” tail light fit a pattern of “racially discriminatory and unlawful policing.”

“For a while, it was seen as just a problem of Frederick and it wasn’t widely felt,” Brown said. But, he added, as these agreements started cropping up in more than a third of Maryland’s counties, “the opposition spread even to these more broadly conservative counties.”In Wicomico County, which Trump won by more than 5 percentage points in 2024 and barely carried four years earlier, Lewis’ plans to partner with ICE might have seemed uncontroversial. Wicomico has a Republican-majority council and GOP county executive. “They thought it would just be a slam dunk,” Brown said.

It wasn’t. When news came out in the summer of 2025 that the sheriff’s office had contacted ICE about an agreement, the reaction was fierce. “It just felt like a slap in the face to our community members,” Foley said, “and so we basically jumped in headfirst as quickly as we could.”“The 287(g) program isn’t about safety. It’s about fear and control.”

The ACLU of Maryland urged the county not to buy into a “program designed to scapegoat immigrants for political gain.”By the fall, the civil rights organization had joined forces with groups such as CATA, a farmworkers support committee, and Foley’s Crabs on the Shore, to protest the proposed deal. “The 287(g) program isn’t about safety,” Foley said at a rally in Salisbury that September. “It’s about fear and control.”

Foley was one of dozens of community members, advocates, and business owners who spoke up against it in council meetings in Salisbury. During a five-hour, standing-room only public comment session in October 2025, one Haitian-born man who has lived in Wicomico County for more than 40 years said he had previously voted for Lewis, but disagreed with him on the issue of local cooperation with ICE. Another speaker told the council how a member of her Haitian church had her husband taken away by ICE one month after their baby was born. “287 is a devastation to the Haitian community,” a Haitian resident said, while calling Lewis a “sensible” man. “We built this community.”

“A lot of people who supported even the current administration,” said Monica Brooks, president of the Wicomico County chapter of the NAACP, “they don’t support 287(g) and what’s happening with immigration.”The issue “brought a whole bunch of folks to the other side,” she added, including farmers.

“There are people who were still all in until they saw families taken and separated right in our backyard.”

Facing increasing pushback, Wicomico County put plans to enter an agreement on hold, only to announce in January that it would be moving forward with it. But then, in February, Maryland Governor Wes Moore into law a statewide ban on 287(g) agreements, forcing counties to drop their deals with ICE. Lewis went to Annapolis to testify against the new law, which he has criticized for putting “partisan politics over public safety.”

Grudgingly Wicomico County complied and County Executive Julie Giordano informed ICE that they were only withdrawing from the program because of the legislation. “It is the biggest betrayal to law enforcement and public safety that I have ever seen,” Lewis of the abolition of 287(g) programs, warning that, in the absence of this cooperation, ICE would have no choice but to swoop into the community. “There is a huge disconnect between him and people of color in the community,” Brooks said. “And I’ve not seen him try to do anything to fix that.”Lewis didn’t respond to an email request for an interview.

Jenkis and Lewis are among a group of 17 sheriffs who have since filed a lawsuit to block the enforcement of another law, the Community Trust Act, which places limits on how state and local law enforcement can assist ICE with requests to hold someone and transfer them to the agency’s custo dy. In opposing this law, they claim they “will be required to violate their oaths of office.”The sheriffs were represented by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington, DC-based organization that wants to restrict immigration and was labeled a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. (The Trump administration has also sued the state of Maryland over the legislation.)

In June, Lewis won the Republican primary with 5,126 votes—or 76 percent defeating his first challenger in a long time: Scott Hamilton, a retired military aviator. “I have faced zero opposition since the day I was elected,” Lewis said at a fundraiser for the Harford County sheriff’s re-election. “Zero opposition. But this year I have an opponent. I have a former deputy who is running against me for the first time in 20 years. His slogan is ‘less politics, more service.’ I felt like saying, ‘Bitch, you have no idea what it’s like to be a sheriff. It’s all about politics.'”

During a recent candidate forum, Lewis said he was frustrated with the Community Trust Act because it stopped his office from doing a “smooth, secure transaction” with ICE. But in a show of moderation, he added, “I’ve reflected on a number of things I’ve said over the years and it primarily has to do with immigration,” and then he promised “greater self-awareness.”Meanwhile, Foley has tried to present her lack of law enforcement credentials not as a drawback, but as an advantage; an opportunity to bring a fresh perspective to the office. She garnered 4,710 votes in the Democratic primary.

In the last push before the general election, Foley held a meet-and-greet event in October and was planning on being at the polls every day during early voting week.

Lewis’ campaign has far outdone Foley’s fundraising, bringing in more than $32,000 in contributions against her $3,363. “He’s used to having a certain degree of popularity with some folks,” Brooks said of Lewis. “But you have a newcomer who’s never run for office, who’s not even law enforcement, who did really well in the primary, and that tells me that people want something new.”

Foley hopes that a push for change after 20 years, a general rejection of Trump’s immigration enforcement overreach, and her message of restoring trust in the community will prevail. She acknowledged that she was unsure if her relative success was primarily propelled by the community’s support for immigration. “But I’m sure it’s not hurting for people to know that I’ve been fighting for our immigrant community,” Foley said, “and that I’m going to continue to do that.”