Sheriff Chuck Jenkins has been facilitating the deportation of undocumented immigrants from his jurisdiction, Frederick County, Maryland, for the past 18 years. Thanks to an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), under Section 287(g) of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, undocumented immigrants held in his jails were transferred to the immigration agency after serving their sentences.

However, this arrangement no longer applies. A state law, passed in February of this year, prohibited the practice. The legislation made it illegal for local police departments and sheriff’s offices to hand over detainees to immigration authorities. This prompted counties that still had these agreements in place to terminate them immediately. And, last month, the Democratic-led state increased protections for migrants by passing the Community Trust Act, which prohibits local officials from asking people about their immigration status, informing immigration authorities about individuals detained in local jails, or holding them after they’ve served their sentences in order to hand them over to federal agents without a warrant.

Jenkins believes that the new legislation will make it harder for him to maintain order in his county. That’s why he has joined 16 other sheriffs across Maryland in taking the Community Trust Act to court. “[The original legislation] in itself was bad enough; [it] did a lot of damage to law enforcement and public safety. But then, to [follow up] with this Community Trust Act, what that did was basically take away every other means that we had available to us to cooperate and work with ICE, so we felt it was a step too far. We felt that sheriffs were placed in a position where we either had to obey federal law, or obey state law. We felt it was an untenable position,” he explains.

Sheriffs from 17 of Maryland’s 24 counties filed a lawsuit against Democratic Governor Wes Moore and Attorney General Anthony Brown in federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland. They argue that the law violates the U.S. Constitution and places their officers in a difficult legal position, due to the conflict between state and federal law. The plaintiffs are Republicans, a minority in a state with a Democratic majority.

Sarah Staudt is the Policy and Advocacy director at the Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit organization that supports the legislation. According to her, before February, there were only eight formal 287(g) agreements in the state: migrant detentions were based on informal collaborations, which are prohibited under the new law.

“Most ICE arrests in jails and other lock-ups occurring in Maryland are occurring not through formal 287(g) agreements, but through informal collaboration by local and state law enforcement with ICE. These collaborations are not targeting ‘dangerous criminals,’ but everyday Maryland residents,” Staudt told Congress this past February.

According to data from the Prison Policy Initiative, approximately one in three ICE arrests (29%) that have taken place in Maryland during the second Trump administration have occurred in jails or other detention facilities. Of these arrests, 81% have been carried out through informal collaboration with ICE, with only 19% occurring through formal 287(g) agreements. “Legislation that only addressed 287(g) agreements, therefore, would not address the bulk of the problem,” Staudt noted.

When Trump returned to the White House with the promise of a historic deportation effort, the focus of migrant detentions shifted. While the previous administration concentrated on carrying out deportations at the border, the Trump administration deployed thousands of ICE agents to inland cities. To facilitate these arrests, 287(g) agreements with immigration authorities were signed.

The ICE website has a section promoting these agreements: “How can I convince my chief or sheriff to participate in 287(g)?” one section asks. At the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, there were 139 such agreements nationwide. Today, there are 1,986 agreements in effect, spread across 39 states.

Trump’s anti-immigration agenda has prompted states to push for legislation concerning ICE. There are three main approaches. Some Republican-led states, like Florida, encourage cooperation; their ICE arrest rates are very high. Democratic-led states like New Jersey have taken a first step toward limiting cooperation with the agency by prohibiting these types of agreements. However, some Democratic-led states have allowed informal collaboration to continue, while some local sheriffs grant ICE access to their detention centers.

The Democratic-led state of Illinois has adopted the most stringent stance against arrests. According to a 2025 directive, local law enforcement agencies cannot transfer individuals to immigration custody; they cannot allow ICE agents access to any person in custody; they cannot authorize immigration agencies to use facilities or equipment, including electronic databases, nor can they provide any additional assistance to federal agents. Illinois is considered a “sanctuary” state, a term used for states that refuse to participate in immigration operations.

Divided opinions

The debate around public safety continues to divide public opinion. Immigrant advocates celebrate Maryland’s new law, arguing that it makes it easier for people to report crimes without fear of arrest. “When community members can interact with local police without fear of being turned over to federal immigration authorities, they are more likely to report crimes, cooperate with investigations and engage with public officials. That makes all our communities safer,” the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said, in a statement released following the law’s publication.

Jeff Gahler, the sheriff for Harford County and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the state of Maryland, views public safety from a different perspective. “Nearly 25 years ago, our nation saw the devastating results when the 9/11 attacks came to our country. It was very clear that when federal, state and local law enforcement agencies operate in silos, void of communication and partnership, the impact is deadly. It is unconscionable that we not only repeat these mistakes, but [also] that there are Maryland legislators and a governor who [have] created such a public safety divide.” he wrote, in an email response to EL PAÍS.

Maryland Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat, neither signed nor vetoed the Community Trust Act, which went into effect this past May. Moore stated that he agrees with the bill’s objective of keeping local police focused on local crimes and that the state should not “let untrained, unqualified and unaccountable ICE agents deputize our law enforcement officers to do immigration work.” However, he noted that the bill “presents real implementation challenges.”

“Protecting our communities,” he continued, “requires seamless coordination among federal, state and local partners… and the bill creates ambiguities around joint investigations that we are working with the attorney general’s office to clarify.”

The law includes exceptions. For instance, local law enforcement agencies can alert immigration authorities about a person in custody if that person has been convicted of a felony, has been required to register as a sex offender, or has served at least five years in prison in another state.

Gahler and Jenkins argue that the issue has been politicized because criticism of cooperation with ICE has surged following Trump’s return to power. The 287(g) agreements were created in 1996, during the administration of Democratic President Bill Clinton, and have been in effect under both Democratic and Republican administrations. However, they never received the momentum that Trump has given them.

Both sheriffs are Republicans, as are the other signatories of the lawsuit against the Community Trust Act. But their counties had contrasting results in the 2024 presidential election: Harford County voted overwhelmingly for Trump, while Frederick County which is part of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, voted for the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris.

Jenkins believes that, in addition to releasing criminals onto the streets, the new legislation will encourage more ICE raids. “[Right] now, ICE agents are in Frederick… and they’re apprehending people on the street that we would have turned over to them in jail. So, we’re seeing the presence of more ICE officers,” he says.

According to data from the Prison Policy Initiative, only 36% of people arrested by ICE in Maryland — broken down into 44% arrested through informal collaboration with law enforcement and 51% through the 287(g) agreements — had prior criminal convictions, including immigration and traffic violations.

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Tom Morello likes to use a word that many musicians stopped uttering long ago: resistance. The 62-year-old singer uses it naturally, the way he would when talking about songs, chords or the road. On June 27, he will perform at the BBK Legends festival in Bilbao, and in a video call interview, he sums up the spirit of the event: “It will be a celebration of the guitar and of resistance.”

More than three decades have passed since Rage Against the Machine, the band with which he rose to fame, made a seismic impact on popular culture, and he still sees no contradiction whatsoever between the two: music and rebellion.

Rock and roll has seemed, since its beginnings, synonymous with fun; while politics is, for many, just the opposite — a drag. The guitarist disagrees: “Rock music has been extremely political from the beginning. The idea of a white artist like Elvis Presley singing with the voice of a Black artist and turning white audiences on to Black music was an incredibly political statement, even if the lyrics were about love. John Coltrane’s music, purely instrumental, challenges the conventions and norms of how you can play an instrument or how you can view jazz, and in the same way, it challenges conventions in society.”

On March 31, Morello joined Bruce Springsteen on a tour of 19 large venues titled Land of Hope and Dreams, driven by that same insurgent instinct. “They were a lot of fun, but also very serious politically, because I believe that as an artist, your responsibility is not to hide who you are in what you do.”

On October 3, he will rejoin Springsteen at the Power to the People concert in Columbia, Maryland, very close to Washington, organized by Morello and also featuring Foo Fighters, Joan Baez, Serj Tankian (System of a Down), Cypress Hill, Dave Matthews, and Jack Black, among others.

He takes his convictions so far that one starts to wonder whether he sees himself as a musician or as an activist who uses music the way others use a megaphone.

“I didn’t choose to be a guitarist,” he replies. “The guitar chose me. It was a calling, almost religious. But once I had that calling, I had to find a way to bring my convictions into my vocation. I was seized by being a guitarist, but also by having a revolutionary perspective on the world, and I tried to find a way where I could be as effective as possible while playing guitar solos.”

Revolution… Morello gives the solemn word a everyday, almost domestic feel. “It means not accepting things as they are and not allowing unjust human relationships to become normalized. In my view, it’s revolutionary to entertain and to confront an audience with an onslaught of joy and justice.”

He adds: “Most of my biggest influences regarding music and social commitment weren’t musicians but political activists: the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, anti-colonial movements in the Third World, the Lincoln brigades that fought in Spain against the fascists.”

As for musicians, he cites Woody Guthrie, Public Enemy and System of a Down. “I can’t conceive of music separated from political activism. Life is something you must engage in.”

He’s far from happy with the United States under Trump. “I’m worried about a lot of things; it’s a long list. I think we are facing someone who wants to be the dictator of democracy every day, from his terrible foreign policy to the tactics of pursuing immigrants in their own homes,” he says. “Probably worse than all that is the anti-intellectualism and anti-science stance, which leads to policies that are undoing decades of environmental work and helping push the planet toward destruction. America is a much more dangerous place than it used to be. It’s a very, very dangerous time, and I wish I could retire and sit on a beach, but that’s not going to happen soon. There’s still work to do.”

Over three decades in music, he has repeated that idea in many different ways, but rarely as combatively as now. “If there has been a message throughout my career, it is that the world is not going to change itself,” he says. “It is our responsibility to make it change. History is not something that happens; it is something we make. When the world has changed in progressive, radical or even revolutionary ways, it has been because of people no different from those reading this now. The people who have changed the world don’t have more courage, power, money or intelligence than the readers of this interview.”

Behind that conviction is also a personal experience. Born in New York in 1964, the son of a Kenyan diplomat and a teacher with Italian and Irish roots, Morello grew up in Libertyville, Illinois, in a predominantly white community. “I didn’t have to read political philosophers to learn about human relationships and injustice,” he says. “I encountered them on the playground when I was four or five. The idea that there was hate, ignorance and injustice in the world came to me very early.”

His mother, also an activist, was a key figure in his upbringing (his father returned to Kenya when Tom was still a baby. “She never made me feel inferior in any way, even though the world was trying to tell me I was,” he recalls. “I always had a very strong heart thanks to the support and love of my family.”

Long before becoming one of the most recognizable guitarists in contemporary rock, he was a teenager obsessed with the instrument. For years, he tried to follow the same path as the great virtuosos of the 1980s. “At first I was a very fast guitarist, heavily influenced by Randy Rhoads, Eddie Van Halen and people like that,” he says.

His search changed direction when he stopped trying to sound like others. “It wasn’t until the beginning of Rage Against the Machine that I began to find my own voice on the instrument. I began identifying as the band’s DJ. I diverted my attention from traditional guitarists toward animal or mechanical sounds, trying to recreate the sounds of industry and nature.”

It was a decision that ended up defining his entire career: “That, combined with the big heavy riffs of my favorite bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, led me to find an authentic voice on the instrument.”

For Morello, what separates a great guitarist from a merely good one is personality. “One of the things that impresses me most about guitarists is when they have their own voice on the instrument,” he says. “Sometimes that can mean playing many notes very quickly, other times playing with feeling, other times producing otherworldly sounds you’ve never heard before.”

At 62, he continues to seek new challenges. The next will come in the form of a record. “It will be my 22nd album, but the first solo rock album as Tom Morello. I wanted to make an album with all the riffs in the style of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave [the group he formed after the former’s breakup] and the lyrical depth of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Roger Waters. I wanted to take the weight and power of the rock of my whole life and bring it to 2026 to make a modern, heavy album that is as devastating musically as it is politically relevant.” His son Roman, also a guitarist, is part of the project.

When asked to choose a Rage Against the Machine song to explain the present, he doesn’t think twice: “The first that comes to mind is Killing in the Name. Frederick Douglass [a slave and later abolitionist in the mid-19th century] wrote in his autobiography that the day he was freed was not when his chains were removed; it was the day the master said yes and he said no. And that is Killing in the Name: a refusal of illegitimate authority. You don’t need to submit to illegitimate authority. Whether in your home, at your school, your workplace or your country. You can always rise up against it.”

But not everything in Morello’s life has been so serious. In 1986, freshly graduated from Harvard, where he studied social sciences, he worked as a stripper at bachelorette parties in Los Angeles to make some money. “I wanted to sell Iron Maiden T-shirts, and I didn’t even get that job,” he says. “I didn’t pass any audition; I got in through a friend. It’s a job like any other. There’s an old saying: the rent isn’t going to pay itself,” he jokes.

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In Liangjiahe, a rural village surrounded by clay-colored hills, a well helps explain who Xi Jinping is and what he wants. Xi is the president who has led China, the world’s second-largest economy, for nearly 14 years; the leader who defied Donald Trump’s tariff wall; the one visited by heads of state and government from around the world; the man world leaders travel to meet; the absolute figure no one in the Chinese Communist Party — a Leninist organization with more than 100 million members that controls every sphere of a superpower of over 1.4 billion people — now dares to challenge.

Xi, who recently turned 73, helped dig the well in Liangjiahe more than half a century ago. Dubbed the “well of the young intellectuals,” a plaque recalls how “Jinping” — his given name — led the village in 1973 to solve its chronic water shortage. The teenager had been sent to this remote village in Shaanxi province, where locals still lived in caves, as part of the re‑education campaigns during Mao Zedong’s devastating Cultural Revolution.

He arrived in 1969 at age 15. He struggled to fit in, but it was here — after enduring all manner of hardship — that he found his calling to serve the people and the party. A mural depicts a young Xi with the message: “Hard work; self‑reliance.” That is the metaphor of the well, the message emphasized by propaganda in Liangjiahe: Xi dug “with his legs completely submerged in muddy water,” a panel recalls.

Today, the site is a popular destination for so-called “red tourism,” although, more than ordinary tourists, it draws visitors tied to the ideological training of Chinese Communist Party members. “Here he learned the spirit of overcoming the harshest conditions,” a guide explains to one such group, shepherded by a “leadership school” specializing in “Xi Jinping Thought.” This, too, is a hallmark of his era. Under his rule, education related to the president and his worldview has been reinforced at every level, from schools to the highest ranks. It is an ongoing instruction designed to counter what Xi sees as the “historical nihilism” that brought down the Soviet Union.

“The knife is sharpened on a stone; people are strengthened by adversity,” he said of his seven years in the village in 2002, when he was a promising governor of Fujian province. Two decades later, in 2022, as he was about to be reelected party general secretary for a historic third term, Xi urged perseverance in the “spirit of struggle” developed “in the face of abrupt changes in the international situation” and “the blackmail, obstacles, blockades and maximum pressure from abroad.”

U.S. historian Joseph Torigian believes the Chinese leader was the answer to the idea that contact with the West would lead China to open up in the style of liberal democracies. “Xi believes, instead, in the need to harden the regime against political and economic pressure; to change course and show that there are alternatives to the Western system,” he says by phone.

Torigian, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is an expert on Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, a revolutionary leader who fought alongside Mao, and has published a book on him called The Party’s Interest Come First. Xi’s son is what is commonly known as a “princeling,” the offspring of the generation of communists who founded the People’s Republic and rose to senior positions once in Beijing.

They were turbulent years in any case. Xi’s father rose to vice premier only to be purged later. He would spend years in isolation while his son faced the wrath of the Red Guards because of his family background and was sent to the countryside. But he continued to believe in the system: from the village, Xi sent a dozen letters to the Party until they admitted him.

From Liangjiahe, he returned to Beijing to study chemical engineering at the prestigious Tsinghua University. With Mao’s death in 1976, the years of reform and opening under Deng Xiaoping began. His father returned to public life. The era of rapid growth was beginning, and many princelings set about making up for lost time, enjoying themselves and absorbing Western influences. Xi, by contrast, “chose to survive by becoming redder than the red,” a friend later told the U.S. Embassy, according to a WikiLeaks diplomatic cable.

His first notable post was as secretary to the defense minister; he later pursued a career away from Beijing. In 1985, as a local official in Hebei province, he traveled to the U.S. state of Iowa as part of a delegation to learn agricultural techniques and strengthen ties. For a couple of nights, he even experienced what it was like to sleep in the bedroom of a young American decorated with Star Trek memorabilia. “A pleasant, charming and intelligent leader; very curious about many aspects of agriculture, food processing and life in the United States,” recalls Luca Berrone, an Italian‑American businessman who organized that trip.

They spent two weeks together, and Berrone would not connect the dots again until 2011, when Xi was vice president and the apparent heir. Since then, Berrone has been invited to a dozen meetings with the Chinese president, who often cites his Iowa trip as an example of the importance of people‑to‑people ties to avoid conflict. “I think he does not seek a confrontational position, but rather genuine mutually beneficial cooperation,” Berrone says. “He respects the United States a lot.”

It is true that Xi’s only daughter, who has left almost no public trace, graduated from Harvard in 2014. But four decades after that Iowa visit, China is no longer the student, but a disruptive power competing on equal terms in the economic, military and technological spheres — and that has changed things.

During the bruising trade clash of 2025, Beijing showed the tools it had prepared to protect its interests by restricting critical resources. When Trump landed in China in May for a summit with Xi, the choreography was staged to convey that the two nations were negotiating on equal footing. The cordial détente was sealed with a formula proposed by the Chinese leader that softens the Cold War premise of co‑existence between powers: “constructive strategic stability.”

“He is a very strong leader who should not be underestimated,” says Rafael Dezcallar, former Spanish ambassador to Beijing and author of El ascenso de China (The Rise of China). “He wants to place China where it belongs, as a great power capable of competing with the United States, never again subjected to its influence or dominance, self‑sufficient in technology and in fundamental matters.” On the domestic front: “He has managed to put the party under his control.”

Xi was chosen as a consensus figure by those within the Party who believed that firm leadership was needed to rein in years of excesses. As soon as he took office, he launched an anti-corruption campaign that is still ongoing. Since 2012, more than seven million public officials have been found guilty and sanctioned by disciplinary inspection and supervisory bodies. The crackdown has extended from the grassroots level to the very top, reaching ministers and the military leadership.

This is compounded by a marked anti-hedonistic impulse, reflected in measures such as banning alcohol, luxury dishes, and cigarettes at official banquets. “Calvinist communism,” as a European diplomatic source based in Beijing describes it. For Xi, the source adds, Westernization amounts to paganism.

Xi has reinstated ideology and repositioned the Party at the center. His ideology, officially inscribed in the Constitution alongside Mao’s and Deng’s, is cited in every political speech. He is also a bestselling author: the three best‑selling books in China in 2025 were volumes compiling Xi’s ideas, according to Chinese media.

Wang Yiwei, vice president of the Academy of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era (the convoluted official name of his ideology), summarizes the president’s vision as “Xivilization.” He sees it as a new phase of “traditional Leninism” that confronted the capitalist system. “Now we have changed: whether socialism, capitalism or any other ism, all have a shared future.” And it draws not only on Karl Marx. “We have synergies with China’s classical culture and civilization.”

Torigian also believes that Xi’s sense of history leads him to fuse present-day Communist China with its past: he is mindful of the repeated collapse of imperial dynasties and witnessed, in his youth, the fall of communism around the world. This prompts him to ask: “How do you immortalize his vision? How do you ensure that what he believes the country needs survives not only while he lives but into the future? How do you prevent institutions from decaying and ultimately collapsing?” With no apparent successor for now, most analysts believe he will remain in power beyond 2030.

During his tenure, a heavy hand has been the answer to dissent. He has launched campaigns against anything that smells of divergence in civil society and has imposed firm control over Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong. It is hard to gauge his approval in an authoritarian country where surveys about the leader are not published, and technological surveillance reaches unimaginable levels. Simply uttering his name in public elicits respect, and it is not uncommon for people, when referring to the president, to lower their voices or speak in euphemisms.

If you ask people about Xi, the response is usually positive. “We only have one president, not like abroad,” says a taxi driver in Yan’an, the city nearest Liangjiahe and another hub of red tourism. Yan’an was where Mao ended the Long March in 1935, and its streets mix communist monuments with a bustling provincial life.

“Xi is not bad, but he still has a long way to reach Mao’s level,” replies Bai Guanglin, a 76‑year‑old farmer, at the city’s revolutionary museum. His granddaughter, Bai Yuxin, 28, a high‑school teacher, adds: “He has contributed a lot economically and in foreign relations.”

Yan’an was also the destination Xi chose for his first trip after being reelected in 2022. Alongside the other six members of the Politburo Standing Committee — the Party’s top decision-making body — he visited the caves where Mao once lived, toured the museum, and in his speeches called for “hard work” and a “fighting spirit,” while recalling those seven years he spent in the village.

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