Police officials from Washington, Prince George’s County and Montgomery County said Wednesday they do not have any agreements to accept ID cards issued by a Maryland pro-immigrant advocacy organization as valid identification, contrary tothe claims of the group’s leaders.
Gustavo Torres, executive director of the immigrant group CASA of Maryland, has said the group has issued 10,000 of the identification cards over the past 10 years to people who crowd their offices every week.
CASA officials maintain they have agreements with all three police departments to treat the cards as identification during routine stops, but that the cards would not help people who had committed crimes.
“Our understanding, across years of practice, is that local police departments accept the identification,” CASA spokeswoman Kim Propeack said in an e-mail. Representatives from area police departments disagree.
“We do not accept CASA of Maryland IDs as a valid state-represented identification,” Prince George’s police spokesman Cpl. Stephen Pacheco said. District police spokesman Sgt. Joe Gentile said the same.
“We’re not aware of any agreement,” Gentile said. “A CASA of Maryland ID card is not legal identification; if we stop you driving, you obviously need a driver’s license.”
Montgomery police spokeswoman Lucille Baur said: “We do not have an agreement with them.”
Baur and CASA’s Propeack said they want to directly discuss identification-card policy with each other’s groups.
“If the police departments are expressing another policy, we will obviously have a conversation directly with them about the utility of accepting the identification,” Propeack said in an e-mail.
