Haven Shoemaker spent 30 years serving Maryland. Seven years as mayor of Hampstead. Four as a Carroll County commissioner. Nine in the State House of Delegates, where he made it to House Minority Whip. Now he’s leaving.
“Maryland has become California on the Chesapeake,” the Carroll County state attorney told Fox News Digital. “It only gets worse. It’s not getting better.”
Shoemaker, born in Baltimore in the 1960s, says the tipping point came in this year’s legislative session, when the General Assembly rushed through an emergency bill blocking local police and sheriffs from cooperating with ICE agents under the 287(g) program. Democratic Gov. Wes Moore signed it.
“I’ve been contemplating this move for a while, but the linchpin for me was this most recent legislative session where they essentially made Maryland a sanctuary state for illegal immigrants,” Shoemaker said.
Moore framed the signing as a defense of law enforcement sovereignty. “We will not allow untrained, unqualified and unaccountable agents to deputize our brave local law enforcement officers,” he said at the time, per WYPR. His office didn’t answer Fox News Digital’s questions for this story. Requests for comment from House Speaker Joseline A. Pena-Melnyk and Senate President Bill Ferguson also went unanswered.
The sanctuary bill wasn’t Shoemaker’s only complaint. He pointed to $1.6 billion in tax hikes passed last year as part of a $67 billion state budget, a move aimed at closing a $3.3 billion deficit. Lawmakers pushed it through. Moore signed it.
It didn’t fix things. Shoemaker says the state is already eyeing another structural deficit of “a billion and a half or so” for the coming year.
“Their tax policy here is horrendous,” he said. “I don’t know who’s going to be the last to foot the bill for the profligate spending that Annapolis likes to engage in, but it’s not going to be me.”
People are reaching the same conclusion across the state. Maryland’s outward migration numbers rank among the worst in the country, according to Shoemaker, who says he watches residents leave “all the time.”
“The State of Maryland has one of the worst outward migration numbers of any state in the country right now,” he said.
The irony is hard to miss. Maryland is the 18th most populous state but ranks 42nd in land area. Its budget has ballooned out of proportion to its size. And now the prosecutor who spent his career in its government is heading somewhere else, calling the “handwriting on the wall” and the political class in Annapolis “beholden to their ultra-progressive base.”
Shoemaker did not say where he plans to move.
