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Monroe County Sheriff Ruben Marté faces a predicament.
He could maintain his agency’s policies regarding immigration detainer requests and risk facing the state attorney general’s wrath, or he could comply with Indiana’s recently passed immigration law and risk facing millions of dollars in civil lawsuits.
Marté decided to sue Attorney General Todd Rokita.
On Wednesday, Marté filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, asking the court to declare Senate Enrolled Act 76, Fort Wayne Republican Sen. Liz Brown’s recently signed, controversial immigration law known as the Indiana FAIRNESS Act, unconstitutional. (Fairness stands for fostering and advancing immigration reforms necessary to ensure safety and security.)
Marté argues in his complaint that the legislation will encourage his officers to violate the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution — which protects citizens and noncitizens alike from unreasonable searches and seizures — by requiring them to “comply with all requests made” in an immigration detainer request. The provision goes into effect July 1.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, issues detainer requests to local law enforcement agencies, asking them to continue holding an individual in custody up to 48 more hours beyond when they would otherwise be released, so that the feds can arrive and decide whether to deport them.
But Marté says the problem is that detainer requests are just that — requests.
Unlike warrants, a detainer request form, Form I-247A, does not seek information about whether there is probable cause to believe the individual has committed a crime or contain space for an agent to include that information, according to the complaint.
Another key difference is that judges review and issue warrants, but they are typically not involved with detainer requests.
In the complaint, Marté argues that the Fourth Amendment creates a presumption that seizures should be made based on a judicially approved warrant, and that without one, law enforcement agencies may be held liable for unlawfully detaining an individual.
“By requiring blanket compliance with ICE detainer requests, SEA 76 would require Sheriff Marté and [Monroe County Sheriff officers] to seize individuals in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” the complaint states.
Rokita told The Indiana Lawyer in a written statement Friday that his office will vigorously defend the FAIRNESS Act and will use every tool provided in the legislation to “ensure no Indiana county becomes a safe haven for illegal immigration.”
“Sheriff Marté took an oath to uphold the laws of Indiana and the United States,” Rokita said. “Hoosiers deserve sheriffs who enforce the law fully and without selective carve-outs that put politics ahead of safety.”
In the past, officials in Rokita’s office brushed aside the possibility of local law enforcement agencies facing civil action for complying with detainer requests.
Blake Lanning, the assistant chief deputy for Indiana’s attorney general’s office, told The Lawyer last fall that Indiana has a long track record of local law enforcement honoring detainers without “ever once encountering that kind of lawsuit.”
“Even if someone were to bring that type of suit, the weight of the law is very firmly on our side on this issue,” Lanning previously said.
The Lawyer sent Lanning a text on Friday, asking him if he is still confident that SEA 76’s detainer compliance provision is not civilly risky for local law enforcement agencies, but he did not immediately respond.
The legislation’s author, Sen. Brown, had previously cautioned against the detainer request language when lawmakers introduced similar legislation in 2025, saying that because detainers don’t include a warrant alongside them, local police don’t have as firm a legal protection when imposing them.
“The problem is that a detainer warrant, which is what ICE issues, is not an arrest warrant,” Brown said in a radio interview with Indianapolis’ WIBC on Oct. 15, 2025. “So, there have to be certain procedures and processes followed so that the sheriffs are not held liable and the sheriffs are not held in violation of someone’s due process if they pick up the wrong person.”
A larger battle
Wednesday’s lawsuit is not the first time Marté and Rokita have civilly crossed paths.
The two have been entangled in a lawsuit over a Monroe County Sheriff’s Office internal policy since 2024, when Rokita accused Marté of establishing a policy that he said violated Indiana’s anti-sanctuary city statute.
In 2023, Marté adopted policy MCSO-012 to establish how his officers were to handle ICE and noncitizen interactions, according to the complaint. Marté revised the policy in 2024, 2025 and 2026.
In adopting the policy, the complaint states, Marté sought to “strike a balance between safeguarding constitutional rights and supporting the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts in compliance with state law.”
According to the most recently updated version of the policy, MCSO-12 allows officers to freely maintain, communicate and exchange citizenship and immigration status information with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
But the policy also provides that MCSO employees “shall not detain individual(s) solely based on a non-criminal/administrative ICE detainer,” and that MCSO employees “shall not hold an individual(s) beyond their scheduled release date based on a non-criminal/administrative ICE detainer.” Those two provisions were included in the original policy, too.
Rokita has held issue with much of the original policy, including the ICE detainer provision, which he has argued violates Indiana Code 5-2-18.2-4 because it bars MCSO officers from assisting and engaging in the enforcement of federal immigration laws “to less than the full extent permitted by federal law,” according to the complaint.
Under SEA 76, Section 4 of the statute now only applies “as long as the enforcement actions do not violate federal or state law.”
A hearing has been scheduled in Rokita’s case against Marté for May 29.
Consequences
The complaint posits two options the sheriff can take: comply with SEA 76 and amend his policy to direct his officers to honor ICE detainer requests, or violate SEA 76 by maintaining the policy.
If he takes the first route, the complaint states that Marté risks civil lawsuits from detainees that could potentially reach millions of dollars, citing a recent case out of New York, in which a court awarded immigrants $112 million after local jails held them past their release date.
If Marté opts for the second path, then Rokita could impose an injunction on his office and civil penalties of up to $10,000 for each violation — a provision SEA 76 added to the state law.
Aside from an unconstitutional declaration, Marté also asked the court to stop Rokita from enforcing the law’s detainer provision.
The case is Sheriff Ruben Marté v. Todd Rokita, in his official capacity as Attorney General of Indiana (26-cv-00701).
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