An undocumented immigrant arrested in Prince George’s County will spend 48 extra hours in jail at the request of immigration agents — regardless of the charge or the person’s past criminal record.

But the standard is different just across the line in Washington, D.C., where the city detains immigrants for extra time only if they have been involved in serious crimes.

Advocates for immigrants who are being deported under a federal program called Secure Communities are pressing to change a patchwork of local law enforcement policies across the country. The advocates say the extended detainment can heighten the chance of deportation.

In Maryland, most counties honor requests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold immigrants for additional time beyond when they would ordinarily be eligible for release. That happens even though the requests are not signed by a judge. The state attorney general has concluded they are optional and local taxpayers are not reimbursed for the expense.

“There’s a huge number of people who are being locked up who would otherwise be dismissed,” said Elizabeth Alex, a lead organizer for the immigrant advocacy group CASA de Maryland.

Under Secure Communities, a high share of immigrants without criminal convictions is being deported from Maryland, according to an analysis of data by The Baltimore Sun. More than 40 percent of the Maryland immigrants deported under the program since 2009 had no prior criminal record, compared with 20 percent nationwide.

Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, wrote the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday to ask why those deportations are taking place under a program designed to catch dangerous criminals. The department has not responded to requests for comment about the letter.

Some advocates believe part of the explanation lies in how the state handles immigration detainers.

Secure Communities provides immigration officials access to fingerprints of people who are arrested, be it for a homicide or driving without a license. The suspect’s fingerprints are sent to Homeland Security, which checks a database of people known to be in the country illegally.

If the database finds a match, federal agents ask the local jail to hold the immigrant for 48 hours beyond the time he or she would otherwise be released, so a pickup can be arranged.

What happens at that point depends on the state and sometimes the locality.

Virtually all local jails in Maryland, including the state-run Baltimore City Detention Center, agree to the requests from the federal immigration agency.

“We honor detainers,” said Terry Kokolis, superintendent at the Anne Arundel County Department of Detention Facilities. “It’s no different if it’s from Immigration or it’s from the U.S. Marshals. Both are law enforcement entities of the government.”

But across the Chesapeake Bay in Talbot County, the director of the Department of Corrections takes a different view. Douglas C. Devenyns said his agency honors the detainers in most cases — but he also believes the county has discretion.

In at least one instance — involving a mother of five children — Devenyns said, he did not further detain the inmate.

“We’ve reserved the right to determine whether or not we should necessarily honor an ICE detainer,” he said.

Unlike warrants, immigration detainers are not signed by judges and meet no standard of probable cause. The state attorney general’s office wrote in October that federal rules allow “state and local jurisdictions to exercise discretion when determining how to respond to individual detainers.”

Opponents of the practice are concerned that immigrants are being detained and deported for minor offenses. A report by the Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union in November found 76 percent of immigration detainers in Maryland between 2010 and 2012 were filed against immigrants facing traffic or misdemeanor charges.

The ACLU, CASA and others support legislation in the General Assembly that would limit the circumstances under which local jails could hold an immigrant longer than a nonimmigrant.

The TRUST Act would allow a judge to determine when an immigrant should be released.

Switzerland is introducing what could be one of the most dangerous experiments in the history of immigration reform.

Swiss voters approved a plan in referendum on Sunday that will set new limits on the number of foreigners who can settle and work in their country. Details haven’t been worked out yet, but strict curbs would be catastrophic for major Swiss industries such as pharmaceuticals, where 45 percent of employees—mainly skilled professionals—come from outside the country.

Although the government isn’t required to put restrictions in place for another three years, employers are likely to start scaling back investment and hiring now, economists Giles Keating and Fredy Hasenmaile of Credit Suisse (CS) warned in a research note. “Uncertainty is poison for investment,” they wrote, adding that Switzerland will pay “a high price” for its decision.

One in five people living in Switzerland is a foreign national. Industry groups say foreign workers account for 45 percent of employees at Swiss pharmaceutical, chemical, and biotechnology companies. Some 25 percent of Swiss bank employees are citizens of neighboring European Union countries, according to the Swiss Bankers Association. The group “fears that the available pool of trained staff will decrease,” a spokeswoman says.

Keating and Hasenmaile predict that passage of the ballot measure will cause employment growth to contract by 50 percent in 2014, with some 80,000 fewer jobs created over the next three years, and economic growth this year is likely to slump from a forecast 2 percent to 1.7 percent.

The damage perhaps wouldn’t stop there. Switzerland’s real estate market would suffer, as many rental developments cater to newly arrived executives. The vote also could hurt Switzerland’s economically vital relationship with the EU, its top export market. Currently, EU nationals are allowed to live and work in Switzerland without restriction. “In the interest of Europe, Germany, but also in its very own interest, Switzerland shouldn’t take the path of progressive self-isolation now,” Andreas Schockenhoff, deputy chairman of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, told Bloomberg News.

Anti-immigrant sentiment often surges during periods of high unemployment—yet Switzerland’s jobless rate is just 4.4 percent, one of the lowest in the developed world, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Still, supporters of the ballot initiative said an influx of foreigners has created housing shortages and traffic bottlenecks. “It’s clear that immigration needs to be reduced,” Toni Brunner, president of the euro-skeptic Swiss People’s Party, told Bloomberg News. “We need to be more selective.”

The ballot initiative doesn’t set specific limits on immigrant arrivals. It simply requires the use of caps and quotas to stop “mass immigration,” as well as requiring that Swiss nationals be given priority in hiring, says Reto Huenerwadel, an economist at UBS (UBS). The government is likely to move cautiously in imposing quotas, given the alarm in the business community and because the ballot measure passed by only 50.3 percent.

Even so, the Swiss vote is likely to encourage anti-immigrant parties in other European countries where polls show rising support for immigration curbs. “What the Swiss can do, we can do too: cut immigration and leave the EU,” Geert Wilders, head of the Dutch Freedom Party, posted on Twitter (TWTR). Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s anti-immigrant National Front, also hailed the Swiss vote in an interview on Europe 1 radio, saying: “The country is our house. We the people have the right to decide who comes in.”

New Jersey is home to a large and growing diverse population of immigrants, and the community-based organizations in the state that offer English classes, legal help and advocacy continue to be important in helping newcomers integrate, a study released Monday found.

The 72-page report, titled “Meet the Neighbors: Organizational and Spatial Dynamics of Immigrant New Jersey,” was issued by the Program on Immigration and Democracy at Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics. It states that the Garden State has adopted few policies to help immigrants integrate, and community-based organizations are doing much of the heavy lifting with fewer federal funds and staff.

“The failure to enact immigration reform has put tremendous pressure on the local level,” said Anastasia Mann, who teaches a course on immigration policy at Rutgers and is one of the authors of the report. “I’m talking about how people are getting their needs met, and in almost in any community you go to where there is a significant immigrant population, you will find a typically quite scrappy but occasionally you know very institutionalized organization that is making some really important connections for people to local government, to schools, to the hospital, and there is a wide variation in terms of how localities are integrating immigrants.”

The study outlines the demographic changes in New Jersey and some of the circumstances that have resulted with that shift. It looked at immigrants across the state, where they came from, live and work, and how they conform and depart from historical immigration patterns. Researchers also surveyed more than 200 community-based organizations that work with immigrants for the study.

Nearly half — about 800,000 — of the immigrants currently living in New Jersey have already naturalized. Demographers estimate that another 250,000 to 500,000 may be living in the country illegally. Roughly that same number are legal residents, according to the report.

From 1870 to 1970, European countries made up the top five nations where Garden State immigrants hailed from, but by 1980, Cuba made the list. In 2010, European countries were absent from the top five, with immigrants from India, Mexico, Dominican Republic, China and Korea leading the list.

Mann said several municipalities in New Jersey are home to immigrants from certain parts of the world. In South Jersey, near Camden, there are a number of Cambodian immigrants, while Bergen County is home to a larger number of Koreans and Filipinos.

A majority of immigrants in New Jersey, as in the rest of the country, live in the suburbs, where they can find others who have emigrated from the same country, as well as jobs, services and schools, the report states.