Martin O’Malley apparently thinks the bitter clingers in the western part of Maryland would attack defenseless minors.

(CNN) – After his strong criticism of the Obama administration’s plans to return thousands of young undocumented migrants back to Central America, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley asked a top White House official that the children not be sent to a site that was under consideration in his home state, sources familiar with the conversation said.

“He privately said ‘please don’t send these kids to Western Maryland,'” a Democratic source told CNN. The heated discussion between O’Malley and White House domestic policy adviser Cecilia Munoz occurred during a phone call late Friday evening, sources familiar with the conversation added.

A potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, O’Malley surprised some in his party when he sharply criticized a White House proposal to give new legal authorities to the Department of Homeland Security to expedite the deportation of the unaccompanied minors and their families.

“We are not a country that should turn children away and send them back to certain death,” O’Malley said last week at a National Governors Association meeting in Nashville.

More from Politico:

Martin O’Malley says that deporting the children detained at the border would be sending them to “certain death” — but he also urged the White House not to send them to a facility in his own state. […]

But before they hung up, O’Malley told Muñoz not to send any of the children to the facility in Westminster, Md., that the White House was looking at. It’s a conservative part of the state, he warned. The children were at risk of getting harassed, or worse, he said.