A U.S. District Court judge has at least temporarily ordered a halt to ICE’s attempt to retrofit a massive warehouse in western Maryland.
Judge Brenden Hurson granted a preliminary injunction to the state to stop ICE’s attempt to convert an 820,000 square foot warehouse into a detention center that could hold up to 1,500.
The injunction is based on the state’s claim that the surrounding area and its environment will suffer from irreparable harm from the renovation and operation of the warehouse, and that ICE did not conduct proper environmental assessments to understand the impact of the facility or proper remediation measures.
The injunction halts all work on the building except for some repairs to the HVAC system and the addition of some security measures like a fence to keep out vandals and cameras.
“Prior to our lawsuit, DHS and ICE were moving rapidly to construct a large immigration detention facility near Williamsport. Even their legal obligations under federal law did not slow these efforts, as they continued a lawless pursuit to detain as many immigrants as possible,” said Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown. “Today’s preliminary injunction is a major victory that stops federal authorities from irreversibly damaging our waterways, our environment, and our communities before our lawsuit is even decided. And it ensures that the federal government cannot rush through the legal process required to open this facility in its frenzy to carry out its deportation goals.”
Sonia Kumar, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU, also called the injunction a win for the state.
It’s a real testament to how important it is for community members to pay attention to what's happening in their backyards," Kumar said.
The Trump administration has used a contracting vehicle called WEXMAC, originally used by the military to set up camps and emergency response to natural disasters in war zones and overseas. However, the administration has pivoted that contracting vehicle to rapidly acquire ICE facilities in the U.S.
State and local governments were unaware of ICE’s acquisition of the property until it was already sold and had little recourse to stop it from becoming a detention center since it is now federal property.
Maryland did, however, have an opportunity to push back on environmental and safety grounds.
At the top of the state’s concern about the environment was the issue of wastewater. The facility only has four toilets and the nearby pumping station would not be able to handle a small amount of capacity, not 1,500 people.
“A facility this size would generate nearly four times more wastewater than the site was designed for, risking sewage overflows on the property and backups throughout the surrounding community, increased traffic, air quality impacts and the burden of local emergency services were never assessed,” Brown said in a statement.
The state also noted that a handful of endangered and threatened species lived in the area and could be impacted. Additionally, traffic and emergency services might be overwhelmed by the facility.
ICE did a preliminary environmental assessment, but tried to exclude many of the factors the state brought up as it bought the warehouse and then continued to award a contract for over $100 million to retrofit it with KVG LLC with options for more than $600 million more in work.
“It sounds to me like in this situation, things went completely backwards, and we're doing the [environmental review] at the end, when [it] should have been done, and at the beginning,” Hurson said explaining how the government already awarded the contracts by planned on doing the review after it was ready to bring in detainees.
The parties will next have a status conference to decide steps going forward on how proper assessments can be made and if the federal government will continue to pursue work on the facility.
