Seeking to quell concerns about their plans to convert a sprawling Western Maryland warehouse into a makeshift detention facility, federal immigration officials recently met with Washington County leadership to address the local impact.

A statement released from Washington County commissioners last week offered highlights from the meeting, representing some of the first details federal authorities have publicly offered about their plans to transform an 825,000-square-foot warehouse near Hagerstown into a detention and processing center.

Among the promises: The planned U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility will be more of a short-term processing facility than a long-term detention center; it will be inspected monthly and held to the highest national standards; it will likely operate at one-third of its capacity; and it won’t overburden local infrastructure.

But former immigration enforcement officials are calling those pledges into question.

“This is a happy dance, but all their fingers are crossed behind their backs,” said Dora Schriro, a former high-ranking ICE official. “This is the best face they can put on something, and it is purposefully misleading.”

ICE’s planned warehouse conversions, including in Maryland, first came to light in press accounts late last year, but immigration enforcement officials in President Donald Trump’s administration declined to confirm details. Officials at ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security this week did not immediately respond to additional questions about the promises made to county officials.

Meanwhile, the project has faced escalating resistance, prompting protests by community activists and, more recently, litigation from the Maryland attorney general’s office that resulted in a stop-work order pushing construction back until at least mid-April while a judge considers the state’s challenges.

Last week, physicians and medical providers in Washington County wrote an open letter expressing their concern about the facility’s potential burden on the local health care system. And on Monday, Gov. Wes Moore and Rep. April McClain Delaney, both Democrats, held a roundtable with Washington County community leaders to hear their concerns.

The purpose of the sprawling facility in Western Maryland has not yet been made clear by federal officials. ICE officials have written in statements to the news media that the Williamsport warehouse would be converted into a “very well-structured detention facility.” But Washington County’s statement, issued after a discussion with DHS officials, described it as a processing facility and asserted that it was “not a detention center.”

Federal officials, according to the county’s statement, said the facility would typically house about 500 detainees at a time, for three to seven days on average, rarely meeting its 1,500-bed capacity.

Schriro, who served as a special adviser to the DHS secretary under former President Barack Obama and now works as an ICE detention center expert witness, said she has never encountered an ICE facility that didn’t quickly fill to capacity. It’s not uncommon for them to exceed capacity, she added.

She said she would expect more vehicle traffic in and out of the facility if federal officials stick to their plan to limit detainees’ stays to a few days, because the positions of detainees who exit will quickly be backfilled by new ones.

Schriro said ICE’s inspection process happens annually, making a monthly inspection schedule unlikely. Federal records show that those yearly inspections don’t always happen on time.

Private companies have been contracted to complete the building conversion and staff it once it’s open. But it’s unclear to what extent private company employees will run the facility.

The agency, Schriro said, is typically deferential to the private companies that operate detention centers, and exercises minimal oversight over them.

Scott Shuchart, a former high-ranking ICE official under former President Joe Biden, said the Homeland Security Department under Trump cut oversight of ICE operations when it reduced those positions to a handful of employees.

“ICE profoundly cannot be trusted to inspect its own facilities,” he said.

Health care needs

Like most rural areas, Western Maryland has well-documented shortages of physicians and nurses that affect local hospitals and state-run prisons.

To that end, federal immigration officials promised that the facility will have a full complement of medical staff, including doctors and nurses, according to the county’s statement. Medical needs would be handled by a private contractor to reduce burdening local resources, according to the statement.

But Dr. Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer of New York City’s jail system who has studied deaths at immigration detention centers, said staffing for these facilities does not usually include specialists who handle emergency and chronic medical needs.

Those visits require outside medical care and a clear plan for getting detainees to specialty appointments, he said.

“Simply standing up a new box without a clear and communicated plan working with outside specialty providers ... increases the risk of preventable death,” Venters said. “If there’s a monthslong delay to see an oncologist while someone’s cancer gets worse, those bad outcomes are the direct responsibility of the detention center.”

Venters added that the detention facility will need to follow a “community standard of care,” which would include access to mental health care and substance use disorder treatment.

“You can’t open the door without having figured that out,” Venters said.

Shuchart said that medical resources at the facility will be further strained by the detained population, who are often older people who previously received care for chronic health issues in their communities.

“The idea of taking people who have been medically managed in the community and dumping them without regular management into a little rural jail in Maryland is absolutely a recipe for bad outcomes,” he said.

In response to questions from The Banner, a Homeland Security spokesperson said in a statement that ICE is actively recruiting health care professionals, but the statement did not address coordination with local providers.

Joseph Deinlein, spokesperson for Meritus Health, a hospital system in Hagerstown near the planned facility site, said that Homeland Security officials have not contacted the medical center about such a plan.

For Venters, that lack of coordination was a major concern. Even if detainees are in the facility for shorter stays, he said, “it doesn’t mean that it’s OK to ignore serious health problems like cancer or chronic health problems like substance use disorder.”

“If they don’t establish partnerships with community health systems to get care, get an MRI, see a specialist, what that means is those patients will get worse,” Venters said. “So you may see patients going to the hospital for emergencies that were preventable.”