Feds: ICE temporarily shut down Baltimore holding facility to comply with court order

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement temporarily closed its Baltimore holding cells after a federal judge ordered the agency to reduce overcrowding and ensure that the basic needs of people detained there were met.

The processing facility, known as the Baltimore hold room, has since reopened, ICE said in a statement Friday. The agency did not say how long the facility was shuttered and when exactly it reopened.

The Banner reported last week that ICE mysteriously cleared as many as 100 people out of the holding cells on the sixth floor of the George H. Fallon Federal Building on March 8, the day before members of Maryland’s congressional delegation showed up for an oversight visit and found the facility empty.

Many detainees were flown to Arizona, where they were held briefly before being moved to other detention centers across the country, The Banner found.

At the time, ICE did not answer questions about the future of its downtown Baltimore hold room. Its deteriorating conditions starting a year ago captured the attention of lawmakers, a federal judge and Maryland’s attorney general, who have pushed the Trump administration to improve the facility in recent months.

ICE issued a statement from an unnamed spokesperson Friday in response to questions from The Banner.

The statement said that the agency acted in accordance with the court order and temporarily shut down the facility while moving the detainees from it to longer-term facilities. Newly arrested detainees were processed through other facilities during the shutdown, according to the statement.

ICE reopened the hold room after meeting the court’s requirements, the agency said.

That comports with what immigration attorneys and court records have indicated over the past week. Lawyers told The Banner that they stopped receiving calls about people detained at the hold rooms after March 9, the day of the congressional oversight visit.

Habeas corpus petitions, which are used to challenge a person’s incarceration before a judge, also stopped appearing in Baltimore’s federal court after the Maryland delegation’s visit.

This week, the first new habeas petition since March 8 appeared on the federal court docket, suggesting that ICE could again be housing people in the hold room because Maryland has only one such facility in the state.

An attorney whose client was briefly detained there this week said his client described being held with about eight other people. Twelve other people who were also being detained there were transferred out of the hold room while the client was there, said the attorney, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal against his client.

ICE said the mass transfer of detainees out of the hold room was not related to reports of what lawmakers had called a recent Legionella “outbreak” in the Fallon building. The bacteria cause a severe form of pneumonia.

The move came two days after U.S. District Court Judge Julie R. Rubin ordered ICE to provide detained people at the hold room with minimal personal space, clean surroundings, hygiene items and medical care.

The holding cells have a maximum capacity of 56 people, but at times were housing up double that amount, with limited privacy and nowhere to sleep. Detainees reported having little food and water, with no access to showers, and sharing a single toilet without privacy.

“Civilly detained people are stuffed into unclean cells by the dozens, without basic hygiene essentials, while exposed to a virtually open unclean toilet,” Rubin wrote. “These conditions woefully fail to comport with ‘contemporary standards of decency.’”

Maryland does not have a long-term immigration detention facility, a fact that Trump administration officials have blamed for the overcrowding in the Baltimore holding cells.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is working to convert a warehouse in Western Maryland into a detention center for up to 1,500 people. But those efforts have been paused following a judge’s stop-work order stemming from a lawsuit from Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown.