U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement must limit the number of people confined in its temporary holding cells in downtown Baltimore, a federal judge ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Julie R. Rubin cited health and safety risks, including uncleanliness, limited medical access and overcrowding, in the facility at 31 Hopkins Plaza in downtown Baltimore.

The federal agency must restrict capacity to no more than 56 people at once across five holding cells often referred to collectively as the Baltimore hold room. The population at the facility exceeded double that number multiple times in 2025, according to ICE data.

ICE must conduct medical screenings of all detainees within 12 hours of their arrival at the facility and before they enter any holding cell. Agents must clean the cells at least once a day, ensure detainees access to basic hygiene supplies and facilitate access to prescription medication within 24 hours.

An ICE spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But on Tuesday U.S. Department of Justice attorneys at an earlier hearing in the case said the conditions in the hold room facility meet federal legal standards and described the plaintiffs’ allegations of unsafe conditions as “selective and distorted.” They have also argued that any injunction would impede ICE’s ability to carry out effective immigration enforcement.

In a 67-page ruling, Rubin rejected that notion.

“It merely would require that it [immigration enforcement] be done within the confines of the Constitution,” she wrote.

The order comes nearly 10 months after two unnamed immigrant plaintiffs, both from Central America, challenged their detention by ICE in federal court. The women, listed in court filings as V.R.G. and B.N.N., also asserted the cramped, unsanitary conditions in the Baltimore facility violated their constitutional rights.

They have pursued the lawsuit as a class action that would include anyone detained by ICE at the facility. Rubin’s order formally recognizes the women as class representatives for potentially thousands of individuals.

Though a preliminary ruling, the order could put a temporary damper on ICE’s local operations while the case plays out and as the federal agency appears poised to ramp up enforcement across the state.

A hearing date has not been set, and it’s unclear if the federal government will appeal Rubin’s injunction.

“We are grateful to the Court for recognizing the urgency of this situation and granting appropriate relief, ensuring that ICE is held accountable for the conditions in which they hold members of the Maryland community,” Amelia Dagen, senior attorney at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, one of the organizations representing the women, wrote in an email to The Banner.

The holding cells at the ICE field office downtown have been the center of a growing controversy after detainees reported overcrowding, inadequate food and lack of medical care, as first reported by The Banner last March. The reports attracted protests, lawsuits and attempts at oversight from Maryland’s congressional representatives.

ICE has long taken the position that the hold room is for short-term stays as part of logistical processing and is not a detention center, and therefore not subject to certain ICE detention policies.

As originally designed and per ICE guidance, individuals should not be in such hold rooms for more than 12 hours before being transferred to a longer-term facility.

However, limited bed space around the country — including in Maryland — hasn’t kept pace with the volume of ICE arrests and detentions since President Donald Trump retook the White House, leading to a lack of detention beds and longer stints at processing facilities like Baltimore’s.

Last year, the Baltimore field office received an exemption to keep immigrants in the holding cells up to 72 hours, though some have remained even longer.

Critics say, as a result, Baltimore’s processing facility has turned into a de facto detention center.

At a hearing before Rubin, the federal judge, on Tuesday, Graeme Blair, a political science professor at UCLA and part of the Deportation Data Project, testified that just 4% of the more than 2,800 immigrants booked into the Baltimore facility from February to September 2025 spent less than 12 hours there.

The number of people inside the facility exceeded 100 on seven days last year, Blair said, and rose as high as 123 on June 15.

Justice Department attorneys Brendan Moore and Aniello DeSimone countered that about three-quarters of those held in the facility are transferred within the allowed 72 hours. They called population spikes there “episodic and temporary.”

Joe Goldenson, a physician who reviewed ICE Baltimore’s protocols for medical care and testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs, described the agency’s medication policy as “totally inadequate.”

The lack of an on-site physician and intake medical screenings to catch things such as tuberculosis and COVID-19 creates a “significant risk of harm,” he added.

Moore and DeSimone said detainees are taken to the hospital when necessary and family members can bring medications to the facility for detainees.

But Goldenson testified that this goes against best practices for jails and prisons, which typically have contracts with local pharmacies. He called the number of people ICE took to the hospital during the court’s discovery period — 25 — “absurdly low,” questioning whether agents could adequately identify when people needed care.

In written testimony last month, V.R.G., who appeared in court via video from a Louisiana detention center, said she was part of the case “so that people like me do not have to endure the same conditions I endured.”

Since her confinement in May, others have come forward. In December, Alexander Salazar Monge, a Salvadoran native who had been living in Maryland with his family, said via written testimony that he spent 10 days confined there without access to a shower or a bed and often shivered from the cold.

Salazar Monge, who has leukemia, said he did not have access to his cancer medication for two days while waiting for a friend to bring it to the ICE office. He expressed fear of missing a doctor’s appointment scheduled for later that month.

In January, a viral video showed what appeared to be dozens of men lying on the floor of one of the Baltimore cells.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Moore and DeSimone said the video was not representative of a typical day and that a winter storm had prevented ICE from transferring detainees out of the facility. Rubin then asked why the agency continued to arrest people knowing there was no space.

Rubin directed ICE to develop new written procedures for complying with her order within 60 days and issued a warning about retaliating against detainees for speaking out.

Documents filed with Howard County government suggest ICE had been planning to move its field office from Baltimore to Elkridge for years, but it was not immediately clear what its future holds. Howard County revoked the building permits for the site Feb. 2, a move that is the subject of litigation.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, recently purchased a warehouse in Williamsport near Hagerstown with plans to convert it into a 1,500-person detention and processing site, which would be the first in Maryland.