When Rafael Benitez visited U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s office in downtown Baltimore on March 5, the immigration lawyer had to wait hours to see his clients because the holding cells were so packed that ICE agents were housing detainees in the attorney consultation room.
By Monday morning, when members of Maryland’s congressional delegation arrived for an oversight visit, the holding cells were empty.
“It seems like they were trying to clean up a crime scene,” Benitez said. “They got caught and they’re trying to clean it up.”
For months, the overcrowded, bleak conditions on the sixth floor of the George H. Fallon Federal Building have drawn attention from Maryland lawmakers, a federal judge and the state’s top prosecutor.
But after Monday’s oversight visit, an urgent question surfaced: What did ICE do with all of those people?
The Banner spoke with nearly a dozen people familiar with the facility — including a man detained in Baltimore over the weekend, loved ones of detainees, immigration attorneys and congressional insiders — in an effort to piece together what happened to the dozens of people once housed there.
Jorge Reyes Medina said he was held in the Baltimore facility starting last Thursday. Over the weekend, ICE officials told detainees they would soon be leaving Baltimore but ignored detainees’ questions, Reyes Medina said.
He said detainees were told that “no one can be in here” as agents prepared them to leave the holding cells. On Sunday, at least 100 people were shackled and loaded into vans, then driven to an airport, Reyes Medina said.
The detainees were flown from Baltimore to Arizona, where they were held briefly before being split up and moved to other detention centers across the country, including in Washington state and California.
Two domestic ICE flights left Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport over the weekend, according to data collected by Human Rights First, a nonprofit organization that has been tracking such flights around the world. One bound for Louisiana left Saturday just before noon, and the other departed Sunday evening for Arizona.
Family members who have spoken with their detained loved ones confirmed in interviews that they also heard about Sunday’s flight from Baltimore to Arizona.
One immigrant detained described to his sister how he was shackled by his ankles and wrists “like an animal.” In an interview this week, she asked not to be named because she fears retaliation from ICE.
“This appears to be another instance in a persistent pattern of this Administration attempting to cover up their abuses and evade accountability,” Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen said in a statement Friday in response to news of the mass transfer.
Late Friday after the publication of this story, the federal Department of Homeland Security responded to multiple requests for comment from the Banner this week with a statement, but did not say where the detainees were taken and why. The statement described people held at the Baltimore field office as “quickly processed and transferred to permanent housing at a detention facility.”
“Maryland lawmakers showed up unannounced to the field office as a political stunt and fundraising ploy,” the DHS statement read.
In Baltimore, the holding cells were designed to hold immigrants for processing before their release or transfer. They had long been used for short-term stays of less than 12 hours, though ICE received an internal waiver to hold people for longer last year as the Trump administration ramped up immigration enforcement, according to court records.
Maryland does not have a permanent long-term immigration detention facility. Trump administration officials have cited that fact as one of the reasons for the overcrowding in Baltimore.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently purchased a Western Maryland warehouse it hopes to convert into a detention facility for up to 1,500 people, but those efforts have been stymied by a federal judge’s recent stop-work order requested by Maryland’s attorney general.
For months, members of Maryland’s congressional delegation have asked for answers, and some previously visited the downtown Baltimore facility.
A little over a week before the detainees were cleared out, members of Maryland’s congressional delegation negotiated with ICE over the date of another oversight visit, according to a congressional staffer with knowledge of their plans.
Lawmakers suggested Monday, March 9, but ICE rejected that plan, the congressional staffer said. At the time, an ICE policy required members of Congress to give seven days’ notice before a visit.
But the Maryland Democrats decided to go ahead with their planned Monday visit after a judge last week permitted members of Congress to make unannounced inspections. Lawmakers called ICE that morning from a nearby hotel lobby and told them they would arrive in 30 minutes.
Inside, however, the lawmakers only discovered empty cells. They said they weren’t given any information about what had happened to the people detained there.
“The short answer is: I don’t know,” Van Hollen, a Democrat, said at the time.
Earlier this month, members of Maryland’s congressional delegation said in a letter that bacteria that cause a severe form of pneumonia were detected in the facility. A federal judge on Friday ordered ICE to improve conditions inside the cells, including a cap on the number of detainees, though she did not order it emptied or closed.
In recent weeks, according to attorney and detainee accounts, the overcrowding in the facility’s five cells was especially bad.
Detainees’ family members said they heard of harsh conditions in the holding rooms, including little sleeping space, limited shower facilities, men and women being housed together, and a single toilet with little privacy.
In the days leading up to the mass transfer, the common areas of the Baltimore ICE field office were packed with people waiting to see detainees, according to immigration attorneys. Four attorneys said their clients complained they didn’t have enough food or water.
The attorneys said they have not received any calls about people detained at the Baltimore ICE office since Monday.
Benitez went to the Baltimore ICE office on March 5 to see two clients. He waited for more than three hours and was told the delay was due to overcrowding.
On Saturday, he was notified that his clients were scheduled for transfer to Arizona. He later tracked both clients through an ICE locator and could see that they were being detained in the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona.
Benitez went back to the Fallon building on Monday with a different client scheduled for a routine check-in. He noticed a stark, eerie difference from his visit just days before.
“It felt empty like I’ve never seen it before — and quiet,” he said. His client was fingerprinted, released and told to come back in 90 days.
Shortly after he was detained in Baltimore, Reyes Medina became violently ill, he said. He believes it was the result of a sandwich he was given in the facility.
“There was a moment when I thought I might die in there,” he said, adding he never saw a doctor despite pleas for help.
After leaving Baltimore on Sunday, Reyes Medina said he briefly stayed in Arizona before being transferred to a detention center in California.
“I’m here, shut in, I don’t know anything, whether they are going to let me go,” Reyes Medina said. “All of us here are in God’s hands.”
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