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Supported by Heads of Four Maryland State Agencies Warning of Environmental and Public Health Dangers
BALTIMORE, MD – Attorney General Anthony G. Brown today urged the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to halt its plan to convert a vacant warehouse in Washington County into a 1,500-bed immigration detention facility, citing ongoing and unresolved concerns about the project's environmental impacts. In formal comments submitted today to ICE, Attorney General Brown argues that the agency must prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement rather than a more limited Environmental Assessment and urges ICE to instead consider selling the property.
Attorney General Brown's letter is reinforced by a companion letter from the heads of Maryland's Department of the Environment, Department of Natural Resources, Department of Transportation, and Department of Health, which details substantive concerns about the project's effects on local waterways, infrastructure, and public health, and notes that ICE has not made available a number of studies it says it relied on in developing its proposal.
Both letters were submitted together in response to ICE's Scoping Notice for an Environmental Assessment of the proposed conversion of the warehouse at 16220 Wright Road in Hagerstown. The submission follows a federal court's April 2026 ruling that ICE had violated the National Environmental Policy Act in its initial push to convert the property.
Copies of both letters are available here.
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