A federal judge’s ruling on an 825,000-square-foot Washington County warehouse has become a test case for how far ICE’s detention expansion can go before local and environmental law catch up to it.
An industrial building outside Hagerstown was constructed to move freight, not to hold people. Whether it ever does the latter now rests with a federal court.
U.S. District Judge Brendan A. Hurson issued a preliminary injunction halting further construction on the site, extending a temporary restraining order he had granted weeks earlier. The warehouse, which sits in Williamsport, a Washington County town of about 2,000 residents, was purchased by the Department of Homeland Security for over $100 million as part of a plan to convert it into an immigration detention facility (The Daily Record, April 2026). Attorneys for the Department of Justice told the court the site is currently authorized to hold 542 people, though the government has said it may eventually expand capacity to as many as 1,500 detainees.
Judge Hurson was openly skeptical of how the government had characterized the project’s scope during a two-hour hearing, telling Justice Department lawyers it was “hard to even pass the laugh test” that converting a logistics warehouse into a detention center could qualify for the kind of expedited environmental exemption they were claiming (The Daily Record, April 2026).
The ruling followed a lawsuit filed by Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, who argued that DHS moved forward with retrofitting the property without the environmental review required under federal law, and that the surrounding water and sewer infrastructure was not built to support a facility of that size. Brown called the injunction “a victory that stops federal authorities from irreversibly damaging our waterways” (Maryland Matters, April 2026). Governor Wes Moore described the ruling as “a major and welcome step forward” for protecting the region’s environment and long-term economic stability.
Judge Hurson did not stop every aspect of the project. ICE can continue installing a security fence, cameras and fiber optic cable, and repairing the warehouse’s HVAC system and roof, while the broader case, filed against the federal government over the alleged National Environmental Policy Act violations, continues through the courts.
A pause, not a resolution
The injunction is a significant setback for the federal government’s timeline, but it is not a final ruling on whether the facility ever opens. The case gives Maryland’s legal team more time to argue that the conversion should be blocked outright, while DHS retains the option of commissioning a full environmental impact statement if it wants to move forward. Reporting from The Daily Record also noted that after a leadership change at DHS, the federal government indicated in a court filing that it was reconsidering the scope of the project altogether.
The fight has drawn sustained public attention. Hundreds of demonstrators, including members of the Washington County chapter of the NAACP and the immigrant rights group We Are CASA, gathered outside the federal courthouse in Baltimore ahead of the hearing, a sign of how far the dispute has traveled beyond Washington County itself.
Why the case reaches beyond one warehouse
The Hagerstown fight is unfolding against a backdrop of expanding federal detention capacity nationwide, and Maryland is far from alone in confronting what that expansion looks like on the ground. For immigrant communities across the DMV, including African immigrant families who have already been navigating a narrower set of legal protections this year following changes to Temporary Protected Status, the outcome of this case carries real weight. A facility built to hold hundreds of people, within driving distance of Baltimore, Montgomery County and the wider Washington region, speaks directly to where enforcement infrastructure is headed next, alongside other regional shifts immigrant households are tracking, from new DMV laws affecting immigrant workers to changes in rideshare regulation that affect immigrant drivers.
For now, the warehouse remains what it was built to be. Whether that changes will depend on a legal process likely to stretch on for months, one that communities across Maryland, DC and Virginia have shown they intend to keep watching closely.