Hagerstown Rapid Response Facebook
Community members in Williamsport, Maryland, protest a proposed ICE facility.
Last February, activists in Hyattsville, Maryland, learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) wanted to lease between 3,750 and 5,001 square feet of additional space in a building that includes a community college, a food pantry, a childcare center, a medical office, and a county social welfare office—and they promptly began mobilizing to stop the expansion.
Although ICE had maintained a small legal office in the nine-story building since 2023—and has reportedly never interfered with anyone coming or going into or out of the building—the activists fear that an expansion of ICE’s footprint will heighten anxiety among the town’s large immigrant population. This is especially true given that the building is located just a few hundred yards from the Hyattsville Immigration Court.
But despite activist pressure, in mid-July the county issued a permit to allow vacant space in the privately owned building to be used by ICE. This decision, government officials told NBC News, followed the agency’s written assurance that the space will be used solely for administrative purposes and not for enforcement and removal operations or immigrant detention.
Heather Cronk, a member of Prince George’s County Immigrant Rights Collective, one of several Maryland groups that is now pressuring the county to rescind the permit, says that collective members are skeptical about the claim. “The county is saying it trusts that [ICE] will do what it told them it will do,” she says. “We think this is an egregious error which is why we’re demanding that the county revoke the permit.”
Many ICE agents, Cronk notes, do not follow the law and are often actively engaged in inflicting violence on communities. Moreover, she says, “The people who write the policies, buy the supplies and vehicles that ICE uses, and process the paperwork for arrests and deportations, are just as responsible for the violence as the ICE agents themselves.”
Autumn X, a member of the Greenbelt Resistance Network, agrees. “We contest the statement that this is just going to be an office,” she tells The Progressive. “The Baltimore ICE office is also supposedly ‘just an office,’ but we know that people are being detained there. We’re opposed to all state-sanctioned violence, but are trying to work within the system, pushing our elected representatives, going to public meetings, using the courts, rallying, and doing court monitoring.” Group members are planning to attend a county council meeting in September, X says, and will be “demonstrating and pushing to get ICE out.”
The Hyattsville activists – and other anti-ICE activists throughout the country – understand that winning will not be easy. For one thing, ICE is awash in money thanks both to H.R.1, the so-called Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Donald Trump in 2025, and the Secure America Act, which he signed in June. Together, the two laws allocate approximately $240 billion for immigration enforcement through 2029, including the hiring of approximately 12,000 additional ICE agents, attorneys, and administrators.
This hiring frenzy has largely fallen under the radar, with most media and activist attention focused on ICE’s ramped-up arrest and deportation efforts rather than on the infrastructure that props up these operations. Still, the establishment of offices where everything from payroll, to hiring, to supply acquisition take place, is important. And it’s an enormous operation.
In fact, the General Services Administration—the federal agency responsible for leasing space for government entities—posted a solicitation last September seeking between 11,500 and 18,500 square feet of “fully finished and furnished office space,” including conference and storage rooms, for use between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. daily in cities throughout the country. Five- and ten-year leases were requested for spaces in more than a dozen cities, including Birmingham, Boise, Columbus, Des Moines, Fort Lauderdale, Grand Rapids, Spokane, and Tampa.
During the past year, according to a February 2026 story in Wired magazine, more than 150 new ICE leases and office expansions have opened in “nearly every state, many of them in or just outside the country’s largest metropolitan areas. In many cases, these facilities . . . are located near elementary schools, medical offices, places of worship, and other sensitive locations.”
The upshot is that commercial property owners are eagerly renting space in buildings that have not been fully occupied since the COVID-19 pandemic. This June, the overall commercial vacancy rate was 17.7 percent, while Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Portland, San Francisco, San Diego, and Seattle had vacancy rates exceeding twenty percent. Unsurprisingly, landlords are readily signing on.
Anti-ICE activists consider this a perfect storm, with landlords happy to enter rental agreements and ICE happy to oblige them with long-term lease commitments.
Hyattsville, Maryland, is a case in point.
Indivisible Route 1 Corridor is part of the effort to get the recently-issued permit rescinded. “The lawyers in these offices are working to deport people,” group member Laura Usher tells The Progressive. “I am not sure how aware most people are of the ways infrastructure holds up the violence we see in the streets. The attorneys and administrators are the folks who support the structure that allows violence and abductions to happen.”
Usher also fears that if ICE’s expansion in Hyattsville goes forward, immigrants will miss necessary doctor’s appointments in the building’s medical office, steer clear of the building’s food pantry, and avoid applying for SNAP and other social service support.
“We’ve already heard that some students have dropped their classes at the community college,” she says. “ICE has been violently menacing people all over Prince George’s County. It’s an affront to human dignity and it makes people scared to leave their homes.”
But there has been some positive momentum in other parts of the state.
In Hagerstown, Maryland, a proposed conversion of an 825,000-square-foot warehouse into a 1,500-bed detention facility was temporarily stopped by order of a federal judge who cited “exorbitant” costs and the environmental destruction it could cause. The building was purchased by the Department of Homeland Security in January 2026 for $102.4 million.
“The site of the building is remote, hard to keep an eye on,” says Laura Spivak of Hagerstown Rapid Response. “It is close to a highway but is surrounded by back roads and you can’t see it easily. After DHS purchased the building, our state attorney general filed a lawsuit and got a preliminary injunction so it can’t be used as a detention center right now. The only things ICE can do is put up a fence, repair the roof, and fix the HVAC system. They are also storing a fleet of vehicles there.”
Kyle McCarthy, a leader of Hagerstown Rapid Response, says that in addition to neglecting to study the environmental impact that a large jail would have on the community, ICE also failed to schedule a public comment period for local residents to ask questions and raise concerns. The court gave the community the entire month of June to react to the proposed facility.
“Over the course of thirty days, we got thousands of responses, 99 percent of them against opening the ICE facility,” McCarthy tells The Progressive. “We did a lot of research and discovered that a building holding 1,500 detainees plus staff will require more than 187,000 gallons of water a day. The sewage system of Hagerstown will not be able to handle the volume.”
On top of this, the former warehouse is located on a stream, so sediment runoff could feed into the Potomac River. “The impact could be catastrophic,” McCarthy says. “People are further worried that an ICE facility will raise their taxes, lower the value of their homes, and increase their energy costs. In addition, they are upset about possible loss of tourism since having a detention center nearby could deter visitors from coming to the area and hurt the small businesses that rely on them.”
As Hagerstown Rapid Response continues to monitor the site, members are also working with activists in Hyattsville—and in other places throughout the country where new or expanded administrative offices and jails are being opposed. “The midterms will be pivotal for opposing ICE and while I think we will ultimately win many of these fights, it won’t be quick,” Spivak says. “Activists are not going to go away and I expect that the resistance will keep growing. It’s really important for us to challenge ICE at every turn.”
Laura Usher of Indivisible Route 1 is similarly focused. “ICE’s functioning and expansion is bigger than what’s happening in Hyattsville or Hagerstown,” she says. “No community deserves the violence and fear that ICE has unleashed. We want ICE out of our communities. We want ICE abolished.”