Maryland Attorney General Demands Environmental Studies, New Public Comment Period, and Suggests DHS Sell Washington County ICE Warehouse

The announcement came just hours after Hagerstown Rapid Response and Washington County Indivisible concluded a public comment campaign that generated more than 4,300 comments.

For the last month, we at Hagerstown Rapid Response and Washington County Indivisible have been urging the community to submit public comments opposing the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to retrofit an 825,000-square-foot industrial warehouse in Washington County into a giant ICE detention center.

It was clear from the beginning that DHS was not conducting this process in good faith, but we also knew it was important to make a statement if we could show that thousands of people opposed this facility opening in our community. Throughout the entire process, the public was asked to submit comments about the project’s environmental impacts without having access to many of the environmental studies, engineering reports, infrastructure analyses, and operational plans that DHS relied upon to conclude those impacts would not be significant.

Just hours after our public comment campaign ended, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown submitted comments to DHS asking for many of the same things that thousands of residents had spent the last month demanding.

Brown called on DHS to release the studies underlying its conclusions, provide another public comment period once those studies become available, and prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement rather than the more limited Environmental Assessment currently being pursued by the agency. He also urged DHS to consider selling the warehouse rather than moving forward with plans to convert it into an immigration detention center.

The environmental review process only exists because Maryland sued DHS earlier this year after the agency attempted to move forward with the project without conducting the review required under federal law. In April, a federal judge largely halted the project and ordered DHS to begin the process it had previously attempted to avoid, leading to the thirty-day public comment period that closed on July 1.

Over the course of that month, our public comment campaign generated more than 4,300 submissions opposing the project and demanding greater transparency from DHS. Just hours later, Maryland’s Attorney General was formally demanding the release of the same studies, another opportunity for public review, and even suggesting that DHS consider selling the building altogether.

If Maryland’s Attorney General and the heads of Maryland’s Departments of Environment, Natural Resources, Transportation, and Health believe they do not have enough information to fully evaluate this project, it is difficult to argue that ordinary residents were ever given enough information to do so during a thirty-day public comment period.

DHS asked the public to trust its conclusions without allowing the public to review the evidence behind them. More than 4,300 people submitted comments anyway because they understood what was at stake for Washington County and the surrounding region. The public comment period may be over, but the demand for transparency did not end on July 1, and neither did our commitment to holding DHS accountable for the decisions it is making in our community.