Maryland lawmakers find Baltimore ICE holding rooms empty during surprise inspection

Natalie Jones, Baltimore Sun on Mar 9, 2026

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BALTIMORE — Maryland’s congressional delegation made an unannounced visit Monday to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Baltimore, only to find the holding rooms empty.

“There’s nobody in this facility,” U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen said at a news conference outside the George H. Fallon Federal Building.

U.S. Rep. Kweisi Mfume said Monday that the empty Baltimore ICE holding facility was a stark contrast to his previous visits.

“The other two times that I was here, this place was running over with prisoners,” he said. “And then today, nobody’s there. I didn’t even see the guards that walk around looking like Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. I don’t want to be overly suspicious, but I don’t believe Humpty Dumpty fell. I think he was pushed. I think this was orchestrated so we would be here and they could claim the facility is humane, because there are no prisoners.”

ICE officials did not answer questions presented by The Baltimore Sun on Monday about where the detainees were taken.

Concern following a court order

It was not immediately clear if a court order issued Friday by U.S. District Judge Julie R. Rubin was the cause for the lack of detainees held in the office.

The order, issued in response to a lawsuit filed in May 2025 by two people confined in the Baltimore holding rooms, outlines the conditions in which detained people can be held, barring ICE from holding people in crowded areas where they have less than 31 square feet of personal space, and from holding them in rooms that aren’t cleaned daily or stocked adequately with personal hygiene products. It also lays out requirements that detainees receive adequate medical care and a written notice of their rights to the services they can receive.

When lawmakers arrived early Monday to inspect the holding rooms, which have come under scrutiny after a video surfaced in January showing cramped conditions there, they found no people, just abandoned mattresses.

U.S. Rep. Glenn Ivey, who also visited the office at 31 Hopkins Plaza on Monday, found that hard to believe.

“Are you serious that there’s like not one person there? Seriously? How convenient. How convenient,” Ivey said. “Then they’re going to say they got to build these new facilities to hold hundreds of more people — well, if you don’t have anybody up there, where you going to send them to? Why do we need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for more facilities? We don’t. That was a sham. We know it.”

Lawmakers who have visited the Baltimore field office in the past have reported detainees calling out for food and help, as well as poor, cramped conditions.

Monday was the second time U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks visited the Baltimore ICE field office. She said the facility is “unfit even to house animals.” Mfume added the seats in the cells were made of concrete and privacy “doesn’t really exist.”

Nine lawmakers in Maryland’s congressional delegation have also raised concerns about the presence of Legionella bacteria in the federal building’s water system in a letter sent Friday to the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). The bacteria can cause Legionnaires’ disease, a type of severe pneumonia.

Van Hollen said Monday that ICE officials told him they had not discovered the bacteria in their part of the Fallon building.

The lawmakers’ surprise visit comes as anxieties over increased ICE operations in Maryland continue to flare.

On Friday, ICE entered a two-month contract with a Pennsylvania-based defense contractor to renovate and use a warehouse in Williamsport for a detention center. And last week, advocacy groups reported dozens of black SUVs in the parking lot of the Williamsport warehouse — a fleet of unmarked vehicles initially parked at a midtown Baltimore parking garage.

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