On the sixth floor of the federal courthouse building in downtown Baltimore, sealed off from the public, there are holding rooms containing little besides a single toilet. Generally, these processing cells accommodate just a few immigrants for up to 12 hours. But in the last few months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has an office in the building, has been packing them full of people for days at a stretch, lawyers in the area say, seemingly violating the agency’s own rules. While immigrants are held there, they have no access to beds, showers, hygiene products, or lifesaving medication.

Typically, agents in the Baltimore field office use these cells to confine people they have arrested before transferring them to longer-term detention centers—or to hold them briefly when they come back for their immigration hearings on the fourth floor of the same building. According to ICE’s detention standards, such holding cells tend to have doors fitted with glass or barred windows for “convenient security checks.” They come with toilets, but movable furniture and cots are not allowed in them. ICE’s policy stipulates that, “absent exceptional circumstances,” no one should be held in these cells for longer than 12 hours.

Between November and March, detentions have lasted for much longer, often from 48 hours to nine days, lawyers said. They believe more than 50 people were held at the Baltimore courthouse over the March 8 weekend. Several lawyers said their clients shared the small rooms in the office building with 10 to 20 people. Some learned about these conditions only after their clients were transferred to a different facility.

The courthouse detentions appear to be the symptom of a confluence of recent federal policies meant to speed up deportations since the start of Donald Trump’s second term. Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Center, an organization that provides legal services for immigrants, explained that long-term detention in what are “essentially cages” in the field office is a recent development and not typical. His organization suspects this is happening elsewhere in the country and is preparing to file a lawsuit. In general, lawyers often argue in cases about inhumane detention conditions that the agency is violating its own rules—or general national standards—and in certain contexts can sue for damages.

Regular detention centers may be nearing capacity, Lukens said, “so ICE is now breaking their own rules, holding people in inhumane conditions because of this mass detention campaign.”

According to an e-mail from an American Immigration Lawyers Association liaison, Baltimore ICE Director Matthew Elliston has told local attorneys the field office received a waiver for the 12-hour rule when detention centers in Virginia and Pennsylvania are full. 

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Some Baltimore courthouse detainees were arrested by ICE during field operations or arrested after they were ordered deported by a judge in the immigration court within the building, without being given a chance to file an appeal with the board that reviews immigration court decisions, Lukens said. This pattern of arresting people at the courthouse before their appeal process can begin is also unprecedented, he said.

Along with other news of aggressive arrests and deportations, the Baltimore detentions add credence to the theory that ICE agents “seem to be out there arresting anybody they can arrest, and then figuring it out later—and the reason for that seems specifically targeted toward driving arrest numbers up, because they’re being told they have to meet quotas,” said Sirine Shebaya, executive director of the National Immigration Project, which is partnering on the forthcoming litigation with the Amica Center.

ICE said its holding cells were not subject to national detention guidelines but did not respond to questions about whether it is violating the standards specific to holding cells. A spokesperson wrote via e-mail that the agency “remains committed to enforcing immigration laws fairly, safely, and humanely, and ensures that holding facilities operate in full compliance with federal laws, agency policies, and established standards to uphold the well-being and dignity of those in our custody.”

Immigration attorney Katie Hyde’s client, a Central American grandmother, was held in the processing cells in the building for five days at the end of February. It was only after she was transferred out to another facility that she confided to Hyde about her experience. The woman has grandchildren who are US citizens, has lived in the United States for over 20 years, and did not have a criminal record. According to Hyde, she was picked up in the Maryland area because she was present when ICE agents arrested an undocumented family member. This client told Hyde that she was not allowed to shower for the entirety of her courthouse detention—and not given access to toothbrush, toothpaste, or hair ties. She had to use the public toilet in the cell in front of other detainees. She and other detainees slept on the floor with no mattress and were sometimes refused foil blankets when they asked for them. For days, her family had no idea where she was held. “Hearing her experience was truly appalling,” said Hyde, a staff attorney with Amica’s Detained Adult Program. “I have not seen treatment like this for my clients before—it’s emblematic of the cruelty of this administration’s immigration policy.”

Another Amica attorney, Sabrina Surgil, said her client was a Black Belizean man in his 50s who suffered tremendous medical neglect while held in the field office. The man has lived in the country since he was 6 years old and has family members who are US citizens. He was in removal proceedings while serving a state prison sentence when Surgil took on his case last year. ICE transferred him to the Baltimore courthouse upon his release without notifying Surgil. For two days there, her client—who is diabetic and requires constant glucose monitoring and treatment—was not given his insulin or other medication and became delirious, Surgil said. Upon his transfer to a facility in Florida, he was placed under medical observation for 23 hours due to “uncontrolled diabetes,” according to medical records reviewed by Type and The Nation.

A third Maryland-area attorney not affiliated with Amica said that two of his clients from Mexico were held at the courthouse. The attorney, who wanted his name withheld for fear of retaliation from the government, said one client was an undocumented construction worker in his 30s who was held there February 5 to 11 before being transferred out. According to notes from a conversation with his attorney on March 12, this man described being kept in a 12-by-18-foot cell with 20 men, having to use the in-room toilet in front of the other detainees, and spending the entire time in the same clothes without being able to shower. He told his attorney he got one phone call, but had to pay if he wanted to make any additional calls.

Other reports Amica has received included the case of a detainee with HIV who wasn’t given access to medication and a transgender woman who spent eight days alone in a Baltimore holding room before being transferred to an all-male detention facility.

The administration has recently begun pushing to expand immigrant detention capacity as it ramps up arrests. On Tuesday, Tom Homan, Trump administration’s so-called border czar, told Fox News that ICE is currently detaining 46,000 people and was on track to run out of beds in two weeks—a bid to get Congress to disperse more funding to the agency. Axios reports that the agency is now telling Congress it needs an additional $2 billion for the rest of this fiscal year, much of it for extra bed space “to detain people for a couple of days while they’re processing,” Senator James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma, told Axios.

Amica attorneys believe that the Baltimore detentions may be part of the effort to push for more ICE facilities in the face of local opposition. Maryland’s Democratic-controlled legislature passed the Dignity Not Detention Act in 2021, which required ICE to close down all four of its detention centers in the state. And after the Trump administration rolled back constraints on ICE activity in “protected areas” like courthouses, schools, churches, and hospitals, an emergency bill seeking to impose such limits at the local level is currently under deliberation in the state legislature.

“Now, ICE isn’t going to get the Maryland legislature to change, but I think they will use this in rhetoric to say, ‘Well, we have to hold people here because Maryland will comply with federal law or won’t help ICE,’” Lukens said. “That’s nonsense. This is really about overcrowding because of over-enforcement.”