ICE’s aggressive enforcement tactics are undermining public trust and prompting communities across the country to push back. In places like Minneapolis and Chicago, the backlash is sending a clear signal: people don’t want ICE operating in their neighborhoods in ways that erode legitimacy and treat entire communities as targets.
Every law enforcement agency needs some minimal level of trust with the people it polices. Without that, you get resistance that undermines the agency’s ability to function. And mass deportation requires mass detention. ICE says it needs beds, and it needs them fast. But the agency’s ability to expand that infrastructure may be increasingly constrained by communities refusing to be part of it.
This is happening close to where I live, just this week.
On Monday, Howard County, Maryland revoked a building permit for a private detention facility that was being retrofitted for ICE. The facility is located in an office park in Elkridge, about ten miles southwest of Baltimore, near health care providers, schools, parks, and residential neighborhoods. It had been under renovation since last summer. But the public only learned of its intended purpose on Friday, January 31, when County Executive Calvin Ball announced he would pursue emergency legislation to block it.
The gap between when the permit was issued and when anyone found out what it was for tells you something important about how ICE is trying to expand its detention capacity.
The building permit was issued on August 5, 2025. According to county records, the scope of work included “improvement of tenant spaces support areas, detention facility, detainee processing and secured waiting area.” The project passed inspections on December 29. For months, a private immigration detention center was being built in a suburban office park and nobody outside the permitting process knew about it.
What finally surfaced the project’s true purpose was not proactive disclosure by ICE or its contractors. According to Howard County’s permit revocation letter, it was “recent reporting and leasing advertisements” that revealed the building was intended for ICE. Once county officials realized what they were dealing with, they moved quickly. Robert J. Frances, Director of the Howard County Department of Inspections, Licenses and Permits, sent a letter to the property owner revoking the permit on February 2.
The legal basis for the revocation matters. Maryland state law establishes specific requirements for permitting private immigration detention facilities. Under the Annotated Code of Maryland’s Correctional Services Code § 1-101 and § 1-102, before any governmental entity can approve a zoning variance or issue a permit for such a facility, it must first:
Provide notice to the public at least 180 days before authorizing the variance or issuing the permit
Solicit and hear public comments in at least two separate meetings open to the public
None of that happened here. The permit was revoked because ICE and its contractors failed to follow state law.
This is not simply a story about activist pressure, though community members have certainly mobilized. Hundreds of residents and immigration advocates packed a County Council meeting Monday night. The Council voted unanimously to move forward with emergency legislation aimed at banning permits for privately owned detention centers. Council Chair Opel Jones told the packed room that with four of five council members co-sponsoring the legislation, it was “99.99% likely to pass.” A public hearing is scheduled for Wednesday evening, with a final vote expected Thursday.
But the revocation itself was grounded in something more fundamental: the law. ICE tried to slip a detention facility into a Maryland suburb without the transparency and public process that state law requires. When county officials discovered what was happening, they had clear legal grounds to stop it.
The Howard County story also raises a deeper question: does ICE actually need all these beds?
The latest detention data shows that ICE is now holding over 70,000 people in detention facilities across the country, the highest number on record. But as I’ve documented in my recent analysis of that data, the growth in detention this fiscal year has come almost entirely from people with no criminal convictions. When the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board cited my research last week, they noted that of the 11,296 increase in single-day ICE detentions between September and January, only 902 were people with criminal convictions. The rest were people with pending charges or no criminal history at all.
The administration claims it is focused on public safety threats and national security risks. The data suggests otherwise. Communities that end up with new detention facilities, at great expense to taxpayers, are largely paying to warehouse people who don’t represent a public safety risk. That’s a hard sell to local residents being asked to accept these facilities in their neighborhoods.
Howard County is not an isolated case. Just days earlier, the Department of Homeland Security purchased a warehouse near Hagerstown, Maryland, raising concerns that it too would be retrofitted as a detention center.
The lesson here is twofold. First, communities can push back, and when they do, it can work. But second, ICE appears to be trying to build detention infrastructure quietly, slipping facilities into communities before anyone notices and without following the legal requirements for transparency.
If you are aware of a new or retrofitted detention center going into your community, I would be curious to know how your community is responding and whether ICE or its possible subcontractors are using tactics to avoid public transparency.