The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome back to The Real News Network. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. In the small town of Williamsport on the western border of Maryland, which is about an hour and a half from where I’m sitting right now in Baltimore, the Department of Homeland Security purchased a massive industrial warehouse for $102 million with plans to turn it into an ice detention center. Now, I’ve traveled to that warehouse myself. It is a gigantic over 800,000 square foot behemoth in the middle of rural Maryland, built for logistical purposes to house boxes and pallets of things, not human beings. And yet, DHS plans to hold up to 1,500 people per day at this facility, but local efforts to expose, delay, and shut down the Trump administration’s heinous plans for this makeshift concentration camp are growing. A broad coalition of local officials, faith leaders, and civil rights organizations have filed an amicus QA brief in the state of Maryland versus Nome lawsuit, urging the US District Court for the District of Maryland to halt DHS’s rush plan to convert the massive Williamsport warehouse into a large scale immigration detention center.

Now, today we are speaking with Sonia Kumar, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Maryland who is part of the team of legal representatives who filed the brief. Sonya, thank you so much for joining us today. Let’s start by breaking this down for folks watching, many of whom may just now be learning about the Trump administration’s horrific plans to turn massive warehouses like the one in Hagerstown into detention centers. So what has our government already done to execute these plans and what do we know about their plans for the Hagerstown warehouse specifically?

Sonia Kumar:

Thanks so much for having me. So I think the best way to articulate it is to use the words of acting director for ICE, Todd Lyman’s own language, which was this is part of a scheme by the Trump administration to treat human beings like, in his words, Amazon prime packages. And it’s important to understand this in the context of the overall massive scheme to deport immigrants from America in a sort of volume-based way rather than any way that involves a consideration of due process or individual circumstances. And part of the scheme is to have a large network of warehouses essentially that are used as essentially internment facilities for immigrants that are being funneled through the deportation pipeline. And so in Maryland, what has happened is the DHS has been spending millions, hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring facilities across the country or pursuing facilities. And the Maryland site in Williamsport is one of the first such facilities that DHS actually purchased and closed the deal on.

And their plan in Maryland, to the extent that we have been able to sort of piece that together, is to operate this warehouse as an internment facility for up to 1,500 people per day with very rapid turnover of their articulating a stay of three to seven days, meaning that we’re talking about cycling in tens of thousands of people through this warehouse over the course of a year.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And that’s also what they say they’re going to do. But as we know right here in Maryland, in Baltimore, like two blocks from where I’m sitting, there was the ICE field office where leaked video showed people packed into rooms staying much longer, being detained for much longer than the period they were supposed to in these horrific conditions. So I think that’s among the many concerns that folks have about what DHS says they’re going to do and what the reality of it is going to be. But I want to talk about the fact that there’s still a whole lot we don’t actually know about this warehouse. And let’s talk about that for a second, like the secrecy shrouding this whole process, because the brief that your team filed states, there are no public documents proposing a layout of the detention center at the Williamsport warehouse, no public documents proposing anything regarding its operations, nor even DHS’s plans to transform the warehouse from a low occupancy building designed for products to a large scale detention center housing human beings with rapid turnover.

Indeed, as of March 23rd, 2026, months after DHS purchased the facility, Hagerstown’s mayor confirmed that DHS had not contacted the city or communicated at all about DHS’s plans and highlighted his unanswered questions and concerns on four separate fronts, infrastructure, emergency services, economic impacts, and lack of legal processes. So I mean, that’s pretty stunning, but what can you tell us, Sonia, about how the government is able to do this with so little public information being disclosed, including to the mayor of the town where it’s going to be converted?

Sonia Kumar:

I mean, I think the reality is they’re not supposed to be able to do it. That’s why there’s a federal lawsuit that has been filed by the state of Maryland. And let me zoom back out and say, in a typical sense, the federal government, like many other entities, is regulated in how it undertakes massive projects in general, regardless of the nature of the project. One of the ways in which that regulation occurs is the National Environmental Policy Act, which is intended to ensure that when the federal government is taking a broad action that is going to have environmental consequences, that it is in communication with local entities, local officials, the state in which the project’s occurring, the community in which it’s occurring, before it takes action, before it proceeds with a sale. And similarly, similar regulations exist regarding other impacts on historical properties or things like that.

And part of what I think is really important for everyone to understand is that consistent with many other aspects of how this administration operates, particularly in the immigration context, everything about this has been done in a very lawless, secretive way that is aimed at evading the kind of normal processes, the normal channels that exist for a reason. I think there’s no reason that this needs this project, this undertaking needs to be done in this incredibly secretive, rushed way. And it’s that combination of things that has created so much alarm. So for example, in a typical … And that’s the basis of the state’s lawsuit is that, listen, before you do this, we need to know what you’re planning so that we can weigh in on what it means for us. And the idea is that the federal government works with local communities to make sure that it’s mitigating the impact of any project it’s proposing, and so that it aligns to the best degree possible with the local landscape, local infrastructure.

What’s happened here is that you have this sort of nationally driven campaign that, like a lot of the other administration’s recent practices, is really driven by sort of soundbites and ill-conceived plans that don’t have depth, don’t have the analysis because they’re not really driven by operational needs. They’re not really driven by reality. They’re driven by this rhetoric of how we’re going to dehumanize immigrants and we’re going to shove this down the throats of every community in America. And so I think that context is really important to understanding why we’re in the situation we are now, where the site has already been purchased without any notice to the local entities and where DHS doesn’t have and hasn’t been compelled to articulate in any sort of clear way what its actual plans are. And so instead, what all of us are doing, including the state of Maryland where this project is being located, is cobbling together guesses about DHS’s plans based on documents that have been produced through Freedom of Information Act requests to other states that we’re sort of gleaning insights about their plans for Maryland.

And as you said, the absence of that, the absence of a sense of this is the plan, has made it incredibly difficult to engage with the reality of what’s at stake. So for example, when you talk about just concretely, as you’ve said, taking a building that is meant for packages, that’s meant for pallets and turning it into something that is approximating something habitable for human beings, for thousands of human beings over the course of a year, it doesn’t take any kind of specialist to understand that that is a dramatic shift in use, that’s a dramatic shift in the kind of infrastructure that a building needs, and also in the ways in which that building and that location is going to interact and affect the community around it. So everything from, and I think you named the concerns of the Haglerstown officials, and one of the things that’s very important to understand is that Hagerstown supplies the water for this building.

Right now, this building is not slated for because it was built as a warehouse, it’s water use expectations, what it’s sort of designed for and what it’s been permitted for is a very small volume of water that is like a hundred times less than what is estimated would be needing if it were housing human beings. And that is hugely significant in Washington County where Hagerstown provides a lot of water for the entire region and where the sort of water has been identified by local residents and government officials as sort of one of the region’s top concerns because there’s a very aging hundred-year-old water infrastructure and this has been a source of concern, sort of a longstanding overdue need for years. And so the federal government coming in and saying like, “Well, okay, now we’ve bought this building and we want to turn it into this internment facility for immigrants.” And so now we’re … And by the way, they still haven’t told Hagerstown or approached Hagerstown to say what their needs are, but Hagerstown officials understandably are looking at this with great alarms saying like, “We’re waiting for the shoe to drop here for the federal government to tell us that they suddenly need hundreds of thousands of gallons of water more than we have ever allocated for this site, and we’re going to need to be able to account for that.

” And so there’s a very concrete way in which the rhetoric by federal officials really collides with the everyday community concerns that really matter to people in their lives. And if people wonder like, “Okay, so does that mean that they’re going to increase my taxes in order to need to make changes to the system in order to deliver water to this site that I don’t even support?” And so there’s been all the secrecy has also precluded any kind of direct engagement about what people can expect for their community.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and that’s something that I’ve heard myself talking to residents and local organizers who were trying to fight back against these horrific plans out there in Hagerstown, Williamsport in that whole area. They told me upfront that we can’t even get answers from our county commissioners. They don’t even do public comment. They won’t allow us to speak at their public meetings. If we can stand there silently holding a tiny sign and if we sneeze, they’ll kick us out. So there’s layers of secrecy from the local level all the way up to the federal level, as you were saying, and you can just hear the immense frustration from residents that we’ve spoken to and that folks can go watch and hear for themselves on our channel. But also I wanted to mention two other things. One that folks in town in Hagerstown and Williamsport have also mentioned to us is that, I mean, this Williamsport, which is right next to Eggerstown, which is Williamsport is where the warehouse is, is a town of like 1500 people or 2000 people, sorry.

And the warehouse is slated to hold upwards of 1,500 people per day. So that’s almost twice the population of the town. And they’ve gotten no input whatsoever on the process of this. It’s just they’re going to be moving in and doing this without anyone say so. And the last thing I wanted to say is I’ve worked at warehouses like this. I’ve been a low wage worker in hot box warehouses just like this one in Southern California, and there is already so much pain, exploitation, and hidden horrors that happen in these types of warehouses. But I can tell you from firsthand experience, they sure as hell are not built to house 1,500 people. I mean, we were sweltering, working in there, moving pallets and boxes around with no air conditioning. This is a horrific plan that realistically would require a lot of horrific things to execute.

And I want to bring us back down to where things currently stand with the battle over this warehouse, particularly with the legal battle. And I wanted to ask you, Sonya, if you could tell us more about where the legal battle over DHS’s plans to turn the Hagerstown warehouse into an immigration detention center are, and how you and the ACLU of Maryland are involved in that fight.

Sonia Kumar:

Absolutely. And so I think a lot of this comes back to the secrecy and the rushed nature of the project. And so for folks who aren’t aware, earlier, a few months after it became apparent that DHS had purchased the site and intended to use it as an immigration detention center, the state of Maryland filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for Maryland contending that DHS was violating the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA, and kind of utterly disregarding its obligations in acquiring and pursuing the operation of the warehouse as an immigration detention site. And you can get kind of technical about some of the ways in which those regulations are intended to constrain or guide governmental decision making. But the upshot is that essentially what the state has been saying is like, look, you’re proposing a massive project in our backyard. The federal law has always required that before you pursue this project, you notify us and you communicate with us.

And as the state, we have a strong interest in the environmental and health consequences of a site like this, and that focus is really driven by NEPA itself, but also acknowledging that it’s not just the state, it’s the local residents and the local officials and the surrounding communities that have a concern. And so the state had filed its case. And then when it became apparent that DHS was continuing to move forward and had actually, again, in an incredibly secretive, non-transparent process, because another important aspect of this is all of the contracting that DHS is doing and all of the ways in which the administration has been sort of, again, circumventing the typical procurement processes explicitly for the purpose of sort of evading accountability, evading transparency, evading the normal challenges. When it became apparent that the federal administration had contracted with an entity to actually initiate construction, building out the site, the state moved for what’s called a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order, basically asking the court to say, “Please direct ICE to stop taking any action until our case is resolved.” If they are allowed to proceed, it will do irreparable harm to our communities.

And that’s sort of the posture of the case right now is that the judge granted that temporary order and the state has now moved for a more longstanding, it’s often called a pause on sort of the federal action while the case plays out. And the DHS has come in and of course opposed this motion saying essentially, “We believe we need a detention space in Maryland and we’re entitled to use this warehouse in that way.” And next Wednesday, on April 15th at 10:00 AM, there will be a hearing at the federal courthouse on this question where both sides will be able to present evidence of their positions and support of their positions and try to persuade the judge. And so we came in because the NEPA lawsuit is filed on behalf of the state, but there’s so many more folks who are concerned, as you know, from meeting with local residents.

And part of what became really apparent is that local community members really wanted an opportunity to share with the court what their concerns are. And so our involvement was really with and driven by these folks who were really on the ground in Washington County. So Hagerstown Rapid Response, which is this amazing network of folks who area residents who organize very specifically around concerns about what this means for their community. It includes people whose families have lived there for generations who’ve built their homes and sort of never contemplated that this would exist in their community as well and include area doctors who are already concerned about the really under-resourced health infrastructure and what a massive … Any influx of a large volume of human beings is going to stress existing health resources, as well as some of the local officials, Hagerstown officials who signed on just sort of acknowledging that they haven’t been informed at all about DHS’s plans for their community and sort of feel an obligation sort of how can they assess what to do without having even the basic information that’s required.

And then in addition to our brief, there was another brief filed by a constellation of more environmental focus groups that sort of further elaborated some of the concerns about the potential impact. And overall, I think there’s so many … Part of what was, when we’re sitting down to do the brief was like, there’s actually so much to say. There’s so much to say about the potential consequences and questions, and you don’t really even get a chance to get into it all, but even just think about traffic and what it means if you’re talking about the enormous volume of traffic we’re talking about. If we’re talking about, again, DHS is saying we’re aiming for three to seven days. So think about the volume of traffic that means for thousands of people coming back and forth, staff, visitors, all of that. And in this region that it has both highways that are already overburdened and then a very small regional airport.

And then there’s so much, but maybe I’ll just leave it at that. Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, the list of horrors and potential horrors is quite long. I mean, even something that’s come out of our own reporting is like, a lot of these immigration detention centers are out in the middle of rural nowhere so that a lot of Americans don’t see them, don’t know that they’re there. But also for the people who are being incarcerated inside these facilities, it makes it so much harder for them to access legal teams, for their families to communicate with them. It is a whole geography of cruelty that goes into the planning for construction of and conversion of these warehouses and detention facilities into a machine to execute Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

Sonia Kumar:

Absolutely. And I think you’re bringing up something really important, which is like there’s this very clear effort by the administration to really criminalize immigrants and all of the ways in which that word is very loaded and this is part of that. Detention is part of that, is sending them a message. And it’s a very intentional effort to dehumanize people who are, many of whom have lived here for years or decades, have US citizen children, many people who have been doing all the right things, who’ve been failed by the immigration legal system through no fault of their own. And I think there was a phrase that I heard recently that I thought really that has stuck with me is that there are so many people who’ve lost their sort of status under Donald Trump, who were sort of with the swipe of a pen, the administration has taken them from being in status to out of status without any individualized assessment or due process.

And sort of in this way, manufacturing this notion of a crisis and then criminalizing people and detaining them to sort of further this narrative and this rhetoric that the very people who have made America great, have contributed to society are sort of harming it. And if you build a detention center of that scale, you’re going to fill it. You’ll find reasons to fill it. And we know that from every context of the criminal legal system, that’s not unique to the immigration system.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. I mean, I don’t know if there’s a more clear and horrifying example of how the state under Donald Trump has taken legal residents and turned them into illegal immigrants, then people going to their immigration court hearings, following the law, doing what they’re supposed to be doing, and suddenly getting captured by masked men, swept into a shadowy staircase and disappeared. We’ve been seeing that all over the goddamn country. We’ve been posting documentaries from the immigration court in New York. I reported from an immigration court out in Orange County, California. It’s happening everywhere, and it’s just proof of what Sonya is saying. And I could talk to you for hours, but I know I got to let you go here in a minute. So I wanted to bring this back down to the grassroots level because just like the communities that are fighting back to stop the construction of these massive water guzzling, environment poisoning, power sucking AI data centers in their towns, we have seen grassroots movements fighting back against these ICE warehouses and winning some major victories.

There was a Canadian company, Jim Patterson Developments that canceled its sale of a big warehouse in Virginia to DHS earlier this year, residents in Hutchins, Texas also fought back and got another deal canceled. So I wanted to ask you, Sonya, what can we learn from these resistance efforts that are happening around the country? What hope is there to actually stop the taxpayer funded conversion of warehouses like the one in Hagerstown into concentration camps? And do you have any messages for folks watching about what they can do to get involved and be part of that fight?

Sonia Kumar:

Absolutely. I think seeing the organizing and resistance has been incredibly inspiring and actually shows that contrary to the message that the administration tries to send, that all of this is inevitable and there’s no way out. There is. And I think of, and it’s very much folks coming together and saying, “We don’t want this, ” and recognizing that people have different reasons for not wanting it. There are those of us who are sort of very strongly morally opposed to this, but there are also people who are just like, “Listen, I don’t really care, but I know I don’t want a massive detention center in my backyard.” And I think part of what has been so important to see, and I think really valuable is the way in which that local organizing, that local coming together and people sort of building these broad tents has been able to successfully defeat some of the detention sites and in places like Maryland and elsewhere, significantly slow them down.

And so one of the examples that I think I go to again and again, because I think it’s so powerful is in Social Circle Georgia where DHS has proposed an even larger sort of detention internment facility. And the City of Social Circle, Georgia has sort of in a very public way, documented their efforts to communicate with DHS about what’s coming. And they said, “Listen, we’re really concerned about our local infrastructure, we are reading in the papers that you are planning a facility to house thousands of people, and we’re very concerned because we already know our local infrastructure can’t handle that. ” And they solicited meetings with DHS, they finally got one, and they said, “We went in wanting to hear answers for how they’re going to respond. We have these very concrete concerns like, what is your plan here?” And they came out of the meeting and they posted and it was very mild mannered.

It didn’t have the frustration that I might use, but sort of very methodically laid out how DHS didn’t have basic answers and was lying on completely false information or incorrect information. I mean, relying on sort of a water plant that didn’t even exist or hadn’t been built yet and really using that information. I think so part of what’s important is combining the information that is available, looking at what other jurisdictions have done, looking at how folks are handling the queries that they’re getting, the responses they’re getting from DHS and combining that with this sort of energy and activism and concern, and then engaging with local officials because that’s where you start. And I think that that has been an incredibly … It has absolutely changed outcomes and will continue to change outcomes. And And I think there’s tremendous, from my perspective, there’s tremendous momentum around shutting down or significantly decreasing the scope of the administration’s plans.

And in fact, DHS has now said under the guise of a transition in leadership that, well, we’re pausing on future purchases of sites while we assess our plans. That is a direct response to the organizing and mobilizing that you’ve talked about. And so I think number one is find out, make sure you know what’s happening in your community. I think there are a lot of Marylanders. It’s been very surprising to me a lot of folks who are not aware of this happening here. And that’s step one. And then once you do, there are being able to connect with your local officials and other folks to organize around what you can do. And in Maryland, we’re really hoping that folks attend and continue to participate in the litigation, but also in the local efforts asking their elected officials what they’re doing to protect the community and how they’re holding DHS accountable, not just for its representations, but for the sufficiency of its answers, which is, I think, a real concern in Washington County.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Real News Network Podcast. And thank you to our guest, Sonia Kumar, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Maryland. If you want to get more coverage and hear more important conversations just like this, then we need you to become a supporter of The Real News Now. Share this podcast with people in your circles, your friends, your family, your coworkers. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so you never miss a story and go to therealnews.com/donate and become a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. For the Real News Network, this Maximillian Alvarez signing off from Baltimore, take care of yourselves and take care of each other.