On March 10, 2026, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown filed a federal lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seeking their compliance with the Attorney General Brown’s administrative subpoena for records related to reported dangerous, inhumane, and unlawful conditions in ICE “hold rooms” at the George H. Fallon Federal Building in the city of Baltimore.   

Maryland’s Office of the Attorney General (OAG) has been monitoring the conditions in the hold cells since summer of 2025. As it reviewed video from inside the hold cells, declarations from detainees in litigation, and media reports of visits by members of Congress, the office concluded that crowding and denial of basic human needs had grown worse, prompting it to open an investigation into these conditions in late January 2026. The investigation focuses on whether ICE has engaged in a pattern or practice of civil rights violations, including overcrowding, extended detention beyond legal limits, denial of medical care, denial of food and water, failure to provide sanitary conditions, and denial of access to legal counsel.   

On January 30, 2026, the OAG issued an administrative subpoena to DHS and ICE demanding records about conditions in the hold rooms, detainee demographics, and the legal basis for individual detentions. ICE denied the subpoena in full on February 25, without citing or applying its own required regulatory factors, and without offering to produce even partially responsive or redacted records. After OAG detailed these deficiencies in a follow-up letter, ICE indicated it would need until April 6 just to determine whether it could share any information. 

The Attorney General’s lawsuit alleges that ICE’s refusal to comply with the subpoena violates the Administrative Procedure Act because it was contrary to law and/or arbitrary and capricious, or (in the alternative) unreasonably delayed. The lawsuit asks the court to order DHS and ICE to produce the subpoenaed documents or order other appropriate relief. 

The conditions inside the Baltimore holding cells have been dangerous, inhumane, and unlawful — and ICE and DHS have done everything in their power to keep us from finding out just how bad they are. The agencies have stonewalled our investigation while people in their custody are denied critical medical care and forced to sleep in cold cement cells and live in their own excrement. We’re taking ICE and DHS to court to expose the full scope and impact of their lawless behavior.Attorney General Anthony Brown