BALTIMORE SUN on ICE Facilities in Maryland

From Natalie Jones' 2-23-26 BALTIMORE SUN article entitled "Maryland Battles Over ICE Facilities Raise Constitutional Question":

As local governments in Maryland clash with the Trump administration’s plans for new federal immigration facilities, the issue is reviving a long-running constitutional question: When the federal government buys or uses property, does it have to obey state and local zoning and land use laws?

Legal scholars say the short answer is complicated — and multiple disputes now unfolding across Maryland could help determine it.

At the center is a lawsuit filed Monday by Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown seeking to block the Trump administration’s plan to convert an 825,000-square-foot warehouse in Washington County into a 1,500-bed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center. The suit argues the Department of Homeland Security failed to complete required local environmental review before spending $102.4 million to purchase the Williamsport property.

Meanwhile, Baltimore County lawmakers may have passed emergency legislation banning private immigration detention facilities earlier this month, but it doesn’t stop ICE or its legal department from occupying office space in Hunt Valley.

Together, the disputes highlight a fundamental constitutional tension: the supremacy clause — which generally gives federal law priority over conflicting state law — versus traditional local authority over land use [...].

Cori Alonso-Yoder, director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, said a federally owned detention center would generally be permissible so long as it does not violate constitutional rights. The Baltimore County law instead targets private actors who might host detention operations.

Federal immigration detention relies heavily on private facilities; a February 2025 analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found roughly 90% of people held by ICE were housed in privately owned or operated centers.

To read the entire article, click HERE.