BALTIMORE — Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown sued the Trump administration on Monday in an effort to stop plans to convert a Washington County warehouse into a 1,500-bed immigration detention facility.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for Maryland, is largely based on the Department of Homeland Security’s alleged failure to comply with environmental review procedures before spending $102.4 million to buy the warehouse in Williamsport. The federal government purchased the over-825,000-square-foot facility in January for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), prompting Gov. Wes Moore and other Maryland officials to sound off over what they called a lack of transparency.

“They spent more than $100 million of taxpayer money on this purchase without telling anyone,” Brown, a Democrat, said in a recorded statement. “No public notice, no consultation with the state, no known environmental review. They just did it.”

Spokespeople for the DHS and ICE’s Baltimore field office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Earlier this month, the Washington County Board of County Commissioners expressed support for the processing facility.

Maryland House Minority Leader Jason Buckel, a Republican, said in a statement responding to the lawsuit that Maryland Democrats “are engaging in virtue signaling when it comes to ICE and trying to politically position Maryland as a sanctuary state, regardless of the consequences.” He chided Democrats for “complain(ing) about detainee conditions” at Baltimore’s ICE detention center and about local detainees being sent to facilities in other states.

“Now, they complain when the federal government undertakes efforts to construct a modern, safe and hopefully humane facility for federal detainees in a county that already approved the transaction, where substantial sums of taxpayer money have already been spent, and in an area where apparently no local zoning rules or regulations are being violated.”

The lawsuit alleges that the administration’s plans to transform the warehouse into a detention center “will have predictable impacts on the environmental, economic, and public health and safety interests” in the state. It hinges on the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to consider the environmental consequences of proposed actions before they’re finalized.

“In their zeal to purchase and convert the Williamsport Warehouse into an immigration detention facility, Defendants have run roughshod over federal law and trampled on the State’s interests,” the complaint says.

The same environmental protection law was the basis for a federal judge’s order to close the “Alligator Alcatraz” ICE facility in Florida, however, an appeals court has put that order on hold while it considers the matter.

The lawsuit filed Monday seeks for a judge to find the warehouse purchase and conversion plans illegal and restrain the Trump administration from further implementing its plans.

The DHS purchased the building Jan. 16 from an entity called FRIND-Hopewell LLC. A brochure from the online investment platform Fundrise advertised the building as “Hagerstown Crossroads at I-81,” and state property records describe it as a “Mega Warehouse” situated on more than 53 acres of land.

The facility is “not currently designed or outfitted to house, feed, bathe, protect, or provide adequate care for people detained by ICE, let alone an estimated 1,500 people,” state lawyers wrote in the lawsuit. They wrote that an immigration processing facility could “overwhelm the existing sewer lines serving the property” and increase traffic in the area.

In his video statement, Brown said that using the warehouse could “generate nearly four times more wastewater than the site was designed for” and said records from ICE detention centers show measles outbreaks, sewage failures, and “dangerous conditions” that would “fall on Maryland’s public health system to address.”

“No administration is above the law. Our people must be heard when the federal government makes decisions that affect their health, their safety, and their communities,” Moore said in a statement, adding that the state filed the lawsuit because DHS “must be held to the same legal standard as every other federal agency.”

Congress appropriated $45 billion for ICE detention centers in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act championed by President Donald Trump, a Republican who is attempting to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history.

When news broke in recent months about the federal government purchasing warehouse space, including the Williamsport building, for ICE facilities, DHS said in a tweet that the buildings “will not be warehouses — they will be well structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards.”

Meanwhile, Maryland officials are seeking to rein in ICE’s expansion within the state. Last week, Moore signed a bill banning local authorities from entering 287(g) agreements with ICE; the state Senate has also passed a bill banning law enforcement, including federal authorities, from wearing face coverings.

Immigrant-rights groups and state Democrats have also raised concerns about inhumane conditions at the holding facility in Baltimore’s ICE field office, where a video showed cramped quarters. In a pending lawsuit over the conditions at the downtown Baltimore facility, Brown’s office filed a friend-of-the-court brief saying that the hold rooms would violate the state’s detention center standards by depriving detainees of health care, food, sleeping facilities, and hygiene.

Brown cited the Baltimore holding facility and a recent shooting by ICE agents in Glen Burnie in his recorded statement, saying that “this Western Maryland detention facility would bring more of that to our doorstep.”

“Federal law gives Marylanders the right to know when and how detention facilities are built in their communities. That right was denied,” he said.

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