Most ICE arrestees in Maryland were held out of state; many moved again and again

By Mehedi Marof

Six months ago, Maria Flores Garcia, 19, stood before her classmates at Parkdale High School in Prince George’s County and gave the valedictory speech. “Congratulations, class of 2026, and remember that dreams don’t have limits or borders,” she said.

Now the University of Maryland freshman is in an immigration detention center in Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles from her home and campus. She came to the U.S. from El Salvador when she was 9.

On the morning of Nov. 5, Flores Garcia went with her mother, Mirna Cabrera, 48, to what would have been a routine appointment: the mother’s annual check-in at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Baltimore. Flores Garcia no longer had to go because she had turned 18, her boyfriend, Cesar Saavedra, told Capital News Service, but she went so her mother would feel safer.

Officers detained her mother, then asked Flores Garcia whether she wanted to stay with her or leave the building. Flores Garcia, “not knowing exactly what was going on,” stayed, Saavedra said. Minutes later, a relative got a call from the two: Both had been detained.

They were held in Baltimore until about 7 p.m., then taken to an ICE facility in Chantilly, Virginia. Guards there told them they would be sent far away, he said. That would be the Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, Louisiana, hwere they were sent next.

Their path is a common one. About nine in 10 people ICE detained after arrests in Maryland spent most of their detention outside the state, a Capital News Service analysis of agency records found. Many were moved from one facility to another.

In all, ICE detained about 8,300 people after arrests in Maryland from Jan. 20, 2025, through early August 2026. About 92% of the agency’s roughly 9,100 arrests in the state during that period led to detention. An arrest is when ICE takes someone into custody, while detention is when it books that person into one of its facilities and holds them there.

With no long-term immigration detention center in Maryland, most went first to an ICE hold room in Baltimore or Salisbury before being sent elsewhere, often far from the state.

More than 6,200 of those people were held at some point in Louisiana, Texas or Mississippi. Half of them got there within about four days of being booked into ICE custody.

Capital News Service traced those journeys through ICE detention records released by the Deportation Data Project, a research group at the University of California, Berkeley, and UCLA. The records end in early August, so they do not include Flores Garcia and her mother.

For Flores Garcia and her mother, being in Louisiana has already narrowed their options. Their lawyer told the family that because they are held in a state in the 5th Judicial Circuit, “they don’t have the same rights that they would have like in California or Virginia,” Saavedra said. “It makes the process a lot more difficult.” A petition the lawyer had planned to file “wouldn’t be viable in Louisiana,” he said.

Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi fall under the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. Maryland and Virginia are in the 4th Circuit. The difference matters, said Maureen Sweeney, who directs the Immigration Clinic at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.

“There’s a very deliberate strategy on the part of the government to move people around to hide them in the system, also to move them to legal jurisdictions where the law is not as protective,” she said.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said in a statement Tuesday that Flores Garcia’s detention “puts a clear lie to ICE’s claim that they are going after ‘the worst of the worst.’” Prince George’s County Executive Aisha N. Braveboy said that she was “outraged” by Flores Garcia’s detention and called for her “immediate release.”

ICE did not respond to a request for comment about their case.

The first stop

For most of those detained, the first stop is a hold room at ICE’s Baltimore field office, a set of cells meant for short stays. An ICE directive generally limits those stays to 12 hours, but ICE waived the limit for Baltimore in February 2025 and later allowed stays of up to 72 hours nationwide, court records show.

In 2023 and 2024, the median stay in the Baltimore hold room was about six hours, ICE detention records show. After President Donald Trump took office, stays grew longer through 2025. For people booked in January 2026, the median stay was about 106 hours, nearly four and a half days.

Hold rooms “are supposed to be very temporary places,” said Yulie Landan, a staff attorney at the National Immigration Project, one of the groups suing over conditions there. In Baltimore, she said, people were held “upwards of a weekend,” with agents “really cramming them into these tiny cells that were not meant to ever hold someone long term.”

Some had no room to lie down and tried to sleep sitting up, she said, and people with “very serious health conditions were just not getting any access to their medicine.”

On March 6, U.S. District Judge Julie R. Rubin granted a preliminary injunction ordering ICE to improve conditions in the hold room, finding that detainees were likely to succeed on claims that the conditions violated their constitutional rights.

Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown also sued ICE and the Department of Homeland Security in March for records about the rooms, which he called “dangerous, inhumane, and unlawful,” and later asked a judge to rule for the state without a trial.

DHS disputed the allegations. “These claims that there are subprime conditions or overcrowding are false,” a spokesperson told Capital News Service in March, adding that detainees are provided food, water, blankets and hygiene products.

Stays shortened in the months after the ruling. The median stay fell to about 59 hours for people booked in March and about 28 hours in June, the records show.

“I do think the situation on the ground did change,” Landan said. “It didn’t … change perfectly.”

In September, Rubin found that ICE had failed to comply with her order, citing the government’s own data showing overcrowding on more than 60% of days, and called the government’s efforts a “spectacular failure.”

Moved again and again

After the hold room, most were moved several times. Of the roughly 8,300 people detained, about two in three passed through three or more ICE facilities, counting the hold room, and about one in five passed through five or more.

Each of those moves takes people “further away from their community members and their loved ones and their attorneys,” Landan said.

Families and lawyers are often not told when someone is transferred, she said, and ICE’s online detainee locator can lag, so the search starts over with each move.

Sweeney said these transfers can leave lawyers unable to catch up “with where the person is to file a habeas petition.”

Federal judges in Maryland, she said, “are extremely receptive to habeas petitions and to arguments that people have been illegally detained.” In the 5th Circuit, she said, people are “much more likely” to be held indefinitely and to lose their immigration cases.

The two courts disagree on whether people who crossed the border without inspection can be held without a bond hearing. The 4th Circuit ruled in September that the government can’t hold them without one. The 5th Circuit’s full court ruled in October that even months without one does not violate due process “so long as removal remains a viable prospect.”

Finding people has also become harder. In September, ICE stopped listing detainees with final orders of removal in its online detainee locator, Sweeney said.

Landan said those people “are no longer even showing up on that database,” a change her group is challenging in federal court.

Many people with final removal orders had been checking in with ICE “for 10 years, 20 years,” Sweeney said, and some have orders barring their return to countries where they face persecution. “They’re essentially disappearing those people into the system,” she said.

Where they ended up

Most cases ended with the person leaving the country. To track outcomes, Capital News Service counted every arrest, not only those that led to detention. CNS looked at arrests from Jan. 20, 2025, through the end of that year, about 4,750, because cases can take months to resolve.

By early August 2026, about 79% of those arrests had ended in deportation or voluntary departure. About 12% ended in release, and about 4% were still detained. For the remaining 5%, the records available don’t show a clear outcome.

Landan said some departures were not as voluntary as the name suggests. “It’s not really voluntary. It’s extremely coercive,” she said.

She said detained people are told that unless they agree to be deported, or to go to Mexico, they will keep being transferred and will never get out.

“Some people do sign that,” she said, “because they were coerced into it.”

Most of ICE’s arrests in Maryland were of people from four countries. Since Trump took office, about 78% of the agency’s arrests in the state were of citizens of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras or Mexico, though the agency recorded citizens of 104 countries in all.

ICE recorded 271 departures to a country other than the one listed as their citizenship. Most of them, 191, went to Mexico, and most of those were citizens of El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras. Those destinations are as ICE recorded them, which can be where a flight landed rather than where someone settled.

People sent to a country they have never lived in “don’t have a community there,” Landan said. “They’re being dropped in a country they’ve never been to where they probably don’t speak the language.”

In her view, the arrests, the hold rooms, the transfers and the deportations are one process. “Each part of this process is horrific in its own right, but it is all one story,” she said, “of the government’s quest to have the largest deportation machine they can.”

Flores Garcia and her mother remain in detention in Louisiana, Saavedra said.

He described Flores Garcia as the one who always went above and beyond. “She’s very intelligent, very caring, very well spoken,” he said.

“A mother and a daughter that have been doing everything right,” he said. “They go to the yearly check-in. They’re not scared to do what they’re supposed to do, and they’re the ones being detained.”