By Will Hammann
Capital News Service
(HYATTSVILLE, Md.) – Battles over Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers are raging across the state this month.
Howard County fought off a facility in Elkridge. Maryland is taking ICE to federal court over a Washington County warehouse. After reports of an office expansion in Hyattsville, Prince George’s is also on the frontlines.
Currently a legal office of the agency, ICE’s Hyattsville location lies just blocks away from two churches, a child care center and the Mall at Prince George’s. Local leaders, advocates and residents fear the plan to expand it could entail its use as another detainment center yet, and have taken to the streets to show what kind of fight they feel needs to be fought.
“It is gonna take the leadership of our federal government to be bold, to be unapologetic, to be loud, to be fierce in this moment,” said Prince George’s County Council Chair Krystal Oriadha. “So that people like my father can go to the store, can pick up his grandchild, walk without the fear that they will snatch him because he looks different and he talks different.”
“That is the fear of so many immigrant families,” she added, her voice cracking as she spoke.
She spoke at a rally in Hyattsville on Feb. 19, joined by other lawmakers, advocates and residents, where Rep. Glenn Ivey (Democrat-Md.) led a march in protest of what could mean intensified immigration enforcement operations in the town.
The Metro One building, where ICE has its office, loomed over the rally as Oriadha and others spoke to protesters.
“We have seen [ICE] gun down the people that they say they are trying to protect — that is the reality. We have seen babies running because they’re so fearful of being snatched up,” she said.
“The reality is that they used to snatch other children,” Oriadha said, referencing American slavery and the prominent role of slave-catchers, “and auction them off on blocks.”
Ivey harkened back to history as well.
“We’ve got a lot to get done, but we’ve seen how it can work. We saw it in Minneapolis, but not only that, we saw it in Selma and Birmingham,” he said to the crowd. “We know we can win because we’ve won before.”
But racial bias and state-sanctioned violence didn’t end with the 1965 marches at Selma, and, according to immigration advocacy organization CASA Executive Director George Escobar, weren’t reborn with the inauguration of President Trump.
He noted that ICE, funded by taxpayer money, now has a larger budget than most national military forces in the world, underlining “what happens when you’re complacent, what happens when you’re not paying attention to the news.”
“The pentagon and DHS … they didn’t create this large infrastructure out of the blue,” Escobar told Capital News Service. “This has been building over the past 20 years because, again, we haven’t been paying attention.”
He emphasized that it’s up to the people to hold the government accountable. “It’s even more important when the spotlight goes away,” he said. “Or [when] we don’t have a congressman doing a rally about a contract.”
Yet, “the biggest weapon that we have at our disposal is our own government,” said Escobar.
Prince George’s County Executive Aisha Braveboy was also at the Hyattsville rally, where she announced the executive order she signed later that day. The order temporarily halts the review and acceptance of occupancy and use permits for detention facilities until Sept. 30, unless extended by another executive order.
The day before the rally, Ivey and Senators Chris Van Hollen and Angela Alsobrooks sent a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and ICE’s Acting Director Todd Lyons demanding information about the proposal’s size and scope, nature of its use, lease duration and cost. They requested a response no later than this Friday.
According to public data from the General Services Administration, the current lease of the Metro One ICE office lasts 20 years after its beginning in June 2022.
Protesters at the rally asked Ivey if he would push to abolish ICE altogether. Currently, members of Congress have reached an impasse over funding the Department of Homeland Security, leading to its shutdown, as Democrats say they won’t agree to fund the department without reforms to ICE such as more stringent training requirements.
Ivey responded by pointing to the building with ICE’s office. “The first step we need to do here is to make sure that doesn’t happen,” referring to its expansion.
“The immediate piece is to make sure we take the steps we can to rein them in now,” Ivey told CNS. “The same things that all police departments across the country [do] — ICE should be following those same protocols.”
During his State of the Union address on Tuesday, boycotted by half of Maryland’s congressional delegates, President Donald Trump touted his administration’s border security success.
“In the past nine months, zero illegal aliens have been admitted to the United States,” he said. There were 237,538 encounters with migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border recorded by Border Patrol in the 2025 fiscal year, 1.5 million less than in 2024 and the lowest in any fiscal year since 1970 according to Pew Research Center.
But he didn’t mention ICE throughout his address.
