Federal Judge Grants Preliminary Injunction Halting Williamsport Maryland ICE Detention Construction Over NEPA Violations

Correction, 2026-08-27: Case is State of Maryland v. Mullin (originally filed as v. Noem), 1:26-cv-00733-BAH (D. Md.), Judge Brendan A. Hurson; plaintiff is the State of Maryland (AG Brown with Gov. Wes Moore), not Washington County — Washington County is only the warehouse’s location. The injunction was granted in part, not a blanket block: the April 15 order (ECF 42) and April 17 memorandum opinion (ECF 43) enjoin detention-purpose construction/renovation during the pendency of the suit, while expressly permitting HVAC-system repair, roof/wall leak repair, drywall demolition/installation, communications wiring, and an eight-foot security fence for anti-vandalism purposes. Capacity per ICE’s own Record of Environmental Consideration (REC) is 542 detainees (the REC’s operative design figure), not 1,500 — 1,500 is a separate, unfinalized expansion ceiling from an internal DHS comment. The purchase deed itself is dated January 16, 2026 (notarized Jan 15; recorded Jan 22; publicly reported Jan 27 — canon’s companion purchase entry previously used the January 27 report date as its date: field and has been corrected).

On April 15, 2026, a US District Court judge in Maryland granted in part Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown’s motion for preliminary injunction, halting ICE’s detention-purpose construction and renovation of the 820,000-square-foot former FRND-Hopewell warehouse in Williamsport, MD — planned per ICE’s own REC to hold up to 542 detainees (with an unfinalized internal ceiling of 1,500) — for the duration of the litigation, while expressly carving out HVAC repair, roof/wall leak repair, drywall work, communications wiring, and an eight-foot anti-vandalism security fence. The ruling found ICE failed to conduct environmental assessments required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) before the January 16, 2026 deed date and before the March 6 award of a $113M retrofit contract to KVG LLC of Gettysburg, PA. Specific concerns cited: the facility has only four toilets; the nearby pumping station cannot handle capacity even for the 542-person design figure (a 1,500-person buildout would be roughly 4x that load); endangered species inhabit the surrounding area.

Correction, 2026-09-17 — name the mechanism precisely. This entry describes the outcome as ICE “failed to conduct environmental assessments,” which is accurate but imprecise about why — it reads as a bare EA/EIS-skip rather than the actual, more specific defect. Per ECF 43 (the memorandum opinion itself, filed 2026-04-17, retrieved directly from CourtListener/RECAP), DHS’s Record of Environmental Consideration for Williamsport invoked three categorical exclusions — C1 (real-property acquisition), D1 (repair/maintenance), and E2* (limited new construction) — and Judge Hurson found “a strong likelihood Defendants’ application of the three invoked categorical exclusions… was arbitrary and capricious.” DHS did not skip environmental review entirely; it claimed a form of NEPA compliance (categorical exclusion) that the court found the agency’s own record could not support. This is the same legal mechanism (an invalidly-applied categorical exclusion, not an absent one) that a federal court separately found at the Gilroy, CA WEXMAC-TITUS site five months later — see 2026-09-11–gilroy-williamsport-nepa-injunctions-share-categorical-exclusion-theory — and testing whether it recurs at the program’s other nine sites is the subject of wexmac-titus-categorical-exclusion-template-test.

Attorney General Brown’s February 23, 2026 complaint had accused DHS and ICE of conducting the purchase and planning “behind closed doors, without public input, state consultation or required environmental reviews.” This is the first federal court to enjoin construction of a WEXMAC-TITUS-connected detention facility and the first successful legal challenge to the program on federal administrative-law grounds (as opposed to the tribal-sovereignty and local-ordinance routes that foreclosed Durant, OK earlier). Hundreds rallied at the Williamsport courthouse the same day. The parties file joint status reports every 21 days, and the court noted DHS may seek modification once it completes NEPA compliance. The Williamsport case now establishes NEPA as a viable litigation track against the program.

Correction, 2026-09-17 — “without documented NEPA compliance” overstated.. The closing line originally claimed all eleven WEXMAC-TITUS sites lacked documented NEPA compliance. A site-by-site test (wexmac-titus-categorical-exclusion-template-test) found this is not uniformly true, and Romulus, MI is the clearest illustration of why a bare “documented” vs. “not documented” framing is too coarse: Michigan’s own complaint (State of Michigan v. DHS, E.D. Mich. 2:26-cv-10968, ¶121, filed the morning of 2026-03-24) pleads, accurately as of that filing, “Defendants have not prepared an EIS, an EA, or properly invoked a categorical exclusion prior to executing the purchase agreement for the Romulus Warehouse.” DHS then produced a categorical-exclusion Record of Environmental Consideration that same afternoon — per Project Saltbox, “ICE Defends Detroit-Area Detention Plan After Same-Day Environmental Sign-Off” (2026-04-22), digitally signed within roughly 30 minutes, invoking the same real-estate-acquisition/minor-renovation/limited-construction category stack (C1/D1/E2*-type) used at Williamsport. Romulus therefore belongs in the same bucket as Williamsport and Gilroy — an exclusion was invoked, just reactively and a month late — not in a separate “no exclusion ever produced” bucket. Arizona (Surprise) and Georgia (Social Circle), by contrast, are documented by their own complaints as finding no categorical-exclusion document at the time of filing, and no equivalent same-day reactive filing has been confirmed for either. See wexmac-titus-categorical-exclusion-template-test for the full, current breakdown — treat that entry as authoritative over any of this entry’s own prior correction attempts.