ICE moves forward with Hagerstown warehouse-detention construction in defiance of Baltimore federal judge's injunction

On May 14, 2026, The Washington Post reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was moving forward with construction at a Hagerstown, Maryland warehouse being converted into a 1,500-person ICE detention facility, citing an internal ICE memo in which agency staffers described "exploring what work can be done" at the site. ICE's continued activity at the Hagerstown property runs against a standing temporary injunction issued the prior month by a Baltimore federal judge, who had blocked the project after finding the existing building's four toilets and two water fountains insufficient for the planned detainee capacity. The New Republic, drawing on the same Washington Post investigation, separately reported that Washington County, Maryland officials had been notified that ICE intended to conduct an environmental assessment on the property — notwithstanding the federal government's earlier argument to the court that the planned renovations posed no environmental concerns warranting such review.

The Hagerstown build-out and operations contract was awarded in March 2026 to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania–based KVG LLC, a defense contractor with no prior experience operating detention facilities, with a $113 million base value and a $642 million ceiling over three years. That award sits on top of the Department of Homeland Security's earlier $102.4 million purchase of the 825,000-square-foot Williamsport warehouse that the contract would convert. The Standing records the underlying procurement program separately at issue-90-federal-procurement-irregularities, which captures DHS's above-market warehouse acquisitions and the parallel DHS Office of Inspector General audit that opened the same day; this entry documents specifically ICE's continued construction at Hagerstown in defiance of the federal court's standing block.

The discrete archive event is the May 14, 2026 disclosure — through The Washington Post's reporting on the internal ICE memo and corroborated by The New Republic — that the agency was actively proceeding at a site under a federal injunction. Defying court orders is the primary abuse mapped here; the targeting of an immigrant population for warehouse-scale detention is the population effect the ICE warehouse program is designed to produce and is recorded as a secondary abuse. The eventual resolution of the underlying litigation, and any contempt findings or sanctions that follow, will be recorded in subsequent entries if and when they occur.