The records, covering arrests from Jan. 20, 2025, through early August 2026, show that ICE detained about 8,300 people following roughly 9,100 arrests in Maryland during that period—about 92%. With no long-term immigration detention center in the state, most were first taken to a hold room in Baltimore or Salisbury before being transferred elsewhere, often far from home. More than 6,200 were held at some point in Louisiana, Texas or Mississippi, and half of those arrived within about four days of being booked into ICE custody.

The transfers can have profound legal consequences. Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi fall under the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which is less protective of detainees’ rights than the 4th Circuit, which covers Maryland and Virginia. “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,” said Maureen Sweeney, who directs the Immigration Clinic at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.

The 4th Circuit ruled in September that the government cannot hold people who crossed the border without inspection without a bond hearing. In October, the full 5th Circuit ruled that even months without a bond hearing does not violate due process “so long as removal remains a viable prospect.”

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

The case of Maria Flores Garcia, 19, and her mother, Mirna Cabrera, 48, illustrates the pattern. Flores Garcia, a University of Maryland freshman who delivered the valedictory speech at Parkdale High School in Prince George’s County six months ago, accompanied her mother to a routine annual check-in at ICE’s Baltimore field office on Nov. 5. Although Flores Garcia had turned 18 and no longer had to attend, she went so her mother would feel safer, according to her boyfriend, Cesar Saavedra.

Officers detained her mother, then asked Flores Garcia whether she wanted to stay with her mother or leave. “Not knowing exactly what was going on,” she stayed, Saavedra said. Both were held in Baltimore until about 7 p.m., then taken to an ICE facility in Chantilly, Virginia, where guards told them they would be sent far away. They were eventually transferred to the Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe, Louisiana—more than 1,000 miles from home.

Their lawyer told the family that because they are held in the 5th Circuit, “they don’t have the same rights that they would have like in California or Virginia,” Saavedra said. A petition the lawyer had planned to file “wouldn’t be viable in Louisiana,” he 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 she was “outraged” and called for Flores Garcia’s “immediate release.” ICE did not respond to a request for comment about the case.

For most detainees, the first stop is a hold room at ICE’s Baltimore field office—cells meant for short stays. An ICE directive generally limits 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. 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.” DHS disputed the allegations at the time, saying claims of subprime conditions or overcrowding were false and that detainees receive food, water, blankets and hygiene products.

Stays shortened after the ruling—the median fell to about 59 hours for people booked in March and about 28 hours in June—but in September Rubin found that ICE had failed to comply with her order, citing government data showing overcrowding on more than 60% of days. She called the government’s efforts a “spectacular failure.”

After the hold room, most people were moved several times. Of the roughly 8,300 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 move 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, and ICE’s online detainee locator can lag, forcing searches to start over with each move.

In September, ICE stopped listing detainees with final orders of removal in its online 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.

Most cases ended with the person leaving the country. Among about 4,750 arrests in Maryland from Jan. 20 through the end of 2025, about 79% had ended in deportation or voluntary departure by early August 2026, about 12% in release, and about 4% were still detained. For the remaining 5%, the records do not show a clear outcome.

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

About 78% of ICE’s arrests in Maryland since Trump took office 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 person’s listed citizenship; 191 of those went to Mexico, and most were citizens of El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras. Those destinations are as ICE recorded them, which can reflect 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 someone 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 added. “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.”