HAGERSTOWN, Md. — In January, the Department of Homeland Security bought an 825,620-square-foot vacant warehouse a few miles outside of this small Western Maryland city, hoping to turn it into a processing facility for immigrant detainees. As news spread in the coming days, stunned residents asked one another how they could stop the Trump administration’s plan. Many of them found their way to Patrick Dattilio.

Dattilio was running a new Signal group for locals inspired by the resistance in Minnesota who wanted to fight the president’s deportation campaign. At first, the group, Hagerstown Rapid Response, had only been picking up one new member every couple of days.

“You could maybe wave it away and say it wasn’t here for a while,” Dattilio, 38, said of the immigration crackdown. “But the warehouse changed everything.”

Suddenly, Dattilio could barely keep up with requests to join. For his day job, he works remotely as a software developer, so he was able to write a bot to help screen would-be members of the group. Membership quickly grew to 100. Then 500. Everyone wanted to know how they could pitch in.

People volunteered to research city and county codes, pull water and sewer documents and file public record requests. An Uber driver took routes near the warehouse to keep tabs on activity there. The group even attracted two drone operators to do surveillance from afar. In a city where the only regular protests used to take place outside the downtown abortion clinic, warehouse opponents were now descending on county board meetings while Rage Against the Machine blared outside.

The Western Maryland warehouse is part of a broader Trump administration plan to convert several industrial spaces around the country into detention centers. The purchases have drawn bipartisan pushback in many communities, with residents worried about effects on the local environment, infrastructure and tax base. But nowhere has the resistance been so fierce and organized as in Hagerstown and surrounding Washington County.

The most energized warehouse opponents have no background in activism or politics — just a shared sense of dread about where the country seems to be headed and how their community figures into the administration’s plans. Dattilio grew up in Hagerstown, earned a degree in computer science from the University of Maryland, and returned to marry his high school girlfriend. He has four children between the ages of 4 and 10. His family has been in the area for 120 years.

He can’t shake the idea of Hagerstown becoming shorthand for “concentration camp.”

“Maybe it’s 10 years, maybe it’s 20 years, but if I’m still here, my kids are going to ask me what I did. And I don’t know how I could look at them and say I did nothing,” he said. “So that’s why I started a Signal group. And because I’m impatient.”

Marylanders are now waging their fight against the detention center on both legal and political fronts. In February, the state’s Democratic attorney general filed a lawsuit to block the warehouse conversion, arguing that Trump officials failed to carry out the necessary environmental analyses. A federal judge in Baltimore issued an injunction in April pausing most work at the warehouse while the underlying lawsuit proceeds.

Meanwhile, warehouse opponents see a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape local politics in a predominantly red area. The county’s governing body, the Washington County Board of Commissioners, is all Republican. Though they have said little publicly about the warehouse plan, the board passed a resolution in February pledging the county’s “full support for DHS and ICE.” At the same time, the board has enforced rules limiting public comments at meetings, angering residents across the political spectrum.

Eight Democratic candidates declared runs for the board this year; four years ago, there were just two. They hope seizing some power in local government could enable them to hinder Trump officials — or at least irritate them — through administrative levers like the county sewer authority. If they can stall it beyond Donald Trump’s presidency, maybe the project gets scrapped.

A self-described “Star Wars” nerd, Dattilio said he thinks about the warehouse battle in terms of a “rebel alliance.”

“It starts coming down to red tape,” he said. “It’s just sand in the gears, for lack of a better term. There’s opportunities to just slow this to an absolute crawl, to make it impossible to justify the cost of the fight. We did it with England once. We can do it again.”

The western Maryland warehouse is one of 11 across the country that DHS has acquired for a total of around $1 billion. Several other purchases have been scuttled, largely due to local pushback. Washington County residents couldn’t stop the warehouse sale there because Trump officials carried it out in secret.

They did so by using a government procurement process designed for military emergencies, sidestepping normal procedures and avoiding scrutiny. The administration not only bought the Hagerstown warehouse for $102 million but also awarded hundreds of millions in related contracts before anyone knew to call their senator.

Among the surprised residents were Chuck and Mary Brown, who live across the street from the warehouse and now plan to put their home up for sale. The Browns said the detention facility is one of several factors leading them to relocate to West Virginia. The warehouse site was a cornfield when they moved in more than two decades ago. Now they worry about anti-ICE protests coming to their street.

“A little bit of transparency would’ve been good,” Chuck said while hosting a garage sale on a recent afternoon.

A real estate firm broke ground on the warehouse five years ago in hopes of capitalizing on the pandemic-era logistics boom. It sits near a nexus of interstate highways an hour and a half from both Baltimore and Washington, D.C., a prime spot that would fit well in a hyper-efficient deportation system — what outgoing ICE Director Todd Lyons once described as Amazon Prime, “but with human beings.”

“It’s just a good spot to have a warehouse for logistics purposes,” said Sean Connell, who drives a forklift at a food distribution center.

Connell, 42, helps lead Hagerstown Rapid Response’s mutual aid committee. He was not politically active until last year, when the president’s agenda prompted him to join a new local branch of Indivisible, the anti-Trump progressive movement. He has since thrown himself into the warehouse fight and is working to prepare a food pantry nearby for detainees who may eventually get released from the facility.

His biggest concern is that the warehouse will empower an agency that’s deporting some 30,000 people a month, according to the American Immigration Council. But Connell believes the best way to build opposition to the detention center is by highlighting basic community concerns. The warehouse was not designed to house people — it was built with just four toilets, according to a real estate brochure — so its conversion to a detention facility could be a much bigger draw on water and sewer resources than originally planned. It would hold anywhere from 500 to 1,500 detainees, according to DHS, and sits just a couple of miles from a scenic stretch of the Potomac River at Williamsport, Maryland.

“The people who find this morally repugnant are going to find it morally repugnant. You’re not going to have much convincing to do on that end,” Connell said. “I think a lot of people don’t want it for the economic and environmental impacts. They’re pragmatic. It’s like the data centers. It doesn’t matter if you’re Republican or Democrat, nobody wants data centers in their area.”

DHS has acquired some sites at eye-popping prices. In Socorro, Texas, the agency spent $122 million on a trio of parcels that were assessed at $27 million for tax purposes last year. In Salt Lake City, an industrial real estate broker described the $174-per-square-foot that DHS paid for a vacant warehouse there as “unheard of.”

Michael Wriston, an independent journalist who grew up in Washington County, has come to view the administration’s warehouse plan as a bailout for commercial developers who overextended themselves. Wriston tracks DHS procurement for the Baltimore-based newsletter Project Salt Box, which put together an ICE warehouse-tracking tool to foster local pushback. He said readers from across the ideological spectrum have reached out with their concerns, and sometimes their help. One guy who runs a floodplain risk firm even put together a pro bono flood analysis of each warehouse site, he said.

“It transcends political beliefs,” Wriston said. “We’ve seen some of the fiercest resistance in states like Oklahoma and Mississippi, deep-red states saying, ‘No, this is not what we want in our community.’”

Undocumented immigrants who are detained in Maryland are currently sent out of state. In 2021, state lawmakers passed the Dignity Not Detention Act, which prohibited local jails from entering into contracts with ICE. The law was aimed at limiting ICE’s ability to arrest and hold people, but one of its side effects is to send detainees far from their families.

Adam Crandell, a Baltimore-based immigration attorney, said that over the past year his firm’s clients have been sent to Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. In one case, Crandell’s associate and a legal assistant had to fly to Wichita, Kansas, and drive to a remote county jail in Oklahoma. He said being separated from loved ones and lawyers has given many detainees a deeper sense of hopelessness.

“It’s hard to come out as an advocate [for immigrants] and be in favor of opening a detention facility in Hagerstown or wherever,” Crandell said. “But from the standpoint of having to represent people and recognize the inevitability of some of what’s happening, I’m also not out there protesting against it.”

But for warehouse opponents, any benefit from keeping detainees closer to home is outweighed by increased detention capacity. As Dattilio put it, “The more warehouses we get shut down, the less people they can hold, the less people can be brought in and out, and the less people can disappear.”

They also argue that new ICE facilities are bound to have the same conditions documented at existing ones. Detention center staff often call out to 911 due to malnutrition, medical neglect and suicide attempts among detainees. A study of three ICE detention centers found a median of 68 emergencies per center per year. Detainees have described overcrowded cells and overflowing toilets. One former detainee said the environment in a California ICE facility was worse than an infamous supermax prison, even though immigrant detention isn’t supposed to be punitive.

“What we’ve seen over the last 20 years is that ICE detention has expanded over time, the number of people in detention has expanded, the amount of money that ICE gets for detention has grown year after year, and the conditions never get better,” said Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, a group that seeks to end immigrant detention.

Jennifer Janus, a Washington County pediatrician, said these problems wouldn’t necessarily stay inside the detention center. ICE facilities have played host to communicable diseases, including flu, hepatitis A and measles, she said, and Hagerstown doesn’t have a lot of hospital beds to spare. She outlined these concerns in an open letter, signed by more than 60 other local doctors and nurses, to convey the stakes to ambivalent residents in Western Maryland.

“A lot of them think of it as a problem that’s 10 miles away, and other than that it’s of no concern to them,” Janus said. “It’s a much more complicated issue than that.”

Her public stance on such a politicized issue has taken Janus out of her comfort zone as a physician, and she has asked to make it clear that her views aren’t those of her employer, Johns Hopkins. But she sees the implications of the detention center as “seismic.”

“The silver lining has been finding out that there are so many other people who are on the same page as you that you might not have realized,” she said. “That part has been great: the community that’s getting built around resistance to this.”

Colin Kelly said he has never seen the county so rocked by politics, aside from when a pro-Trump trucker convoy used Hagerstown as a staging ground for their Capitol Beltway demonstration. Kelly, 29, grew up on the county’s western edge and was part of a high school class of just 25. In his day job, he manages a women’s clothing store at the outlet mall; in his spare time, he’s a drone operator for Hagerstown Rapid Response.

The group’s drones have turned up some helpful intel, including footage showing DHS brought in what appeared to be restroom trailers and water tanks. Kelly called the drone work “the little bit I can do.”

“I’m not going to tell you where I sit, but I don’t park anywhere near there,” he said of filming the warehouse. “I don’t even drive past it, so they’re not looking at my blue hybrid that screams ‘Democrat.’ Because they are watching.”

Washington County voted for Trump by a 23-point margin in 2024. The county has 44,000 registered Republicans, compared to just 31,000 Democrats. But the president’s immigration crackdown and warehouse scheme have drawn progressives here out of hiding.

Laura Spivak is one of them. A couple of years ago she moved from nearby Frederick County to the “ruby red farm town” of Clear Spring, population 372. She takes her kids to a gymnastics class near the warehouse, and lately they’ve seen a lot of unmarked DHS vehicles on the drive.

“It just hits differently when it’s right there and you see ICE agents getting a Slurpee at your 7-Eleven,” she said.

Spivak and other members of Indivisible put on a satellite No Kings protest in Clear Spring in March. Twenty-three people turned out. Spivak was thrilled. She said she was surprised by some of the surnames in attendance representing “deep-rooted families” in the community.

“There’s probably never been anything like that here,” she said. “The purpose of that was to have these little acts of resistance pop up in places where you wouldn’t normally think that you would see them, so that people didn’t feel so alone.’”

The county’s all-GOP board of commissioners has given them an inadvertent boost. Last year, the board implemented tighter restrictions on comments and signs at public meetings. The changes were in response to a local, self-described First Amendment activist who mooned the commissioners from the podium, but warehouse opponents believe they’re now being used to shut down dissent — a charge the county’s spokesperson denied.

In March, the head of the local NAACP chapter, Taj Smith, was removed from the building as she tried to argue the ICE warehouse could sap emergency services. Smith said she was careful to keep her warehouse comments tied to the issue at hand — a fee increase to support 911 operations. The board president cut her off anyway, calling her remarks “irrelevant.”

“Of course these two issues are related,” Smith said in an interview. “We’re talking about public safety concerns and the strain on our local resources.”

Outside the building, a sheriff’s deputy gave her a trespassing notice and told her not to reenter the building for the day, Smith said.

In April, the board unanimously approved the controversial purchase of $118,000 in riot gear for local law enforcement. Warehouse opponents took it as an acknowledgment that the detention center could lead to civil unrest.

Many residents suspect board members may have provided more support for DHS’s project than they’ve let on. The commissioner Derek Harvey, who resigned mid-term in February, served as Trump’s top Middle East adviser during the president’s first term and contributed to Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for Trump’s second term. Harvey said he was leaving the board to pursue new business opportunities, according to a statement from the county. He couldn’t be reached for comment.

A public records request from Hagerstown Rapid Response revealed that after the sale went through, the county administrator sent an email to the White House inviting Trump officials to come out for a tour.

In response to questions from HuffPost, the county spokesperson said commissioners did not know about DHS’s plans before the warehouse purchase. She also said the detention center is “not a County-led project,” and therefore the commissioners wouldn’t grant interviews or provide comment.

For people like Amber Dwyer, the warehouse has brought about a sense of democratic collapse at both the national and local levels. Dwyer grew up two miles from the warehouse site and is now raising a young daughter in the county. She said the warehouse has “completely changed the political dynamic around here,” turning “neighbors into enemies.” She said she was told to sit down or leave a board meeting when she tried to speak out against the detention center (though she admits she’s disposed to cussing, which she describes as “just the spice of life”).

“I hate that it’s happening everywhere,” Dwyer said of the immigration crackdown. “But when it’s literally your hometown where you grew up, and your community that you love, it definitely feels more personal to me. I can’t stop it from coming everywhere right now, but I can stop it from coming here.”

A Democratic county board could create problems for the Trump administration. While the city of Hagerstown provides water to the area around the warehouse, the county controls the sewer system that would need to be expanded to accommodate ICE. As is, the facility appears equipped to provide utilities to a warehouse work crew — not hundreds of live-in detainees and their guards.

All five seats on the board are up for election this fall. Although Democratic voters are outnumbered, nearly one in four registered voters in the county is unaffiliated. That gives hope to candidates like Dave Williams, who was one of just two Democrats who ran in 2022. Back then, Williams ran out of fear that there wouldn’t be any Democrats at all on the ballot. This time, there are seven others. Smith, the NAACP leader, is also running as an independent.

“The climate has changed,” said Williams, a committee member of the county’s Indivisible chapter. “People are fed up at all kinds of levels. They’re standing up and speaking out for the first time in a long time.”

Trump’s immigration crackdown has shaken up internal Democratic politics here as well. The area is represented in Congress by Rep. April McClain Delaney, a moderate Democrat whose district stretches from the liberal Washington suburbs to the conservative western counties. She was part of a large group of House Democrats who voted last year for Trump’s Laken Riley Act, which used the murder of a college student to expand the number of undocumented people subject to mandatory detention by ICE.

Now in a tough primary battle, McClain Delaney has disavowed her vote and introduced a bill in Congress to block the Hagerstown warehouse.

It’s unclear how the recent shake-up in DHS leadership could affect the warehouse conversion. The detention center plans were put together under then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was ousted in March. Her replacement, former Sen. Markwayne Mullin, has paused new warehouse acquisitions and pledged to “work with community leaders” on the issue. But the architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, aide Stephen Miller, hasn’t left the White House.

Asked about the status of the detention center plan, a DHS spokesperson said the new leadership is “reviewing agency policies and proposals,” and reiterated Mullin’s desire to “be good partners.”

So far, warehouse opponents have been winning the legal battle. At an April hearing in federal court in Baltimore, Justice Department lawyers argued that proceeding with the Hagerstown detention facility was essential to enforcing immigration law. But they struggled to address basic logistical questions about the project, like where all the wastewater would go.

“How can you say with a straight face that four toilets is the same as you would have with 542 people?” the judge asked at one point.

He issued an order temporarily blocking the conversion, allowing DHS only to erect a temporary fence and do basic maintenance repairs on the property.

But opponents like Dattilio are operating under the assumption that the courts will eventually give DHS the green light. His group has raised money and sent out mass mailers to residents highlighting local concerns. They’ve divvied the county into 24 districts and are assigning an “ICE watch” lead for each one. Working alongside local Indivisible groups, they’ve continued their weekly protests outside the county board meetings downtown, where drivers’ encouraging honks tend to outnumber middle fingers. And they’ve been sharing their playbook with other communities who are pushing back against DHS warehouse plans.

Dattilio said there hasn’t been much activity at the warehouse lately. The site is staffed by a handful of DHS personnel who are probably bored, judging from drone footage, he said: there appear to be doughnut marks in the parking lot. The agency recently brought in a caravan of about 70 SUVs, but many of them have disappeared.

“For the most part, it’s been quiet,” he said. “I’m guessing it’s going to stay quiet. But we’re going to keep our eyes on it, just in case.”