April Amaya-Luis has been undocumented in Maryland for more than two decades. On February 4th, she went for her customary check-in with her probation officer in Chestertown. Luis had plead guilty to a misdemeanor for probation in exchange for no jail time.

“When I left the appointment, I didn’t imagine immigration officers would be waiting for me on my way out,” she said in Spanish through an interpreter.

They handcuffed her and by late that evening she was transported to the US Immigration’s and Customs Enforcement Field Office in Baltimore, housed in the George H. Fallon Federal Building at 31 Hopkins Plaza.

“I would sleep on the floor. There was a concrete structure that looked kind of like a stage, I would sleep there,” she said.

She says her room had no window, she was never taken outside for fresh air or recreation. She was housed completely alone with no way to tell time.

“When I was locked in there my mental health was bad,” she said. “There was a point where I was pulling my hair out. I was banging my head against the cement walls because I didn't understand. I didn't know why I was being locked up.”

At first, she said she was given peanut butter and jelly sandwiches daily. But when she asked for something else, she said the guards stopped feeding her completely. She thinks she went between four and five days without food.

According to ICE policies, detainees are not meant to be kept in holding rooms for more than 12 hours. Amaya-Luis was there for a total of seven nights and without a cot.

Rachel Girod represents Amaya-Luis. Girod and other lawyers who spoke with WYPR say that keeping detainees for days in the Baltimore holding rooms is a new practice that has begun since Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January.

“ICE has alleged that they've gotten a waiver for that 12 hour limit. They have not provided any information about the limits of the waiver, the grounds for the waiver, who issued the waiver,” said Girod.

The ICE Baltimore Field Office did not respond to WYPR’s questions about a waiver.

Instead, a spokesperson sent a statement saying that the agency remains “committed to enforcing immigration laws fairly, safely, and humanely and in full compliance with federal law and agency policies.” The office said that since Baltimore operates a holding room and not a detention facility, the rooms are not subject to the 2011 Performance-Based National Detention Standards.

WYPR reviewed a March 7th email sent to local immigration lawyers from Rachel Ullman, the American Immigration Lawyers Association liaison to Baltimore’s ICE field office. The email summarized a conversation between Ullman and Field Director Matthew Elliston. It explained that when detention facilities in Pennsylvania and Virginia are full, ICE may have to hold someone for longer than 12 hours to find bed space outside of Maryland.

Under the state’s 2021 Dignity Not Detention law, ICE cannot detain people in state-run facilities.

An ICE spokesperson did say that ICE medics are on site for necessary medical care.

Amaya-Luis believes her treatment was especially cruel because she is a transgender woman.

WYPR spoke with multiple lawyers who said their clients were made to sleep on the ground, had no access to recreation, and had sometimes only one sandwich a day.

“I was told yesterday by the person I consulted with his family member and he was being held in a room where everybody had to sleep on the floor, and there were 15 or 20 people in one room,” said Girod.

Detainees report little access to phones so often calls are made to family members before they can speak with legal representation.

Nilsa Yurivilca, an advocate at the Baltimore non-profit Asylee Women Enterprise, had a client who was detained for two nights in a room with 15 other men and nowhere to sleep but the floor. She did say he had a blanket. He also required insulin, which she says ICE officials took from her at an arranged drop off. Her client told her he was only fed once a day. He spent two nights in the Baltimore holding room before being sent to a detention facility in Pennsylvania, where he is held as of Thursday evening.

Eric Lopez, an attorney at the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights says Maryland’s detention laws are not the problem. Instead he points to reports where anonymous ICE officials said they are being asked to detain 75 individuals per field office per day.

“The overcrowding of ICE detention centers directly related to their escalation and enforcement and their indiscriminate focus on arresting anyone who they come into contact with without status,” said Lopez. “And this just is not something we have seen before.”

The Amica Center has been working with detained immigrants in the Baltimore/ Washington DC area for 25 years.

All six lawyers who spoke with WYPR reported having clients who were detained without violent criminal records.

Amaya-Luis pleaded guilty to a second-degree assault, a misdemeanor, in early February after an adult male pest worker accused her of unwanted touching when he was in her home. Amaya-Luis made local and national headlines when the White House circulated a post of her image on the social media platform X that misgendered her and accused her of child abuse. Girod, her lawyer, called those claims “baseless” and Amaya-Luis has not been charged with any crimes related to the abuse of minors.

Amaya-Luis spent an entire week by herself in a Baltimore holding room before being sent to a facility in Florida. She was one of the lucky ones; ultimately, she wasn’t deported although her family did have to pay to get her back to Maryland on their own dime.

Amaya-Luis is married to an U.S. citizen, and they live together in Kent County. She began the process of applying for a U.S. green card in 2024, said Girod. Amaya-Luis is still in that process now.

Back home, Amaya-Luis says she feels “smaller” after her experience with detainment. People don’t trust her, she says.

“This false post by ICE made it seem like I’m such a horrible person and did such horrible things,” she said, speaking of the image posted to social media by the White House. It’s caused her to lose her cleaning business, she says.

“I’m trying to regain my social image back. I want to be approached and not reproached.”

WYPR reached out to ICE in Baltimore with multiple emails and calls in the days before this story was published but ICE representatives did not agree to an interview by late Friday evening.

This story has been updated to correct that on February 4th, Amaya-Luis was meeting her probation officer for a check-in related to her misdemeanor charge, not an immigration check-in.