Hagerstown Rapid Response and Washington County Indivisible join elected officials and community organizations in calling on DHS to release the environmental studies behind proposed Washington County ICE detention center and extend public comment period.

As the public comment period on the proposed Washington County ICE detention center comes to a close, we are proud to stand alongside the elected officials and organizations that have joined the call for transparency and accountability.

We stand with Maryland State Delegate Matt Schindler, Hagerstown City Council Members Caroline Anderson, Erika Bell, and Tiara Burnett, the Washington County Branch of the NAACP, the ACLU of Maryland, and every organization and community member demanding answers.

DHS claims that converting an 825,000 square foot warehouse into a massive ICE detention center capable of producing nearly 200,000 gallons of wastewater per day will have no significant environmental impact. Yet the agency has refused to release the wastewater studies, environmental assessments, infrastructure analyses, and other reports it relied upon to reach that conclusion.

The public cannot meaningfully comment on information it has not been allowed to see.

DHS should immediately release every study and assessment used in its determination and extend the public comment period so residents, elected officials, and community organizations can review the same information available to the federal government before submitting comments that could shape the future of Washington County and the surrounding region.
https://blog.hagerstownrapidresponse.com/p/hagerstown-rapid-response-and-washington

The announcement came just hours after Hagerstown Rapid Response and Washington County Indivisible concluded a public comment campaign that generated more than 4,300 comments.

For the last month, we at Hagerstown Rapid Response and Washington County Indivisible have been urging the community to submit public comments opposing the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to retrofit an 825,000-square-foot industrial warehouse in Washington County into a giant ICE detention center.

It was clear from the beginning that DHS was not conducting this process in good faith, but we also knew it was important to make a statement if we could show that thousands of people opposed this facility opening in our community. Throughout the entire process, the public was asked to submit comments about the project’s environmental impacts without having access to many of the environmental studies, engineering reports, infrastructure analyses, and operational plans that DHS relied upon to conclude those impacts would not be significant.

Just hours after our public comment campaign ended, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown submitted comments to DHS asking for many of the same things that thousands of residents had spent the last month demanding.

Brown called on DHS to release the studies underlying its conclusions, provide another public comment period once those studies become available, and prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement rather than the more limited Environmental Assessment currently being pursued by the agency. He also urged DHS to consider selling the warehouse rather than moving forward with plans to convert it into an immigration detention center.

https://blog.hagerstownrapidresponse.com/p/maryland-attorney-general-demands-environmental-studies-new-public-comment-period-and-suggests-dhs-sell-washington-county-ice-warehouse

Built with vibes, secured by nothing, and somehow surprised when the data walked out the door

Over the weekend, we reported that something was wrong with GTFOICE.org, a high-profile anti-ICE organizing site associated with Miles Taylor, who previously served as Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security, the same agency that oversees ICE. The project is described as a collaboration between DEFIANCE.org, Project Salt Box, and Save America Movement.

At first glance, the situation looked like a potential data breach. However, as we began to dig deeper, the picture that emerged was not one of a sophisticated hack, but of a system that may never have had meaningful protections in place to begin with.

Nearly 18,000 people entered their personal information into the platform, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, and zip codes with the expectation that they would receive a playbook or be connected to local organizing efforts. Instead, that data appears to have been accessible through a publicly exposed API that lacked basic safeguards, such as authentication and rate limiting, meaning that anyone who knew where to look could potentially view and collect large amounts of sensitive information tied to anti-ICE organizing activity.

The situation escalated further when members of our team, who had signed up across multiple locations using different phone numbers, received the following message days later:

“Hi *****, Your email, phone number, location, and other information that you provided to GTFOIce have been forwarded to the authorities, including FBI, HSI, and ICE. Miles Taylor and Xander Schultz are grifters and terrible coders, and should never have been hired for security anything”

We cannot independently verify the claim made in that message, but its impact was immediate, amplifying fears about how exposed this data may have been and who could have accessed it.

In practical terms, this means the data people submitted was effectively sitting out in the open online, without real barriers preventing access and without controls to limit how much could be retrieved. The issue was not that someone broke through layers of security, but that the system itself appears to have made that data available in the first place.

Signups, silence, and a suspicious text: users joined GTFOICE.org to protest ICE and woke up to messages claiming their data was sent to federal agencies.

Just four days ago, Project Salt Box’s Michael Wriston and Defiance.org’s Miles Taylor appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show to announce their partnership for the GTFOice website. As Rachel Maddow noted, “They’re calling it a rapid response network to stop ICE prison camps before they start.”

An apparent data breach may have compromised user information submitted to GTFOice, a newly launched platform designed to organize opposition to proposed ICE detention facilities across the United States. The situation is still developing, but early signs point to a serious security failure involving sensitive user data.

Three days ago, we signed up on the platform using multiple email addresses and phone numbers across several locations listed on the site, including Hagerstown and Williamsport, Maryland, as well as Salt Lake City. No confirmation emails or texts were received at the time of signup.

That changed this morning.

One of the phone numbers used during signup received a text message claiming that user data submitted to GTFOice had been forwarded to federal authorities, including the FBI, HSI, and ICE. The message also included inflammatory claims about the individuals behind the project. We responded to the message but received no reply.

Shortly after, the GTFOice website appeared to acknowledge an issue. Around 6 p.m. Eastern, the site displayed a notice stating that signups were temporarily paused while a security review was completed. Within roughly twenty minutes, that message was removed and replaced with a generic “under construction” page.

GTFOice is collecting highly sensitive information from individuals organizing against federal immigration enforcement infrastructure. Any compromise of that data could have significant consequences for those involved.