Residents are shaken and demanding answers after ICE agents terrorized a quiet, suburban neighborhood in Frederick, Maryland, earlier this month. On September 4, federal agents swarmed the Tasker’s Chance neighborhood in West Frederick, invaded the home of one family, and eventually left without making any arrests. ICE agents were filmed beating peaceful protestors and menacingly driving their unmarked cars onto sidewalks and private property while local police officers stood by and watched. In this on-the-ground report, TRNN takes you to the very spot in Frederick where these terrifying events transpired, and we speak with an eyewitness who saw everything.
Credits:
Videography: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Reporter 1:
Breaking story in Frederick. We have been told that ICE agents have been camped out in the Taskers Chance neighborhood. Neighbors
Reporter 2:
Say ICE has made a move on one home under the cover of night. That’s exactly what you are seeing right now.
Soolah:
There were protestors next to me. There are protestors across the street. And then I turned to this car and it was right here. And then I heard out of the side, the siren go off and I turned and here’s this car coming at me from on the sidewalk. By
Reporter 1:
Friday night, protestors were chanting on the sidewalk, also trying to block the street and a home they believed ICE was targeting. That’s when Santos says ICE became aggressive. This video shows when an ICE officer drove up on the sidewalk toward protestors. Santos and local activist Sula Kemp say ICE officers became violent.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I’m standing here in Frederick, Maryland, just over an hour west from Baltimore, and I’m standing in a quiet residential neighborhood where just over a week ago, ICE agents in unmarked cars swarmed this neighborhood, surrounded the house behind me. ICE agents are on video beating peaceful protestors with their batons, menacingly driving their cars onto the curbs into the directions of protestors. And I’m standing here with Sula, who is a local resident of the area and who was here the night of those events. Sula, thanks so much for joining me here. Can you walk listeners through what happened and what you saw that night?
Soolah:
Okay. I was asked by as many people were asked to come and help. So I had that time and I was able to come down and I saw different ICE peoples actually around this whole neighborhood. They were in different pockets and locations. I hadn’t even come to this street. I had gone to two streets down and then the next street right over and you could see where they were positioned. And then there was also one that was driving around that seemed to be sort of intimidating by chasing cars, which I thought was really strange behavior because you didn’t see anything on the vehicle to say who it was. It didn’t say police, it didn’t say anything. Didn’t have any markings on the cars. So we didn’t know who they were. Assumed they were ice and their lights were just kind of on. They’re just sitting in their cars parked on the street.
So then there was a call later. I was there about three hours and then somebody had just said they need people on this street specific. So I was like, “Well, I’ll just walk over.” And they said that there was one car that had a spotlight on protestors. And what they were apparently trying to do on this street was just line the sidewalk, a public space with protestors. So that was fine. So I was like, “All right, let me take my phone and go to the other side and get the perspective of the spotlight being put onto the protestors.” So I did that. I first took a bit of video from this side as an observer and then went to the other side and stood there and watched just cars. And then all of a sudden as I was standing on the sidewalk, I heard a siren go off, just a few bursts of it.
And I happened to turn my camera and there was a car on the sidewalk coming toward me and telling me, and everybody who’s on the sidewalk, “Move, move, get out of the way.” At some point they sa, “You’re impeding a federal investigation.”
Maximillian Alvarez:
We’re talking about a car driving up
Soolah:
Right
Maximillian Alvarez:
Here where we’re standing.
Soolah:
Right. On the sidewalk, public space.
Maximillian Alvarez:
These are people’s houses. They’re driving onto people’s property.
Soolah:
Well, and if you or I had done that, what would’ve happened to us?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, they’d throw my ass in jail.
Soolah:
Reckless endangerment of people. And it was crazy. They stopped for a hot second and I jumped onto the grass at first and then I stepped back onto the sidewalk because I was like, “I don’t know what’s happening.” Just a natural response. I was like, “Wait a minute, I’m on the sidewalk.” So I stepped back on the sidewalk and then he started really coming. He did not stop and he sped up toward me first and then there was a woman behind me. And then there was another person, another protestor that they did hit and started to push with their car.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So you were standing right around here?
Soolah:
I was right here. And there was a car there. There was a car across the street. So I had my camera on this car. There were protestors next to me. There were protestors across the street. And then I turned to this car and it was right here. And then I heard out of the side, the siren go off and I turned and here’s this car coming at me from on the sidewalk. I jumped over to here. He passed me. He hit another protestor and then pushed that protestor out of the way. And then the protestors at some point have been sitting down, just linked arms, sitting down, singing and chanting right in the middle of the street, which is fine. They can do whatever they want to.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Community members surrounding one of their neighbor’s homes to try to protect them. Yeah. And then agents of the state come in and start beating the hell out of them for it.
Soolah:
Yeah. So they sat in the road and then they did get up and did that protection. And it’s a typical thing that people do to blockade, but peacefully, they didn’t do anything. They just linked arms. You can’t do much when you’re linked arms. And it’s a whole group of people. And then all of a sudden Frederick Police were coming and then they moved up to the porch area and started beating them up.
Maximillian Alvarez:
You and I are standing here right now on this quiet residential street. People who are watching this may have only seen a small slice of this street on line. What they can’t see is that this is the quietest residential street you can imagine. There’s nothing happening here. You would think with all the ICE agents and vehicles that were here last week that this would be a hotbed of overrun with criminals and criminal activity. It’s just families and houses.
Soolah:
Yeah, it’s very quiet here. You can drive around here and people are working, people are doing their lives and that’s it. So it’d be like every day storm into your everyday world in your suburban America, and that’s what happened. And when you look at now, it’s quiet, it’s peaceful here. So they brought a sense of terror and they brought a sense of unsafety. So yeah, the main set of protestors, they’re stationed on the sidewalk here right at the stop sign. There’s a whole group here. And then there was an ice vehicle here. There was an ice vehicle behind –
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right behind
Soolah:
Where I’m standing. Right behind where you’re standing. Because they started sort of parading in, it looked like a little ice parade. And I’m just joking about that because it was so weird. Once they got into the house, I could hear up in one of the rooms them banging stuff around. And another protestor had asked me, who was observing, asked me, “Do you hear that?” I was like, “Oh yeah,” because it was loud. I don’t know how the house was on the inside when this was all done, but this was a lot. And then I actually went and looked through the back part. They had a shed or some kind of building out in the back there, and you could see these guys go into the back and they started searching. They didn’t know how to get open the shed or whatever because it’s big, but eventually they did.
And it was eerie. It was very eerie.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And it feels reminiscent of the Gestapo view.
Soolah:
It does because who bangs down a door like that? Who goes through looking for whomever? And apparently they didn’t take anybody. I don’t understand why it all happened in the first place.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. So all that terror for nothing?
Soolah:
All that terror for nothing.
Maximillian Alvarez:
How do you move on from something like this? How does this community move on? How are folks responding?
Soolah:
I know right now they’re collecting donations for the people who were beaten because they had hospital bills. And it’s really hard because I don’t know them all personally. I came because just like anybody else, we don’t know each other half the time, but we do see something in need. So they do have a donation set up for them specifically. I am not sure what the next steps are. I know that I have personally tried to contact the attorney general’s office a few times. I haven’t heard anything yet. And I’m hoping that somebody who’s above, in some kind of governmental stance or something, because who feels safe going to the police when you watch the police stand there? There’s the question. I didn’t report anything to them, even though I had a vehicle come at me on the sidewalk. I doubt anybody else is really going to feel comfortable or safe, and maybe that’s the point.
Maybe that was the point too. I can’t speak for that, but it’s just what goes in my head, why would I contact you to tell you what happened? So I want to go higher up.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And so when you were here and you had federal agents and unmarked cars and you also had local police, did you feel in that moment like the police were there to protect you?
Soolah:
No. And the wild thing too is on the car that, at least this car that came at me, you couldn’t tell who they were because their license plate was tinted out. There’s nothing identifying that either. So who are these people? I don’t know if Frederick Police had some kind of directive because I don’t know what even drew them out here in the first place. Maybe they heard that people were getting beat maybe, but they were here before that happened. So maybe they have to take a specific. I don’t know. I literally do not know. And if that’s the case, if they have a specific directive or they don’t know what to do, maybe that needs to be talked about. Maybe something like this, when you have unmarked cars doing reckless behavior with their cars, doing reckless behavior towards other people, what is the community’s protect and serve folks going to do for the community?
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Who are you protecting? Who are you
Soolah:
Serving?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Not us.
Soolah:
There are tax dollars going into all of this too, that people are going to step back and go, “Wait a minute, what’s happening here? I’m putting money toward them and it’s whoever was called out here for that night.” Who knows? I don’t know. But at the end of the day, who are they protecting?
This story originally appeared in Prism on Aug. 31, 2026.
After years of organizing, residents in Howard County, Maryland, say they’re running out of options to find out what their plastic recycling corporate neighbor, W.R. Grace, is emitting.
The multinational chemical company and the state’s main permitting agency have fulfilled state and federal permitting and regulatory requirements for W.R. Grace’s pilot program to recycle plastic.
“As long as the facility meets local zoning and land-use requirements, MDE is obligated to review an air quality permit application for activities related to the facility,” the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) said in its final determination letter, granting the necessary air permit. While MDE required the company to control and monitor for volatile organic compounds and “forever chemicals,” an environmental impact assessment was not required given the scope of the pilot project. MDE’s air quality control regulations prohibit a source from causing a nuisance or odor.
In recent weeks, residents have reported foul odors emanating from the W.R. Grace facility, which initiated the pilot program in 2023. Residents told Prism that they don’t know whether the air is toxic; W.R. Grace has claimed that some of the information about the process is proprietary, limiting what the public can learn about its operations and emissions.
Residents of Cedar Creek and River Hill, two communities in Columbia, Maryland, that sit as close as 240 feet from the chemical facility, said the company can legally leave the public in the dark. This isn’t just an issue for Maryland residents, but should ring an alarm bell for communities across the country.
“Even in this very Democratic city … no one’s listening,” said Shamieka Preston, a community organizer with the Stop Grace Coalition who said she lives 400 feet outside the facility’s fenceline. Preston ran for Howard County Council to represent District 4 and lost her primary election in June. She ran on a platform to hold W.R. Grace accountable after other attempts failed, including a court challenge to the company’s operations permit and trying to change zoning rules about how far industrial facilities have to be from residential areas.
In 2022, Preston moved her family from California for a better quality of life and safety. In Maryland, her family could live in a larger house and access high-quality public schools. Soon after the family’s move to Cedar Creek, W.R. Grace applied for its permit.
Advanced chemical recycling, or “pyrolysis,” refers to the process of applying extreme amounts of heat to plastic without the presence of oxygen, turning it into pyrolysis oil. Once that oil is refined, it can be used as transportation fuel. W.R. Grace disputes that its experimental technologies conduct pyrolysis.
“Grace scientists have developed a new way of recycling plastic that has the potential to reduce emissions, save energy, and lower costs compared to other plastic recycling options such as pyrolysis,” a W.R. Grace spokesperson told Prism in an email.
The company “followed the proper MDE process, including participating in a public hearing and a 120-day comment period,” the spokesperson said, adding that the “pilot research project will not impact the health or wellbeing of our local community or the employees who work at the facility every day.”
Plastics recycling, pyrolysis, and chemical recycling are the latest forms of so-called solutions to the climate crisis, said Rita O’Connell, a staff organizer at Beyond Plastics, a research and advocacy organization housed at Bennington College in Vermont. She told Prism that people should be wary of the narrative that plastic is recyclable and its consumption relatively harmless. O’Connell has consulted with the Stop Grace Coalition.
About 6% of all plastics that have ever been produced have been successfully recycled, she said.
“The promise of chemical recycling for legislators and municipal leaders is, ‘Oh good, we don’t have to worry so much about this plastic crisis because we can just send it off to be turned back into plastic,’” O’Connell said. “That essentially functions as an incredibly effective public relations campaign for the plastics and the petrochemicals industries to keep making as much plastic as they want.”
Maryland residents are also concerned that W.R. Grace has claimed many of the components of its research are proprietary, including information about feedstock sources and composition, fuel, and what chemicals are used in the heating process. The company has repeatedly stated that atmospheric emissions from the pilot program will be “low,” despite the thermal oxidizer running 16 hours per day, 250 days per year.
Lisa Krausz, who lives in River Hill near the W.R. Grace facility, told Prism that the emissions aren’t any less of a concern just because the pilot program engages in less chemical recycling than a commercial operation might. In fact, “pilot projects can actually be more risky because they’re testing stuff,” Krausz said. “It’s all experimental.”
W.R. Grace isn’t required by the state to make public what catalyst it uses to break down plastic feedstock. But, Krausz said that some catalysts, like chromium, can become toxic after exposure to high heat.
The Biden administration ushered in a wave of experimentation with advanced chemical recycling. In 2022, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that its New Chemical Division would “streamline” the review of “environmentally friendly chemical substitutes” in order to bring new fuels to market that would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Sources of fuel that are derived from “waste” such as plastic are included in this effort.
Despite the lofty goals of chemical recycling to meet the moment of unprecedented plastic pollution, environmental advocates caution that plastic pyrolysis is a way to offer the oil and gas industry a public relations lifeline and convince the public that recycling is an effective means of waste management.
Scott Throwe, vice president of the consulting organization Throwe Environmental, worked at the EPA for three decades, including helping to lead development and enforcement of Clean Air Act regulations.
Throwe said there is almost no federal guidance or leadership on the subject of pyrolysis. Without a risk analysis for the industry, specific regulations addressing air pollutants that result from this process, or understanding the manifold and complex risks of emissions, companies simply have to make sure their emissions don’t violate the current Clean Air Act regulations—even if those regulations were written prior to pyrolysis facilities starting to operate.
Deregulation and destabilization at the EPA have a filter-down effect on states. “There’s a very strong laissez-faire attitude at EPA with the states right now, and the state agencies basically, for all practical purposes, have carte blanche,” Throwe said. The problem, he said, is that state agencies might not have the breadth of experience or institutional knowledge to establish and maintain robust monitoring schemes.
“This is a pilot plant, so things are going to go wrong—that’s the nature of pilot operations,” Throwe told Prism.
Correction, Aug. 31, 2026: This story has been updated to correct where two residents live: Lisa Krausz live in River Hill, and Shamieka Preston lives in Cedar Creek.
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