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Inside the Burlington office ICE has used to detain immigrants

The ICE Boston Field Office in Burlington, Mass. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)
Robin Lubbock/WBUR
The ICE Boston Field Office in Burlington, Mass. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)

This story was originally produced by WBUR. We are republishing it in partnership with the New England News Collaborative. You can find the original version here.

Kary Diaz Martinez was trying to do the right thing when she went to the immigration court in Boston last month for a scheduled hearing before a judge.

She’d heard that agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were arresting immigrants at the courthouse, but decided to take her chances. She’s applying for permanent legal status and wanted to follow the rules.

It didn’t work out in her favor.

More on immigration enforcement in New England

Diaz Martinez fled the Dominican Republic last year “to escape unrelenting physical and sexual abuse from the father of her children, who beat her, controlled her, sexually abused her and threatened her with death for years,” her attorney wrote in a petition to the court. She crossed the southern border and made her way to Rhode Island to live with, and eventually marry, her boyfriend of four years, Wiliz de Leon, a naturalized U.S. citizen.

At the courthouse, the judge told Diaz Martinez to come back for another hearing in a year. But when she left the courtroom, ICE agents were waiting in the hallway.

She was arrested, joining tens of thousands of immigrants detained as part of the Trump administration’s push to arrest and deport people who crossed the U.S. border illegally — an effort that has strained the immigration system in many parts of the country.

The ICE agents brought Diaz Martinez to the agency’s New England regional headquarters — a two-story building in an office park near the Burlington Mall — and put her in a cramped, cold concrete holding room with 16 other women.

The building, more commonly called the Burlington field office, was not designed to hold people for more than a few hours. But Diaz Martinez — who has no criminal history, according to court documents — spent nine days there.

Kary Diaz Martinez and her husband, Wiliz de Leon, in their Providence, R.I., apartment. (WBUR/Miriam Wasser)
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Kary Diaz Martinez and her husband, Wiliz de Leon, in their Providence, R.I., apartment. (WBUR/Miriam Wasser)

She said she remembers entering the holding room in Burlington and seeing women sprawled out on the floor. The room was freezing and smelled like human feces.

“I came in, sat on one of the little benches by the door, and spent the whole day crying with my head down,” she said.

The holding room had a small bathroom area in the corner, she said. It consisted of a sink and a toilet, and was set off by a half-wall that offered little privacy. There were no beds, just concrete benches lining the perimeter of the room. Some women slept on them, while everyone else lay on the floor.

“We slept close and huddled together — the line of women reaching all the way to the bathroom,” she said.

Immigration attorneys and some elected officials have called the conditions inside the Burlington facility “unsanitary” and “inhumane.” And they say the situation raises questions about whether Congress or the courts can hold ICE accountable for the treatment of people in its custody.

“It’s important to situate Burlington within the larger landscape of immigration detention — the hallmarks of which are a lack of accountability, a lack of transparency and a lack of enforceable standards,” said Sarah Sherman-Stokes, Diaz Martinez’s lawyer and the associate director of Boston University’s Immigrants’ Rights & Human Trafficking clinic.

“There are national detention standards that are supposed to govern conditions in ICE custody, but they have no teeth,” she added. “And even when ICE violates them, there are almost no consequences. So Burlington is like an example of that on steroids.”

Though several immigration attorneys said ICE arrests seem to be down in Massachusetts this month — and they aren’t aware of any individuals currently being held in the Burlington office for long stretches of time — they worry that could soon change. President Trump’s new tax and spending law includes at least $150 billion for more immigration enforcement and those same attorneys expect arrests to spike again in the near future.

“I suspect that we could see the widespread use of Burlington again,” said Sherman-Stokes. “It seems to me that until they’re legally required to stop using Burlington, it will continue to be an option.”

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The Burlington field office is primarily a place where agents do paperwork and people come for scheduled check-ins with immigration officials.

It also serves as an intake center. Immigrants arrested by ICE typically stay in one of its secure holding rooms for a few hours before they’re taken to a longer-term detention center.

When the building opened in 2007, the regional director of ICE, Bruce Chadbourne, said the facility was not designed to hold people for extended periods of time.

He told the audience at a public meeting, “You will note that we have no kitchens and no dining rooms, and therefore we cannot keep people overnight or over the weekend,” Wicked Local reported at the time.

But as ICE began ramping up arrests in Massachusetts this spring, men and women have been held at the Burlington office for days at a time, according to several immigration lawyers.

WBUR found a floor plan for the field office attached to a publicly available document on the Burlington Building Department website. It was included in a package of information about a 2021 renovation. Mark Dupell, the town’s building inspector, confirmed it is the most up-to-date rendering of the building on file.

The floor plan shows four main holding rooms at the facility. Each has a toilet and sink in the corner, as Diaz Martinez described.

There are also four smaller “segregated” holding rooms, one of which seems to be designated for juveniles. Marcelo Gomes da Silva, the high school volleyball player from Milford who spent six days in Burlington, told reporters he was put in one of these rooms on his last day in detention.

Alexandra Peredo Carroll, an immigration attorney, said she has a client who was detained with two other women in one of the smaller rooms. Peredo Carroll’s client told her there wasn’t enough room for all three people to lie on the floor at once, so they took turns.

Preview is not available for Flourish Scrolly

According to the floor plan, the Burlington office has one shower for detainees, though Diaz Martinez and others held in the facility said they never got to bathe or change their clothes.

What’s more, Diaz Martinez said, there was no soap or hand sanitizer in the holding room. Occasionally, an ICE agent would give out baby wipes so the women could clean themselves.

ICE did not respond to a detailed list of questions from WBUR about the conditions inside the Burlington field office and the number of people held there. But in a statement, the agency said “detainees pending processing are given ample food, regular access to phones, showers and legal representation as well as medical care when needed.”

Diaz Martinez said the unsanitary conditions, the anxiety that she might be deported and that fact that she didn’t know how long she might be stuck in Burlington all took a toll on her.

“I fell into a really bad depression there. I was losing all my hair,” she said. “I was so depressed that I was ripping it out myself — with my own hands, I was ripping out my hair. I just couldn’t take being locked up.”

When she got her period, she said an agent gave her five sanitary pads. After she had used those, she was told the facility had run out. She wadded up toilet paper to line her underwear instead.

Diaz Martinez said she asked to see a doctor several times, but one never came.

She also said the women were fed the same thing every day: microwaved oatmeal in the morning with the consistency of a thick paste, and microwaved pasta for lunch and dinner. Sometimes they got an apple.

The food was “really awful,” she said. And after a few days, just the smell of it made her nauseous. She lost 10 pounds during her stay, she said.

Others who spent time inside the Burlington facility shared similar stories.

Yury Melissa Aguiriano Romero, a 36-year-old immigrant from Honduras, was detained there for 11 days. She came to the U.S. after fleeing political violence in 2021, court documents show. She has three young children, including one who is a U.S. citizen and was still breastfeeding when ICE agents arrested her in early June.

Aguiriano Romero spoke to WBUR from the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in Vermont, where she was transferred about a month ago. In a 20 minute phone call, she described the “horrible” days she spent in Burlington.

“There were five women in the room when I arrived,” she said in Spanish. “Then came one woman, then another, then another. Eventually, there were 19 of us in that room. We were practically sleeping one on top of the other.”

Like Diaz Martinez, she said the women were fed small portions of microwaved oatmeal and pasta for every meal, though she remembered that one day she got a sandwich. She divided it into four pieces and ate a quadrant for the next few meals.

Aguiriano Romero said she suffers from chronic headaches and repeatedly asked the ICE agents outside of the room for Tylenol. She said they told her she could call her husband and have him drop off medicine, but she never did. She was afraid ICE would arrest him too.

“Other women would say that their husbands had gone in to drop off some meds and had been grabbed there,” she said. A headache, she decided, was preferable to leaving her daughters parentless.

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After Gomes da Silva, the Milford high school student, was released from Burlington on June 5, U.S. Reps. Seth Moulton and Jake Auchincloss went to the Burlington field office to see the building for themselves. ICE field offices aren’t open to the public, but members of Congress have oversight authority and are allowed to show up unannounced and go inside.

Moulton and Auchincloss said they were shown the secure area in the back part of the building, though they didn’t go into any of the holding rooms or talk with any detainees. After the tour, they told reporters it didn’t seem like the type of place people should be held for more than a few hours.

“ What I saw was a processing facility, not a detention facility,” Moulton said in a recent phone interview. “It’s not a place that anyone should be made to stay for more than a few hours, let alone overnight.”

Marcelo Gomes da Silva, 18, center, a Massachusetts high school student who came to the U.S. from Brazil at age 7 and was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents Saturday, May 31, 2025, speaks to journalists after being released from detention on bond as Reps. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., right, and Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., left, listen, Thursday, June 5, in Burlington, Mass. (AP Photo/Rodrique Ngowi)
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Marcelo Gomes da Silva, 18, center, a Massachusetts high school student who came to the U.S. from Brazil at age 7 and was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents Saturday, May 31, 2025, speaks to journalists after being released from detention on bond as Reps. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., right, and Jake Auchincloss, D-Mass., left, listen, Thursday, June 5, in Burlington, Mass. (AP Photo/Rodrique Ngowi)

Moulton said he hasn’t tried to go back to the Burlington office since his visit in early June. But it’s not clear he would even be allowed inside.

Not long after his visit, several media outlets reported that ICE released new guidance requiring members of Congress to give at least 72-hours notice before asking to tour a field office. That guidance seems to have disappeared from the ICE website. WBUR asked ICE if it had rescinded the policy and received the following statement from Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security:

"As ICE law enforcement have seen a surge in assaults, disruptions and obstructions to enforcement, including by politicians themselves, any requests to tour processing centers and field offices must be approved by the Secretary of Homeland Security."

In a letter to ICE signed by the state’s all-Democratic congressional delegation, Massachusetts lawmakers criticized this new policy restricting their access to the Burlington field office.

“ICE appears to be violating its own detention standards, denying reports of violations, and then preventing the American public’s representatives from witnessing those violations,” they wrote.

The letter includes a long list of questions about how the facility is being used and how many people are inside. As of publication time, lawmakers said they hadn’t received answers.

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After nine days in Burlington, Diaz Martinez agreed to be transferred to the Chittenden detention center in Vermont.

She spent five days there and said the conditions were much nicer than Burlington: She had a bed. She could shower. The food was palatable. She had an easier time getting in touch with her lawyer and husband.

On June 17, a judge ruled that her detainment was unlawful and that she should be released from custody. Since then, she’s been back home with her husband in their Providence apartment.

She said she’s relieved to be out, but the transition has been tough. She’s terrified ICE is going to detain her again.

“I’ve had a lot of nightmares,” she said. “I can’t sleep. Sometimes I hear a car coming and feel like it’s ICE.”

In the weeks since she returned home, she said she’s only left the house to meet with her therapist. She’s too scared to even open the front door.

And her biggest fear now is ending up back in custody in Burlington.

“It’s not a suitable place for holding a person in,” she said.

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Data visualization by Roberto Scalese, with photo by Robin Lubbock.

Jesús Marrero Suárez contributed to this story.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

Copyright 2025 WBUR

Miriam Wasser
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