Dozens of people arrested by federal immigration agents in Greater Boston are being held in an office building near the Burlington Mall, often for days at a time, in conditions lawyers described as “abysmal” and “unsanitary.”
The New England Regional Headquarters for Immigration and Customs Enforcement — more commonly known as the ICE field office in Burlington — is a squat, two-story office building in a sea of businesses and parking lots. Normally a place for immigration agents to perform administrative work, it now holds a number of detainees.
In sworn affidavits filed in federal court this week, and in interviews with WBUR, several lawyers said clients being held in Burlington described being hungry, cold and terrified. They said clients lacked access to showers and sinks, meaning they couldn’t wash their hands after using the toilet, and that they were sleeping on concrete floors with a single mylar blanket each — the sort given to marathon runners after a race.
“There is no privacy, no beds, no medical care, very limited food,” said Sarah Sherman-Stokes, a law professor and associate director of Boston University’s Immigrants’ Rights & Human Trafficking clinic. “It’s absolutely inhumane and it’s a violation of these peoples’ rights.”
ICE did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the conditions of the Burlington facility.
It’s not clear exactly how many immigrants are being held in the offices. Sherman-Stokes said she has a client there in a room with 12 other women. And Robin Nice, a lawyer for Marcelo Gomes Da Silva — the Brazilian-born 18-year-old Milford student arrested last week on his way to volleyball practice — told WBUR’s All Things Considered her client has been in a holding cell with about 40 other men.
On Thursday afternoon, a federal judge said Gomes Da Silva appeared for his hearing remotely from the Plymouth County Jail. The judge ordered the high schooler released on a $2,000 bond while he fights efforts to deport him.
The revelation that ICE is holding detainees in Burlington comes amid a surge in immigration arrests and enforcement activity in Massachusetts. Earlier this week, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said agents had arrested nearly 1,500 people during the month of May.
“The problem is, when you start trying to detain everybody, there are not enough beds,” Nice said. The initial plan was for ICE to transfer Gomes Da Silva to a Plymouth jail that’s also an ICE detention facility, “but there wasn’t space there,” Nice said.
There are few immigration detention facilities in New England, and none in Massachusetts that house women. What’s more, after seeing ICE arrest people in Massachusetts and quickly transfer them to detention facilities in other parts of the country, many lawyers have moved quickly to try and keep their clients in the state.
“ ICE tends to arrest people, and especially [with] women, they try to whisk them out of the jurisdiction as quickly as possible to a less favorable jurisdiction, typically somewhere in the south, like Louisiana,” Sherman-Stokes said. Judges there are seen as less likely to make favorable decisions for immigrants, she said.
Right now, Sherman-Stokes has one client in Burlington: Kary Diaz Martinez, a 29-year-old woman who fled the Dominican Republic to escape domestic violence and is currently married to a U.S. citizen. She was arrested by ICE at the Boston Immigration Court earlier this week. A judge approved her request to stay in state, and she was taken to Burlington.
On Wednesday night, Diaz Martinez asked a federal judge to release her from Burlington “due to the inhumane and cruel conditions of detention at the facility where she is being held.”
“The conditions of detention at the Field Office/Processing Center at Burlington, Massachusetts, do not meet the minimum requirement for humane treatment of detainees and violates the United States Constitution and federal laws,” her lawyers wrote in the petition.
If the judge denies her request, Sherman-Stokes said Diaz Martinez is likely to stay in the Burlington facility.
‘It was never supposed to be a detention center’
Alexandra Peredo Carroll, a lawyer with the Mabel Center, a Boston-based nonprofit that provides free legal assistance to immigrants, said she first heard about people being held overnight at the Burlington office around Memorial Day weekend.
She had a client who was arrested by ICE and, along with his father, was taken to Burlington that Saturday morning. They stayed there until Sunday evening, at which point they were transferred to the Plymouth County Correctional Facility.
“I was surprised that they had spent so much time there,” she said. “To my knowledge, people were not kept at that facility for longer than a couple of hours.”
From the outside, the Burlington ICE facility looks like any other office building that dots the landscape in eastern Massachusetts. But on the inside, Peredo Carroll said, the conditions for detainees is “hell.” That’s largely because this building was never designed to house people in this way, she said.
The 42,000-square-foot office building is primarily an administration facility — a place where immigrants check in with ICE or fill out paperwork, and where agents do office work in cubicles. Occasionally, she said, people in the process of getting deported might be temporarily detained there in a holding room, but they were always moved to a facility designed for longer-term holds within a few hours.
Peredo Carroll said she’s never been allowed in the back of the office where the holding area is located. But Matt Cameron, an immigration attorney, has.
He described “a pod of small cells,” similar to what one might see in a small county jail.
“It’s an ICE field office, which means it’s not a detention center,” he said. “It was never supposed to be a detention center.”
In fact, according to a 2007 Wicked Local article, Bruce Chadbourne, then-New England regional director of ICE, said as much.
“You will note that we have no kitchens and no dining rooms, and therefore we cannot keep people overnight or over the weekend,” he’s quoted as saying at a public meeting.
Chadbourne did not respond to a request for comment.
3 women locked in an 8×10 room
After Peredo Carroll learned from her client that he and his father had spent two days in the Burlington office, she said she started hearing similar stories from other immigration lawyers.
And a couple days later, another client of hers was brought there after being arrested by ICE in a hallway of the Boston Immigration Courthouse, where she had gone for a routine hearing.
WBUR is not naming Peredo Carroll’s client because she fears reprisal for speaking out about the conditions she endured.
Peredo Carroll and colleague Jill Seeber tried to see their client on the second day of her detainment, but were told “ICE does not allow lawyer visitations with clients held at the Burlington Field Office,” according to an affidavit.
They tried again two days later, they said, and this time were taken to an interview room to meet with their client. When they entered the room, their client was crying and telling an agent in the room that her legs were swollen and painful. According to the affidavit, the woman had recently had surgery and was told by her doctor to walk often to prevent swelling.
“She was shivering. She was literally shivering she was so cold,” Peredo Carroll said. The interview room was also freezing, and the whole situation reminded her of the “hieleras” or “iceboxes,” she’d so often heard about at immigrant detention centers near the southern border.
Peredo Carroll said her client spent a couple days in a small holding cell by herself — an 8-foot-by-10-foot space with nothing but a toilet. Eventually, two other women were moved into the room.
The space was so small that all three of them couldn’t lie down at the same time, Peredo Carroll said.
“So two of them could lie down while one was leaning up against the toilet,” she said.
Eventually, all three women were moved to a larger holding cell with about a dozen other women. Once again, there were no beds, or a sink with soap for handwashing, and the women slept on the floor.
There was one toilet in the center of the room and “the women used the aluminum blanket to cover each other as they used the toilet so they could have a little bit of privacy,” Peredo Carroll wrote in her affidavit.
Throughout her stay in Burlington, Peredo Carroll said her client received three small meals per day: a small cup of oatmeal in the morning, a couple spoonfuls of pasta for lunch and some sort of rice dish for dinner that she likened to “dog food.” A small bottle of water came with each meal.
Sherman-Stokes also said her client in the Burlington facility was “not being fed appropriately.” After 18 hours in ICE custody, she’d had a small cup of oatmeal and an apple, she said.
“Conditions in detention are notoriously bad across Massachusetts,” Sherman-Stokes said. “The bar is really low.” But reports on the conditions at the Burlington ICE facility, she said, are “particularly egregious.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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