Hundreds of people detained at ICE’s New England Regional Headquarters in Burlington were held there for multiple days over the spring and summer, despite the agency’s admission that the facility is not designed to house detainees for extended periods.
Between Jan. 20, when President Trump returned to office, and the end of July, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement booked in more than 2,700 people, according to a WBUR analysis of information from the Deportation Data Project.
Of those, nearly half, or 1,338 people, were transferred out of Burlington within 12 hours. Another 353 were moved within a day. But 1,005 were held for multiple days, and in several cases, for more than a week.
Through July, at least 176 people were held in the Burlington field office for three days or more. In one case, a Brazilian man was held for 20 days.
These long stays appear to exceed even ICE’s new detainment standards. According to a July 24 letter from ICE to U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the agency issued a temporary waiver in June so that “aliens may be housed in a holding facility for up to, but not exceeding, 72 hours, absent exceptional circumstances.”
ICE did not respond to WBUR’s questions about the longer Burlington detentions.
In a statement, Warren said, “ICE’s responses are insufficient and don’t match the reality on the ground.”
“The reports coming out of ICE field offices continue to be deeply concerning,” she said.
The ICE letter said the agency inspects conditions at its holding room facilities “through a formal self-inspection program, and that it’s committed to “safe, secure, and humane environments” for those in its custody.
But people detained in Burlington have told a very different story, from a Milford High School volleyball player held for six days in a crowd of men to women held for days without sanitary products.
“Immigrants are imprisoned here in overcrowded cells,” said Rev. Andrew Harris, a minister at the nearby Burlington United Church of Christ, during a recent protest outside the ICE facility. Harris, who helps organize a weekly demonstration there, pointed to the squat, two-story building, recounting what former detainees have said publicly about the conditions inside.
“There are no beds, so people sleep on concrete floors,” Harris told a crowd of about 500 people. “There are no clocks, no showers, no soap, no medicine,” he said; people held there also have complained about sharing a toilet with large numbers of people and no privacy.
ICE has refuted some of these claims and said detainees are given “ample food, regular access to phones, showers and legal representation as well as medical care when needed.”
The field office is a 42,000-square-foot building in a busy office park near the Burlington Mall. The facility is primarily an administrative site, where people go for routine check-ins with immigration officials. It also serves as a regional intake center, where ICE takes people after arresting them.
Most people are transferred quickly to detention centers like the Plymouth County jail or facilities out of state. But as ICE launched “Operation Patriot” in the spring, a highly publicized increase in immigration enforcement and patrols in Massachusetts, hundreds of arrestees got stuck waiting in Burlington.
The number of people held at the Burlington office fluctuates day to day, but during the weeks around the May surge, agents booked about 40-50 people per day. In one day, they brought 101 people in; on another, 107.
And now with the launch of “Patriot 2.0” — a new immigration enforcement operation in Massachusetts — many more people are likely to spend time inside Burlington in the coming weeks.
“This latest enforcement ‘surge’ will inevitably cause overcrowding, denial of due process, and any number of other violations of the legal and human rights of detainees,” said Matt Cameron, a Boston immigration attorney.
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Very few outsiders have been allowed into the ICE field office in recent months, but in early June, U.S. Reps. Seth Moulton and Jake Auchincloss got a rare look inside.
“This is supposed to be a processing facility where people stay for six to 12 hours,” Moulton told reporters at the time. “It’s obviously completely inappropriate — I would say, inhumane — for long-term detention.”
The two congressmen had gone to the facility to meet Marcelo Gomes Da Silva, the 18-year-old volleyball player from Milford who had just been released after six days in detention. Da Silva had not been the intended target of immigration agents; they’d been looking for his father. But they picked him up anyway, in what immigration enforcement officials refer to as a “collateral” arrest.
ICE had claimed Marcelo was “an exceptional case,” Auchincloss said, and that most people were booked in and out of the field office in a matter of hours.
Until now, that’s been difficult to verify. Neither reporters nor members of the public have been permitted inside, and immigration lawyers haven’t been allowed into the secure holding area in the back of the building. The agency also has denied Burlington town officials access to inspect the building.
In the wake of media coverage of conditions at the field office, the Burlington Select Board and Building Department sought entry to the building. When ICE refused, the town petitioned the decision in district court. But that request also was recently denied, leaving the town with no option to appeal, according to Select Board Chairman Mike Espejo.
“I’ve probably put more time and thought into this issue than any other during my seven years in town government,” Espejo wrote on Facebook last week. “This is all about ensuring that all of our buildings in town are used in the manner in which they are designed and permitted and ensuring that anyone that enters the Town of Burlington is treated ethically and fairly.”
An ICE spokesperson told WBUR in an email, “We never intend for anyone’s stay at Burlington to be an extended one.” There are occasions when it happens, the statement continued, and “these instances are a rarity.”
Yet that’s not what the data shows.
While ICE wrote in its letter to Warren that a March 31 “self-inspection” found no detainees in custody at that time had been held for more than 12 hours, the Deportation Data Project reveals that at least 50 people were held for longer than that in the preceding ten days.
Most of the extended stays in Burlington coincided with the May arrest surge, but at least 38 more occurred in June and July, according to the data analyzed by WBUR.
The data also shows that while ICE has said it’s pursuing the “worst of the worst” in its immigration arrests, about half of those detained in Burlington had no criminal history, just civil immigration violations. According to the data, 508 people booked into Burlington had some criminal conviction; another 937 had pending charges.
“ICE facilities like Burlington’s are being forced into roles they were never meant to play, because of the Trump Administration’s chaotic and inhumane decisions,” Moulton said in an email after WBUR shared the results of the new data analysis.
“If the data being reported is accurate, it is unacceptable that people are being held there for days — or even weeks — without adequate medical care, access to showers, or beds,” he said, noting that the latest ICE surge in the station “will only make these problems worse.”
The dataset includes a hold that lasted 34 days, and another that lasted 55 days. ICE did not respond to questions about whether these extreme outliers are accurate or the result of a data entry error.
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José Pineda, an East Boston resident, was stopped by five ICE agents on May 27 while driving to work. Pineda was born in El Salvador but has temporary protected status, which gives him the right to live and work in the U.S. He’s lived in the country for 30 years and has a 12-year-old daughter who was born here.
Pineda said he gave the agents his driver’s license and explained his legal status, but they arrested him anyway.
“They said, ‘Those who aren’t born here don’t have rights,’ ” he recounted in Spanish.
Pineda was brought to Burlington, where he said he was placed in a crowded room with 40 to 50 other men.
“After a couple of hours, they moved me to another room that was a bit emptier,” he said. But soon, many more men arrived. “It got to the point where sometimes you couldn’t even sit down.”
Pineda spent two days at the Burlington field office, uncomfortable and hungry. He slept on a concrete floor with only a mylar blanket, and was fed “a sour and inedible pudding” on the first day and a “cup of oats and a small burrito” on the second, according to a complaint his lawyers filed with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE.
Pineda said he’d never been detained or spent time in jail before. Other men held there at the time told him a jail cell was “more comfortable than these little rooms packed with people.”
After two days, Pineda was released. He said he’s still having nightmares about the experience, but his detainment has taken an especially hard toll on his daughter, Michelle Valentina Pineda, according to the complaint.
“I don’t want any more separations of families,” Michelle said at a community listening event hosted by Rep. Ayanna Pressley earlier this summer. “Family belongs together and I don’t want any kid to know what I’ve been through and what happened to me.”
Mirian Albert, a senior attorney with Lawyers for Civil Rights and one of Pineda’s lawyers, said ICE’s new surge is hitting immigrant communities like New Bedford and Chelsea hard.
“Families and communities are living in fear again,” she said. “Many of them are paralyzed in many of their daily activities.”
And as happened during the spring surge, she expects Burlington will soon be crowded with people stuck there for days at a time.
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WBUR’s Todd Wallack contributed to this report.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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