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“Candidly, there’s no excuse that they have no sleeping mats from June until now,” Moulton said.
Not much has changed at the ICE Boston field office in Burlington, Rep. Seth Moulton said Monday outside the facility, since the congressman’s first oversight visit in June.
“Candidly, there’s no excuse that they have no sleeping mats from June until now,” Moulton said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs blamed the historic 43-day government shutdown, he said, “but that doesn’t account for the period of time between June and October before the shutdown started. We have been promised that those materials have been ordered… It was absolutely a surprise that we don’t have basic mats on the floor.”
Moulton, who previously visited with Rep. Jake Auchincloss, said there still is not enough blankets or adequate facilities for detainees to be held “for any length of time.”
The field office, which is located in an office building near Burlington Mall, is only equipped to hold people for a short period of time before they are moved to actual detention centers.
“Look, the facilities in there are completely inadequate and inhumane for anyone to be staying here for an extended length of time,” Moulton said. “It does seem that they are moving people through here more quickly. The consequence of that is that they don’t have as much time to have lawyers intervene in their cases.”
Conditions at the field office, which the Massachusetts congressional legislation called a “makeshift detention center” in June, have been criticized after reports that the facility is overcrowded and that food there is scarce.
Moulton and Auchincloss visited in June after Marcelo Gomes da Silva, a Milford teenager detained by ICE on his way to volleyball practice, spent six nights in the field office. At that time, he told his lawyer that there were 25 to 35 people in each of the office’s four holding cells.
There were less than 10 on Monday, Moulton said, compared to the 50 he saw in June.
“Some of the observations that I made on my last visit,” Moulton said, “those have not changed, but we have been promised that they will change.”
He said his office will follow up to ensure detainees have sleeping mats, adequate meals, and “basic humanitarian needs.”
‘Your presence here makes a huge difference’
In October, Burlington Town Meeting overwhelmingly voted to approve a mostly symbolic resolution to denounce actions being taken by ICE agents at the field office.
Moulton praised the activists at the facility and said he doesn’t want to see the field office moved “to the boondocks of Northern New England.” In September, three people trying to deliver food to the facility were arrested and charged with trespassing.
“Your presence here makes a huge difference. They know that they’re being watched. They know that they’re being held accountable, and we’re going to continue doing that until this situation improves,” Moulton said. “I don’t want ICE to not have your supervision.”
He noted that while ICE has been accused of moving people out-of-states to more sympathetic courts, mostly in the south, Moulton said female detainees have to be moved because there is no facility in Massachusetts. While he doesn’t want to advocate for more facilities, he said “it actually probably would be smart” to keep people in-state.
“Frankly, I don’t want to see any of this happening,” Moulton said, “but if people have to get detained, I’d rather see them detained in Massachusetts with access to Massachusetts judges and Massachusetts lawyers and their families in Massachusetts with their Massachusetts attorneys than sent elsewhere.”
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