A group of activists and a local faith leader were detained Tuesday while trying to deliver basic necessities to immigrants detained at the Burlington U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center.
Roger Rosen, Eric Segal, Sabine von Mering and the Rev. Fred Small were arrested by officers from the Burlington Police Department.
“We want those who are detained to know that they are not forgotten, not now and not in any season,” said Rev. Sarah Lusche, the senior minister at Old Cambridge Baptist Church and a licensed clinical social worker who was present when the four were arrested. “That’s what today was about — attempting to care for these members of our community who are being detained without due process by this administration’s regime of immigration terror.”
Lusche said the care packages contained food, juice, hats, bedrolls and menstrual products. The latter two items, she said, were in response to media reports of detainees sleeping on concrete floors, and in the case of menstruation, “being made to sit in their own blood.” ICE didn’t return a request for comment about this claim and the conditions in the facility.
The Burlington Police Department confirmed it arrested four adults for trespassing and disturbing the peace on Tuesday at 11:15 a.m..
“All four were told repeatedly to disburse from the front entrance and refused to do so after multiple attempts. They knew they would be arrested and ultimately were, and then booked at our facility and will be arraigned in Woburn District Court today,” Police Chief Thomas Browne wrote in a message.
Rosen has worked with families from Haiti and El Salvador in the United States and is a climate organizer; Segal is a retired tech executive; von Mering is a climate activist, mother and naturalized citizen. Small left parish ministry in 2015 and is active in human rights advocacy.
In anticipation of their arrests, the activists prepared media statements.
“Masked ICE agents abducted Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk less than a mile from my home,” Small wrote. “Jesus told us to welcome the stranger. Instead, ICE is brutalizing our neighbors with wanton cruelty. In this Christmas season, I want to light a candle of kindness and compassion.”
“The blatant physical and emotional cruelty of ICE operations demands that we step outside our comfort zone to object,” Rosen wrote. “Our attempt to deliver these necessities to our immigrant brothers and sisters is a recognition of their humanity and their right to be treated with kindness and respect.”
Immigrants that have been detained and released from the Burlington processing center have shared reports of crowded cells, as well as lack of access to on-site medical attention and medication.
Most immigrants detained in the state go through the facility. Some high-profile stays included Marcelo Gomes Da Silva, an 18-year-old Milford high school student detained for six days and many of the immigrant employees of Allston Car Wash. One man, Dairo Preciado, said he slept on an air mattress that felt half-inflated so he could feel “metal bars under his back” and cried as he spoke of his experience there.
The building opened in 2007 and was approved under the town’s zoning code to temporarily hold immigrants for only a few hours. But the increase of immigrant detentions across Massachusetts have yielded greater numbers of people being brought to the center to be processed, and many of them have remained there for days, or even weeks.
U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton and Sen. Ed Markey have visited the facility, calling on the agency to improve conditions there and allow immigrants to meet their attorneys, family and clergy in-person.
