BURLINGTON, Mass. — Holding back tears in a press conference on Thursday, 18-year-old Marcelo Gomes Da Silva detailed the conditions he faced while spending 6 days inside a Burlington ICE detention facility.
“I don’t want to cry,” he said. “But I want to say that that place, it’s not good, it’s not good.”
Gomes Da Silva said he was thrown in a cramped holding room with “a bunch of 35-year-old men.”
He said food was sporadic and sleeping was difficult due to lack of bedding.
“You sleep on concrete floors,” Gomes Da Silva said. “They give us a really long sheet of this thin, aluminum I’m guessing, and we lay down on the concrete floor and put that over us and just sleep through the night.”
The 18-year-old described being held behind big doors with a small slit to look through. He said it was difficult to disseminate how much time had passed because there were no windows and the only clock he could see was through the small slit in the door.
“To check the time, we have to try and peak our head out of that door to see what time it is,” he said. “We don’t get to see outside, we don’t get to walk outside, we all stay in there and the only chance we get to breath is when we open that little gap and some old air comes in, but that’s it.”
Gomes Da Silva said the bathroom situation was just as bleak.
“The bathroom, I have to use the bathroom in the open with 35-year-old men, it’s humiliating,” he said.
The Milford teen claimed he didn’t use the bathroom for 6 days.
Congressmen Seth Moulton and Jake Auchincloss took a tour of the facility on Thursday shortly after Gomes Da Silva’s press conference.
“The facilities that Congressman Moulton and I saw are not facilities anyone should be spending 6 days in,” Auchincloss said. “and we know that these officers are trying to uphold federal law and operate professionally but they’re not being supported properly by this administration.”
“To be clear, this is supposed to be a processing facility where people stay for 6 to 12 hours,” Moulton said. “So for anyone, especially like Marcelo who’s expected to stay here, to sleep here with no beds, not what anyone else would call a blanket, sparse food, no windows even, it’s obviously completely inappropriate, I would say inhumane for long term detention. And that’s what Marcelo experienced.”
Boston 25 New has reached out to ICE for comment about the conditions at the Burlington facility.
On May 31, Gomes Da Silva was driving in his father’s, Joao Paulo Gomes Pereira’s, car to volleyball practice at Milford High School when he was detained by immigration officers.
ICE officials say they were looking for Gomes Pereira when they picked up the 18-year-old.
Immigration authorities allege hat Gomes Pereira is wanted for speeding 100 miles an hour through residential areas.
Boston 25 News found one record in the courts of a citation issued for Gomes Pereira in July of 2023 — court records show Milford Police cited him for failing to yield to a stop sign and driving with a revoked license as a habitual traffic offender.Sources familiar with his driving record tell 25 Investigates that he has had 16 driving-related citations since 2014.
“When we go out into the community, and we find others who are unlawfully here, we are going to arrest them. We’ve been completely transparent with that. He’s 18 years old, he is unlawfully in this country,” Patricia Hyde, Field Office Director of ICE Enforcement, said earlier this week.
Gomes Da Silva’s case is due back in court on June 26.
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