Inside the Burlington office ICE has used to detain immigrants

Kary Diaz Martinez was trying to do the right thing when she went to the immigration court in Boston last month for a scheduled hearing before a judge.

She’d heard that agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were arresting immigrants at the courthouse, but decided to take her chances. She’s applying for permanent legal status and wanted to follow the rules.

It didn’t work out in her favor.

Diaz Martinez fled the Dominican Republic last year “to escape unrelenting physical and sexual abuse from the father of her children, who beat her, controlled her, sexually abused her and threatened her with death for years,” her attorney wrote in a petition to the court. She crossed the southern border and made her way to Rhode Island to live with, and eventually marry, her boyfriend of four years, Wiliz de Leon, a naturalized U.S. citizen.

At the courthouse, the judge told Diaz Martinez to come back for another hearing in a year. But when she left the courtroom, ICE agents were waiting in the hallway.

She was arrested, joining tens of thousands of immigrants detained as part of the Trump administration’s push to arrest and deport people who crossed the U.S. border illegally — an effort that has strained the immigration system in many parts of the country.

The ICE agents brought Diaz Martinez to the agency’s New England regional headquarters — a two-story building in an office park near the Burlington Mall — and put her in a cramped, cold concrete holding room with 16 other women.

The building, more commonly called the Burlington field office, was not designed to hold people for more than a few hours. But Diaz Martinez — who has no criminal history, according to court documents — spent nine days there.

Kary Diaz Martinez and her husband, Wiliz de Leon, in their Providence, R.I., apartment. (Miriam Wasser/WBUR)

She said she remembers entering the holding room in Burlington and seeing women sprawled out on the floor. The room was freezing and smelled like human feces.

“I came in, sat on one of the little benches by the door, and spent the whole day crying with my head down,” she said.

The holding room had a small bathroom area in the corner, she said. It consisted of a sink and a toilet, and was set off by a half-wall that offered little privacy. There were no beds, just concrete benches lining the perimeter of the room. Some women slept on them, while everyone else lay on the floor.

“We slept close and huddled together — the line of women reaching all the way to the bathroom,” she said.

Immigration attorneys and some elected officials have called the conditions inside the Burlington facility “unsanitary” and “inhumane.” And they say the situation raises questions about whether Congress or the courts can hold ICE accountable for the treatment of people in its custody.

“It’s important to situate Burlington within the larger landscape of immigration detention — the hallmarks of which are a lack of accountability, a lack of transparency and a lack of enforceable standards,” said Sarah Sherman-Stokes, Diaz Martinez’s lawyer and the associate director of Boston University’s Immigrants’ Rights & Human Trafficking clinic.

“There are national detention standards that are supposed to govern conditions in ICE custody, but they have no teeth,” she added. “And even when ICE violates them, there are almost no consequences. So Burlington is like an example of that on steroids.”

Though several immigration attorneys said ICE arrests seem to be down in Massachusetts this month — and they aren’t aware of any individuals currently being held in the Burlington office for long stretches of time — they worry that could soon change. President Trump’s new tax and spending law includes at least $150 billion for more immigration enforcement and those same attorneys expect arrests to spike again in the near future.

“I suspect that we could see the widespread use of Burlington again,” said Sherman-Stokes. “It seems to me that until they’re legally required to stop using Burlington, it will continue to be an option.”

The Burlington field office is primarily a place where agents do paperwork and people come for scheduled check-ins with immigration

It also serves as an intake center. Immigrants arrested by ICE typically stay in one of its secure holding rooms for a few hours before they’re taken to a longer-term detention center.

When the building opened in 2007, the regional director of ICE, Bruce Chadbourne, said the facility was not designed to hold people for extended periods of time.

He told the audience at a public meeting, “You will note that we have no kitchens and no dining rooms, and therefore we cannot keep people overnight or over the weekend,” Wicked Local reported at the time.

But as ICE began ramping up arrests in Massachusetts this spring, men and women have been held at the Burlington office for days at a time, according to several immigration lawyers.

WBUR found a floor plan for the field office attached to a publicly available document on the Burlington Building Department website. It was included in a package of information about a 2021 renovation. Mark Dupell, the town’s building inspector, confirmed it is the most up-to-date rendering of the building on file.

The floor plan shows four main holding rooms at the facility. Each has a toilet and sink in the corner, as Diaz Martinez described.

There are also four smaller “segregated” holding rooms, one of which seems to be designated for juveniles. Marcelo Gomes da Silva, the high school volleyball player from Milford who spent six days in Burlington, told reporters he was put in one of these rooms on his last day in detention.

Alexandra Peredo Carroll, an immigration attorney, said she has a client who was detained with two other women in one of the smaller rooms. Peredo Carroll’s client told her there wasn’t enough room for all three people to lie on the floor at once, so they took turns.