BURLINGTON — Rep. Lori Trahan and Sen. Elizabeth Warren are calling for more transparency and humane treatment of people in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, following a recent unannounced visit to the ICE field office in Burlington.
The two lawmakers conducted their congressional oversight visit to the facility on Tuesday, Sept. 8, after receiving testimonies from immigration attorneys and community advocates in their districts that they called “deeply concerning”.
“Today we exercised our constitutional duty to conduct unannounced Congressional oversight of an ICE facility,” Trahan and Warren said in a joint statement. “Immigration attorneys and community advocates have shared deeply concerning testimonies with our offices of individuals being detained by ICE for multiple days without access to adequate food, medical care, or sleeping conditions.”
During the hour-long inspection, Trahan and Warren said they witnessed over a dozen people being held for processing. They said they questioned ICE officials about the concerns raised by their constituents and pressed for humane treatment to all those in custody.
“We’ll continue showing up and fighting for transparency, decency and accountability,” the lawmakers said.
The visit comes months after Trahan toured the same facility on March 24. That hour and a half long tour of the facility was pre-scheduled with ICE and came just weeks after a 14-year-old was detained by ICE in her district.
According to Trahan, the girl had no criminal history, but was detained by ICE in Marlborough and taken out of state. The congresswoman called the action “an apparent overnight attempt to use her as a hostage to coerce her father into turning himself in for deportation.”
“I am furious. This is not immigration enforcement. It’s the deliberate targeting of a child to inflict maximum pain on her family,” Trahan said in a statement on March 11, following the girl’s arrest. “I am demanding her immediate release. She should be returned home to her family this afternoon and able to go back to school tomorrow. In the meantime, DHS (Department of Homeland Security) must abandon its clearly adopted policy of using children as bait to detain and deport family members and instead focus its efforts on violent criminals.”
ICE was later ordered by a federal judge to return the girl to her family in Marlborough.
After touring the Burlington facility in March, Trahan spoke with The Westford Villager and described what she saw.
“This isn’t a detention facility, this is an administrative ICE enforcement facility,” Trahan said. “I was told people are moved out of this facility very quickly. We talked about where people go. Men go to some places, children and women go to others. There weren’t many people in the holding cells that we just walked through. So we had a lot of questions around what happens when someone has no criminal record, what happens when someone is swept up in an operation that has no criminal wrongdoing in their past.”
Trahan has been a vocal critic of the federal government’s immigration enforcement tactics and the deployment of ICE agents in communities across Massachusetts, especially since President Donald Trump took office.
“This facility has been here since 2007, however the (Trump) Administration has changed the game with a massive increase in funding, hiring thousands of new (ICE) agents to fulfill his (Trump’s) mass deportation promise, sending an unprecedented number of agents into our communities,” Trahan said. “We’ve seen hardworking people, in many cases without a criminal record, being targeted and detained, often without a signed judicial warrant. They’re then transported out of state into other detention facilities as fast as possible.”
Trahan has argued ICE agents often do not follow due process when making arrests, detain immigrants as well as American citizens without a criminal record and detain children in an attempt to target their parents.
“Nothing that I heard today changed my belief that congressional oversight of ICE enforcement must continue,” Trahan said. “Variation in how these directives are being carried out across the country is precisely why oversight cannot stop. Congress has both the authority and the responsibility to ensure that enforcement actions comply with the law and respect due process.”
Following their recent visit to the Burlington facility, Trahan and Warren said they plan to continue their oversight of ICE operations, with a focus on transparency, decency and accountability.
