Sleeping on a cement floor in a windowless room. Only brushing your teeth twice in five days and never getting to shower. Being mocked by a guard.
These are among the “horrendous conditions” that Massachusetts high school junior Marcelo Gomes da Silva endured while being held by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, according to his lawyer Robin Nice.
Gomes Da Silva, 18, was arrested by ICE agents on May 31 when he was stopped on his way to volleyball practice with friends in his hometown of Milford. Federal officials said they targeted da Silva’s father, Joao Paulo Gomes-Pereira, who they say is an undocumented immigrant from Brazil, but they detained Gomes da Silva − who came to the United States at the age of 7 with his parents − when they realized he had overstayed his visa.
According to Nice, Gomes Da Silva was subsequently detained for five nights in cells that are intended to hold detainees for hours before being transferred. The cells lack access to basic amenities like beds and showers.
“The Burlington (Massachusetts) facility is not a detention center, it’s a holding cell,” Nice told USA TODAY after a June 5 hearing in Gomes da Silva’s case, which has drawn nationwide attention and fervent local opposition to his detention and possible deportation.
“It’s deplorable,” she added.
Nice first raised the issue in a federal immigration court hearing on whether he would be granted bail.
“He’s being held in just awful conditions no one should be subjected to: sleeping on a cement floor for just a few hours per night,” Nice began, before she was cut off by Immigration Judge Jenny Beverly, who noted the hearing was not the proper venue to raise the issue.
Shackles, teasing, and solitary confinement
Nice provided more details on her client’s confinement in a press conference after the hearing, in which the judge set a $2,000 bond for Gomes da Silva’s release, and in a subsequent interview with USA TODAY.
“This kid has been sleeping on a cement floor for five days, no access to a shower, he’s brushed his teeth twice. He’s sharing a room with men twice his age,” Nice said at the press conference outside the Chelmsford, Massachusetts federal immigration court.
At one point, Gomes da Silva was taken to a hospital emergency room because he was suffering severe headaches and vision loss stemming from a high school volleyball injury days earlier. When he was transferred to and from the hospital, he was handcuffed and kept in leg shackles and then moved to a different room, Nice said.
“He got back to the holding facility at 4 am and then was put in what I would refer to as solitary confinement: it was a room without anyone else, and all of these rooms that people are held in, there is no window,” Nice said. “There is no yard time, because it’s not set up for that.”
“If you are detained in the Burlington ICE facility, you do not see the light of day,” she said. “You don’t know what time it is.”
The isolation that da Silva subsequently endured made him so “desperately lonely” that he took to banging on the walls of his cell to get someone to come talk to him, Nice told USA TODAY. The guards, who he said mostly ignored him, nicknamed him “the knocker” in response.
When Gomes da Silva was held in the room with a larger group, one of the guards played a cruel practical joke on the detainees, Nice said:
“He said when ICE opens the door it means either someone’s coming in or someone’s getting released, so everyone perks up when they open the door. So he sees in a little slit in the door window, one ICE officer motion to another and says ‘watch this,’ and so one ICE officer opens the door to the cell and just stands their for a minute and then says, ‘psych!’ And closes the door. And everyone had just perked up,” Nice recounted.
The isolation in the ICE holding facility extended beyond its walls, Nice said. There was no way for her to call her client there, and he could only make one call for two minutes per day − and not even every day.
Nice wasn’t able to get in to see Gomes da Silva until the fifth day of his confinement. He was so shut off from the outside world that he didn’t know his varsity volleyball team had lost in the semi-finals of the state tournament, even though the match drew media coverage.
ICE did not respond to USA TODAY’s request for comment on Nice’s allegations.
In a statement on June 2, Patricia Hyde, acting field director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations’ in Boston defended Gomes da Silva’s detention and said the agency intends to pursue deportation proceedings.
“When we go into the community and find others who are unlawfully here, we’re going to arrest them,” Hyde said. “He’s 18 years old and he’s illegally in this country. We had to go to Milford looking for someone else and if we come across someone else who is here illegally, we’re going to arrest them.”
‘Nobody deserves to be down there’
Later on June 5, Gomes da Silva himself addressed reporters after posting the $2,000 bond and being released.
“Nobody deserves to be down there,” da Silva told reporters. “You sleep on concrete floors. The bathroom — I have to use the bathroom in the open with like 35-year-old men. It’s humiliating.”
Gomes da Silva also said they were given only crackers for lunch and dinner. Nice told USA TODAY he was also fed what he described as an undefined “mush” that was “like oatmeal, but not oatmeal.”
A twice-weekly churchgoer, Gomes da Silva asked the guards for a bible but was not provided with one.
Beside him were U.S. Reps. Seth Moulton and Jake Auchincloss, both Democrats from Massachusetts, who said they returned from Washington, D.C., on Thursday to speak with da Silva and to inspect the detention center.
Consequences of an immigration crackdown
The Trump administration has sought to ramp up deportations of undocumented immigrants, including those like da Silva who were brought here as children and have no criminal record. ICE reported holding 46,269 people in custody in mid-March, well above the agency’s detention capacity of 41,500 beds.
USA TODAY has previously reported on allegations of conditions in ICE detention similar to what Gomes da Silva and Nice described.
In March, four women held at the Krome North Processing Center in Miami said they were chained for hours on a prison bus without access to food, water or a toilet. They also alleged they were told by guards to urinate on the floor, slept on a concrete floor, and only got one three-minute shower over the course of three or four days in custody.
The allegations come after two men at Krome died in custody on Jan. 23 and Feb. 20.
