No menacing guard towers surveil the perimeter. No razor wire envelopes it. No police cruisers wait out front.
Really, how bad can it be?
Well, there have been some reports …
ICE has turned that suburban field office into an overflow detention center. Temporary holding cells meant to detain people for only a few hours now hold too many people for too much time, often several days or more. There are no beds or mattresses. There’s little privacy and terrible sanitation. Food is minimal. Some detainees have told their lawyers they are fed only oatmeal or crackers.
Detainees do not have access to a shower. Bright lights shine all day and night, one woman told her lawyer. Attorneys attempting to enter the facility to speak with clients say they have not been allowed into areas where detainees are being held.
In a sworn affidavit filed alongside a habeas corpus petition to the US District Court of Massachusetts, Crystal Traslaviña Garcia described her Burlington confinement: “There was one officer who was mistreating me psychologically. He was telling me it was my lawyers’ fault that I was there. He said, ‘The lawyers think they know everything but they don’t know anything.’ He yelled at me a lot. He put my picture on the door of my cell and told the other officers not to give me anything because I had asked for too much. I was wearing the same clothes for seven days. I was freezing. I needed medication.”
According to her statement, Garcia, who has no criminal record, appeared in Boston on May 27 for her immigration hearing. There she was detained, whisked to Burlington’s field office, and held there for five days before being transferred to Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in Vermont.
There are many such accounts these days.
ICE operates 25 field offices for enforcement and removal operations across the country. When it set up its office in Burlington in 2007, it wasn’t supposed to double as a detention facility. ICE didn’t explicitly set out to camouflage its skullduggery in such disarmingly bland surroundings.
But premeditated or not, that camouflage is a critical feature of the quandary confronting us. It’s not easy to grasp the enormity of the looming horror, and the view is so much prettier if we don’t.
Daily life for most folks around Boston has not markedly changed … yet. See the young mothers pushing baby strollers along the Boston Common Frog Pond. Check out Lansdowne Street at game time as spirited fans pour into Fenway, eager for a playoff run. Head to the Charles River on a late afternoon and you’d think the entire city is one large health club with all those joggers and bikers and boaters. The stock market, surely a bellwether, keeps right on smiling.
There are no National Guard troops stomping onto the Rose Kennedy Greenway. No FBI raids on Mayor Michelle Wu’s Roslindale home. No marble statues of Confederate generals being reerected. No legislators demanding the Ten Commandments be posted in classrooms. No Musk henchmen snatching our private data and handing it over to Bondi. Or Miller. Or Gabbard.
No razor wire. No menacing guard towers.
How bad could it be?
