Photo: Chaiel Schaffel/WBZ NewsRadio
Updated 12:04 p.m., Dec. 2, 2025
BURLINGTON, Mass. (WBZ NewsRadio) — Rep. Seth Moulton inspected an ICE facility in Burlington on Monday, as part of a pre-planned visit.
He described the facility as “completely inadequate and inhumane for anyone to be staying here for an extended length of time,” with detainees being forced to sleep on the concrete ground, with only a thin mylar blanket as bedding, in windowless cells with no clocks. He said about ten people were being held in the facility when he was inside, a fraction of the number being held when he was there in the summer.
Moulton said he believes that the protestors have played an outsized role in improving the pace of moving detainees on from the holding facility. Protests have gone from once a week earlier this year, to practically every day, and Moulton said the officers at the facility seem to feel the extra eyes on them. But he said that the quicker pace is a double-edged sword.
“It does seem that they are moving people through here more quickly,” Moulton said. “The consequence of that is that they don't have as much time to have lawyers intervene in their cases.”
Moulton noted that some activists want to shut the facility in Burlington down, but said that wouldn't be wise, reasoning that ICE would open another facility elsewhere, where there would be less pressure on the agency if there were less people watching.
“I don't want this facility move to the boondocks of Northern New England or something like that, where there's not the presence, the oversight,” he said.
It was one of a handful of comments that raised some ire from the assembled crowd of protestors. Moulton also said that while he wasn't advocating for opening new ICE facilities in Massachusetts, he felt that having a new overnight facility for women detainees (which Massachusetts does not have currently) might not be a bad idea.
“It actually probably would be smart so that they are not being sent out of state and that they can get to go before Massachusetts judges,” Moulton said.
Right now, those female detainees are sent to other facilities, often in Vermont.
WBZ NewsRadio reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment, which responded:
“The ICE field office in Burlington is a processing facility, not a detention facility. Illegal aliens are only briefly held there for processing before being transferred to a detention facility. Detainees are provided with bedding items including blankets."
A DHS spokesperson did not respond to questions on the alleged inadequate food and lack of showers at the Burlington facility. They did say conditions at their detention facilities are "higher...than most US prisons that hold actual US citizens."
WBZ NewsRadio’s Chaiel Schaffel (@CSchaffelWBZ) reports.