A Yom Kippur vigil outside ICE’s local headquarters

1000 District Avenue in Burlington looks like a typical office building. Its exterior walls are made of squares of opaque black glass, and inside, there are eight small rooms spread across its two floors. These rooms sport no windows, furniture or decor — instead, they hold people detained by ICE, for anywhere from a few hours to multiple days. In one extreme case, an ICE detainee was held at the facility for 20 days. 

The building has been an ICE facility since 2007, but only recently caught the public’s attention due to its handling of people detained in the recent crackdown on immigration.

The facility has been on Lexington resident Josh Model’s radar since 18-year-old Marcelo Gomes da Silva was detained on his way home from volleyball practice this summer and held there for six days. Since then, Model has been protesting outside the facility every Wednesday, alongside hundreds of other locals, including many from Lexington. 

“What actually got me out to a protest was the story of Marcelo Gomes da Silva. He ended up coming here to 1000 District Avenue and was mistreated, and it was just a terror — the idea of someone just driving and being picked up by thugs and then put into a prison,” said Model.

LexObserver spoke with Model on Oct. 2 at a Yom Kippur vigil that was held outside the ICE facility. About 60 people congregated on a small patch of green, which is where protesters are legally allowed outside the facility. Crossing beyond the boundaries of the plot puts protesters at risk of arrest. Many of the attendees were elders and seated on folding chairs and picnic blankets, though some stood and held signs. “What were once trains have become planes,” one sign read, comparing ICE deportations to the trains that carried people to concentration camps in WWII.

“My personal connection to the cause is my history as a Jew whose family fled the Nazis,” Model said. “My grandmother escaped Germany in 1939, just in time, and came here to America. We lost a lot of family in World War II, and so to see this type of rhetoric being cheered by other Americans, I feel like it needs to be stopped. It is much too familiar to my family history.”

President Trump said in a 2023 speech that “immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing a line from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. “It’s the same way that Nazis talked about Jewish people during the Holocaust,” Model said. “Combined with the visuals of masked people pulling people off the street and taking them away to illegal prisons, it’s not a stretch, it’s really not a stretch.”

A few unmarked black vans entered and left the facility’s parking lot. There were only two labeled vehicles parked in the lot, with “Defend the Homeland” and “ICE” spraypainted in large letters across the body of the vehicles. 

Once, Model recalled, he assembled a care package for detainees in the Burlington facility. The package included Vitamin Water, Kind bars and maxi pads. Model attempted to hand the package to an ICE officer, instructing him to give it to the detainees in the building. The officer told Model that there were no detainees in the Burlington facility at all and refused to take his care package.

That conflicts with the testimonies of detainees who have been through the facility, including Gomes da Silva, and by local politicians who have been able to go inside the building. State Rep. Ken Gordon, who represents Bedford, Burlington, and Lexington’s Precinct 6, recounted his experience for those gathered at the vigil. 

“Their bathroom is a corner of the room that doesn’t go up over about their chest level. So they have no privacy whatsoever, and I think there’s one shower. It’s torture. They’re not given any reading material. They have no clock. The only way they can tell time is to look through a crack in the door,” said Gordon.

Gordon’s experience talking to an ICE officer was more productive than Model’s. According to the officer he spoke to, ICE purchases food for detainees at the prepared food aisle at the supermarket. However, when Gomes da Silva would ask for an item as simple as crackers, ICE would take a long time to carry out his request. Gordon said that Gomes da Silva “would split his food with other people in his cell. That would mean they probably didn’t have enough food, because he was sharing what he had.”

Gomes da Silva and the detainees in the facility with him at the time “were given forms in English that were important legal rights that they were being asked to waive. Many of the detainees didn’t speak English. Gomes da Silva was able to translate for them because he was bilingual. He was able to read some of it to them, and they didn’t sign,” said Gordon. 

Protesters say they find it disturbing that immigrants are being detained in these conditions right in the middle of a popular commercial strip, across the street from the Burlington Mall. Macy’s is in clear view from the patch of green the protesters populate each Wednesday. Model said he’s “very upset that the Constitution is being trodden on down the street from where I would have lunch.”

At the Wednesday ICE protests, protestors read portions of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution into a microphone to any ICE officers in range. “I did that a couple of times, which was very satisfying. Making sure that they know we’re watching, and that they’re assaulting liberty, is why I’m here. Getting that audible reminder is nice,” said Model.

These readings, speeches and signs elicit eruptions of honks from cars passing by and have attracted large numbers of people. 

The protests began with a couple, Jared and Laurie Berezin, armed only with a sign and their voices, and have since expanded into an enormous weekly demonstration. 

“It always means a lot to see people out here and see people caring. You can get angry, but you can also balance that with being hopeful,” Model said.