3 activists arrested outside Burlington ICE office after trying to deliver food to detainees

Three people were arrested outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Burlington on Friday, after they tried to deliver food to people detained there.

"We've heard some pretty compelling evidence that people are not being given enough food, not being given sanitary supplies, blankets," said Eleanor Reid of Hanover, N.H., before the arrests. "And since our government is not doing that, we are here to do it ourselves."

Reid, along with Nastasia Lawton-Sticklor of Leominster and Nathan Phillips of Newton, had approached the field office with baskets of sandwiches, granola bars, fruit and other snacks. They said they were concerned about the welfare of immigrants held at the facility, based on reports from former detainees that they weren't given much to eat while in ICE custody there.

"We're here to deliver food and care packages to the people being held here, and visit with them, if possible, to make sure they're doing okay," Lawton-Sticklor told WBUR. "We have some deep concerns about food, basic necessities, being withheld from them."

The ICE field office is a large two-story building located in a busy office park near the Burlington Mall. As the agency's New England regional headquarters, it's primarily a place where immigrants go for regular check-ins with officials. But it also serves as an intake center, where people get booked in after an ICE arrest.

Former detainees and immigration lawyers have described conditions inside the field office as "abysmal" and "inhumane." People were crowded into windowless rooms where, if they even had room to lie down, they had to sleep on cement floors. There was little privacy and no access to showers. And food rations were meager.

ICE has insisted that it provides adequate food and medical care to detainees.

Around 10:30 am Friday, the three activists knocked on the glass door of the building and asked to go inside to deliver the food.

A man wearing a navy jacket with the words "Police E-R-O" on the back — which stands for Enforcement and Removal Operations, a division of ICE — told them no visitors are permitted inside the building and they weren't accepting deliveries.

What then unfolded was a tense back-and-forth between the activists and a few federal agents. Officials tried to get the three to leave the front entryway, but they refused. They sat on the far edge of the stairway entrance, where they said they weren't obstructing people from access to the building.

During the 90-minute standoff, several people entered and exited the building. At one point, a man in plain clothes stuck his head out of the front door and told the activists, onlookers and the media to "go f*ck off."

A little while later, several Burlington police officers arrived. They also tried to convince the protesters to leave, but the trio sat tight. About 45 minutes later, the officers handcuffed and arrested them.

Reid, Phillips and Lawton-Sticklor were each charged with one count of trespassing. They were arraigned in Woburn District Court and released on the condition they stay away from the Burlington office. They have a pre-trial hearing scheduled for October.

"We notified them that they were to move, to remove themselves from the operational area of the main doors, and they refused to do that," said Captain Hanafin, a Burlington Police Department officer who responded to the scene.  "It's disruptive, and it's frankly a security issue to have people there in protest when there's operational things that happen."

He went on to call the arrests "unfortunate," saying the department wasn't "looking to arrest anyone."

Since details about the conditions inside the Burlington field office first emerged this summer, several groups of protesters gather outside the building weekly. The largest protest, which happens on Wednesdays, frequently attracts hundreds of people.

ICE has been accused of holding people in poor conditions inside processing centers around the country since the Trump administration began its immigration crackdown earlier this year.