By Daniel Jackson | djackson@repub.com
U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, D-Springfield, paid a visit this week to the facility in Massachusetts where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processes people it has detained.
Officials there didn’t know he was coming.
“We’re conducting congressional oversight by making an unannounced visit,” Neal said in a video recorded outside the doors of the facility in Burlington.
Visits by members of Congress are important, Neal said in a statement, to ensure immigration officials treat people they have detained humanely and process them in a timely manner.
Neal, who is running for re-election, said he made the trip Tuesday in response to the recent news of the death of an ICE detainee. “We want to avert what has happened in New Jersey,” he said in his video.
A Salvadoran man by the name of Edwin Lopez-Cornejo died at the Delaney Hall immigration jail on Saturday, according to the Associated Press. Although officials have yet to announce the cause of death, his family said Lopez-Cornejo died because the New Jersey facility failed to give him his medications regularly.
Neal said in his video that the visit to the Burlington facility was a reminder that immigration officials have detained immigrants at courthouses when they were seeking “to regularize their status.” It undercuts President Donald Trump’s assertion that immigration officials are focused on detaining “the worst of the worst,” he added.
The lawmaker told Spectrum News that ICE officials “cooperated with my questions” during the visit.
Neal is among several members of Congress who have shown up to the facility unannounced.
U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Worcester, flashed his ID to an official standing at the facility’s doors in April and announced he was conducting an oversight visit. The official told McGovern he could enter, but he had to leave his cellphone outside, and he could not be accompanied by staff or a translator.
McGovern said in his own video that he had heard the facility was unsanitary, overcrowded and offered “lousy food.”
U.S. Rep. Katherine Clark, D-Revere, said in a statement July 24 she returned to the facility not only to provide oversight but to call for an end to ICE’s “endless acts of terror.”
“This facility is not equipped to be a detention center, yet we’ve seen even in the last week that people are frequently held here well beyond initial processing,” she said in a statement.
Asked about Neal’s visit to the facility, an ICE spokesperson wrote in an email that the agency’s goal is to process detainees through its facilities quickly, moving them on to deportations. Because the Burlington building is not a detention center, people stay there briefly, according to the spokesperson.
“These claims that there are subprime conditions or overcrowding are false,” the statement said. “The ICE Burlington facility has an abundance of supplies, including food, assorted snacks, water, personal hygiene, and bedding materials.”
