The high school student in Massachusetts who was arrested and kidnapped by Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) on his way to volleyball practice was released after six days of detention on Thursday after a judge granted him bond.

Marcelo Gomes da Silva, 18, who came to the U.S. from Brazil at the age of 7, was detained by ICE last Saturday. The agents were looking for Marcelo’s father, who owns the car that his son was driving. He had parked in a friend’s driveway and was headed to practice when ICE agents pulled him over, arrested, and detained him. The student did not even know about his own immigration status because he was so young when he arrived in the United States.

In a press conference, Gomes da Silva described the inhumane conditions he was subjected to while being held in a Burlington, Massachusetts ICE detention facility. 

Marcelo slept on the cement floor in a room holding 25 to 35 men, many twice his age. He had to use the bathroom in the open, describing the situation as “humiliating.” The majority of his six days in detention, he was detained with no windows, no time outside, and no permission to shower. He was allowed to brush his teeth only twice. His request for a Bible was denied.

“This isn’t a good spot to be, “ Marcelo said. “Nobody should be in here. Most people down there are all workers. They all got caught going to work. These people have families … they have kids to go home to.”

Marcelo described the solidarity he experienced with the other detained men, such as another man from Brazil who made him a bracelet from the mylar blankets. He said that he would share his limited food with them, and often acted as their translator because he speaks English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

“They would come in with their papers and say, ‘Can you translate this for me? I don’t want to sign something and get deported.’ And a lot of those papers, I would have to look back at them and be like, ‘You are being deported. They are taking you out of the country.’ And I would have to watch people cry, people with kids, ten-month-year-old babies,” Gomes Da Silva said.

His lawyer Robin Nice was not able to enter to see her teenaged client until his fifth day of confinement.

Patricia Hyde, acting field director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in Boston, defended the high schooler’s detention and said the agency intends to pursue deportation.  “When we go into the community and find others who are unlawfully here, we’re going to arrest them,” Hyde said. “He’s 18 years old and he’s illegally in this country. We had to go to Milford looking for someone else and if we come across someone else who is here illegally, we’re going to arrest them.”

In a press briefing on Monday, she justified his collateral detention and celebrated the Massachusetts ICE raids by referring to the detained immigrants as “murderers, rapists, drug traffickers, child sex predators and members of violent transnational criminal gangs” — racist dangerous tropes to justify their attacks on immigrant workers and students.

This attack on Marcelo Gomes da Silva comes as the Trump administration is launching its most intense wave of its war on immigrants and their basic democratic rights. That includes the detention of Dylan Contreras, a New York City public school student from Venezuela who remains detained in a Pennsylvania detention facility while his school community rallies to support him and bring him home.

Students and Educators in Solidarity

In response to his kidnapping by ICE, the high school junior’s classmates at Milford High School organized a walkout on Monday to protest his detainment. Students at Milford High wore shirts and held signs that read “Free Marcelo” and expressed their love for and solidarity with him. 

The volleyball team dedicated their Tuesday night game to their missing teammate, with the community packing the stands and wearing white shirts with his number 10 drawn on the back in his absence.

The Massachusetts Teachers Association, the teachers union representing the educators at Milford High School, released a statement condemning “ICE’s cruel and inhumane actions in the strongest possible terms,” explicitly calling out the Trump administration and expressing solidarity with the students and teachers who walked out in protest.

Students demanded his release, as well as making Massachusetts a sanctuary state, demanding ICE out of schools, hospitals, and religious sites following the change in DHS rules in January that allows ICE to enter sensitive locations.

Students, educators, and the entire labor movement must defend immigrant youth and workers. 

Marcelo’s detention is part and parcel of the capitalist system that depends on immigrant labor while treating immigrant lives as disposable.This system criminalizes working-class people of color, tears families apart, and deports youth who have spent nearly their entire lives here. While the Trump administration is escalating these attacks with open cruelty and racist rhetoric, both political parties have fueled this system, using immigrants as a hyper-exploited workforce to serve the interests of capital.

No student should fear being ripped from their community on their way to school or practice. No worker should be detained for driving to their job. The only way to stop these attacks is to organize and resist independently from the capitalist parties and using our own methods — walkouts, mass protests, and strikes.

No business as usual while our classmates, coworkers, and neighbors are under attack!