Teen Released by ICE Describes Conditions

A Massachusetts high school junior who was detained by ICE on his way to volleyball practice last weekend has been released from custody. An immigration judge found that Marcelo Gomes da Silva, an 18-year-old with no criminal record, was not a danger to the community and released him on $2,000 bond, ABC News. " He's an upstanding member of the society, we have people with luminous community letters of support in terms of his character from everyone," attorney Robin Nice said.

• More than 100 supporters, including dozens of his fellow Milford High School students, gathered outside the courthouse on Thursday. Students staged a walkout on Monday to protest his detention, and the volleyball team dedicated Tuesday's playoff game to him. "I don't wanna cry—but I wanna say that that place is not good," said Gomes da Silva, who was held at an ICE facility for six days.

• Officials said the ICE agents who arrested Gomes da Silva had been looking for his father, but the teen was driving his car. Gomes da Silva, who was born in Brazil, said an ICE agent told him that he arrived in the US in 2013 and his visa expired in 2015. He said he told her, "Ma'am, I was 7 years old," WGBH reports.
• Gomes da Silva said he was held in a room with dozens of other men. "You sleep on concrete floors. I have to use the bathroom in the open with like 35-year-old men. It's humiliating." The food, he said, was crackers for breakfast and dinner and "mush" for lunch. "Nobody deserves to be down there," he said, per the Milford Daily News. "Even if they have to be deported, so be it, but do it the right way."

• Democratic lawmakers said Gomes da Silva should have been released when ICE found out he wasn't their target and wasn't a criminal. "Marcelo should have been playing the drums at Milford High's graduation on Sunday, not trapped in a detention center," Sen. Ed Markey said in a video on X.
• Nice, his lawyer, said: "We disrupted a kid's life. We just disrupted a community's life. These kids should be celebrating graduation and prom. ... They should be doing kid stuff, and it is a travesty and a waste of our judicial process to have to go through this." She said Gomes da Silva will probably have a hearing in a few months, the AP reports. "We're optimistic that he'll have a future in the United States," she said.

(More ICE stories.)