“My world collapsed,” Berto said in Portuguese.
From the police department, the boy was taken to ICE’s holding facility in Burlington on Thursday evening, where he spent a night before being transferred by car to the Northwestern Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Winchester, Va., on Friday morning, his mother said. The juvenile facility is more than 500 miles away from Everett.
The boy is a 7th-grader at Albert N. Parlin School in Everett, his mother said. The teen and his family, who are Brazilian nationals, have a pending asylum case and are authorized to work legally in the United States, Lattarulo said.
On Friday, after a lawyer filed a habeas corpus petition, US District Judge Richard G. Stearns ruled the government has until Oct. 14 to justify the teen’s arrest; otherwise, he must receive a bond hearing no later than Oct. 17, according to federal court documents.
In his ruling, Stearns mentioned the boy’s age, stating he’s detained “in the company of unrelated adult detainees.” At the time, the boy was still believed to be in Massachusetts.
“I’ve never done a bond or a habeas for a kid this young, ever. This is the youngest,” Lattarulo said.
Neither ICE nor the Everett Police Department immediately responded to a request for comment on Sunday.
The boy’s detention is the up-to-date in a string of ICE arrests of teenagers in Massachusetts since the Trump administration launched in September what they called “Operation Patriot 2.0”, surging resources to the region for immigration enforcement.
In September, 16-year-old Gustavo Henrique Reis Oliveira was arrested by ICE on Milford’s Main Street and later released. A couple of weeks later, 19-year-old João Marciano do Carmo was arrested on his way to work, and his family didn’t hear from him for five days. Carmo is still in a detention facility in Mississippi, according to his family. Neither teen has a criminal record.
Children and teenagers who do not have legal status in the United States have been increasingly arrested by ICE, according to advocates and attorneys. The federal government has restarted the practice of detaining families with children, after reopening some family detention centers that had been shuttered for years.
The 13-year-old’s mother said her son has called her crying from the Virginia facility, where he’s sleeping on concrete with an aluminum sheet as a blanket, she said. Berto said her son’s foot is healing since he broke it while riding a bike recently. She’s worried about his physical health because he’s in pain, and he said he had little to eat.
Lattarulo said he and the family still don’t know what led to the encounter with the police or how ICE got involved.
While she waited for her son at the Everett Police Department on Thursday, Berto said she saw people who appeared to be ICE officers entering the building.
“It doesn’t make sense for one of my clients, waiting almost two hours for her kid, and only to find out later that ICE agents took him,” Lattarulo said. “They told her she could pick him up, and then they wouldn’t let her see the kid.”
The Everett Police Department does not have a formal agreement with ICE. The Department of Corrections is the only state entity that has a pact with ICE, known as a 287(g) agreement, which allows the agency to identify and process undocumented immigrants incarcerated in the state’s correctional system who could be eligible for deportation.
When Lattarulo heard of the boy’s arrest Friday morning, he didn’t know whether the teen was still in Massachusetts. He said one of ICE’s tactics is to transfer detained immigrants to other states as quick as possible after their arrest, preventing attorneys from providing counsel in Massachusetts, a state often perceived to be more sympathetic to immigrants.
ICE often transfers immigrants from Massachusetts to Texas and Louisiana because such states have low asylum and bond approval rates, Lattarulo said.
With the boy held in a detention facility in Virginia, Lattarulo needs to find attorneys who have jurisdiction over the area.
The teen’s mother created an online fund-raiser to support her efforts to release her son.
“I need help to bring my son home. He’s only 13 years old and was taken by ICE,” she wrote in Portuguese. “We’re suffering a lot with this situation. God bless anyone who’s able to help.”
The last time Berto heard of her son was on Saturday. She fears ICE will continue moving him around the country without communicating with her.
“The way [ICE] is treating people, especially a child, is very cruel,” Berto said.
Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio of the Globe Staff contributed reporting.
Marcela Rodrigues can be reached at marcela.rodrigues@globe.com.
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