ICE’s Boston Immigration Sweep Sparks Clash: Healey Calls It ‘Political Theater’ Amid Sanctuary Policy Feud

BY COLIN A. YOUNG

About three months after trumpeting with few details 1,500 arrests in Massachusetts, federal immigration officials this weekend said they were in and around Boston “cleaning up the mess left by the city’s sanctuary policies,” an effort the governor said was mere “political theater.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it initiated “Operation Patriot 2.0” in recent days, a follow-up to May’s immigration enforcement campaign across Massachusetts. The new push, which ICE promoted by allowing some media outlets to tag along on for some arrests this weekend, follows the U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuit challenging Boston’s policy to limit police cooperation with non-criminal federal immigration enforcement.

David Wesling, the acting director of the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Boston field office, said on Fox News this weekend that his agents were specifically looking for “the individuals arrested by Boston Police Department that are actionable cases for us, people that we have tried to take into custody, lodge detainers with and wanted to arrest.”

“We have 71 individuals that are out there, out and about in the communities now, that we still haven’t been able to locate,” he said.

Massachusetts has not declared itself a “sanctuary state,” but the state and its capital city have been popular targets of the Trump administration amid pushback against policies that federal officials see as lenient towards immigrants. In a Sunday interview on MSNBC, Gov. Maura Healey reiterated that Massachusetts “is not a sanctuary state.”

“What we have seen from ICE and from the administration really isn’t about public safety. It’s about political theater. It’s about a political power grab and an attempt to intimidate,” Healey said, touting her public safety background as a former attorney general. She added, “It’s about show. It’s about a show of force. It’s about political theater. It’s the same reason you see National Guard now on streets and cities in America. It’s just not right.”

The governor added, “It’s just not right, what’s happening across America right now.”

Healey, a Democrat who faces reelection next year, charged that President Donald Trump is using immigration enforcement as “an effort to distract” people from things including “the abysmal record of the Trump administration on the economy right now.”

Pressed by a host to explain the “strategy” behind saying that Massachusetts is not a sanctuary state, Healey said it’s “just the fact.”

“These are just terms that the Trump administration makes up — guys, that’s what’s going on — to fit into their narrative and to further this political theater,” the governor said.

While Healey has repeatedly slammed ICE’s tactics, she has also called for the federal government to do more to tighten control of the nation’s borders as a way to staunch the influx of migrants.

“I told President Biden that he needed to act on the border and shut it down two years ago, three years ago now. I think that some of what Donald Trump has done on the border makes a lot of sense, right? And the tightening there,” Healey told reporters in May. “I won’t get into specifics. But the general move and recognition that there needed to be more control brought to the border is absolutely correct. And certain things have been done that make a lot of sense.”