Immigration policy divides GOP U.S. Senate contenders for Massachusetts

Sam Drysdale

AUG. 19, 2024…..After U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren sided with Republicans to shoot down an immigration reform bill last spring, the three Republicans vying for her seat this fall have differing opinions on how to handle the immigration crisis that most Bay Staters say is a top concern this election year.

During a Sunday debate hosted by WBZ, of the three Republican primary candidates up for the Senate seat — Bob Antonellis of Medford, Ian Cain of Quincy and John Deaton of Bolton — only Deaton said he would have supported the federal immigration deal that was blocked by Senate Republicans and a few progressive Democrats, including Warren and Sen. Ed Markey earlier this year.

Gov. Maura Healey has pointed to that bill’s failure as a contributor to the state’s migrant crisis, as the state has spent more than $1 billion in the last year on an emergency shelter system that has strained under a flood of new arrivals.

The bill would have steered billions towards the crisis and included tougher standards on asylum, automatic shutdowns of the border if illegal crossings exceeded certain limits, expansion of work permits and funding to help state and local governments handle the migrant influx. Former President Donald Trump reportedly encouraged Senate Republicans to kill the bill.

In his response to moderator Jon Keller’s question about whether he would have supported the bill, Deaton referenced the Healey administration’s temporary conversion of a Roxbury recreation center into overflow housing for families seeking shelter, many of them refugees.

“When they took that rec center from the poor kids in Roxbury, someplace I lived my first year of law school here in Boston, New England School of Law, it hit home. And I went to the border and what I learned is shocking — 50 percent of the fentanyl entering Massachusetts is coming from the Yuma crossing. They’re giving asylum court dates of 2032 and 2033, eight, nine years from now,” he said.

He continued, “Twelve million people have crossed when you count getaways. So even if you assume 99 percent are good people who just want a better life, something I can identify with, even if 1 percent is bad, that’s 120,000 people. It’s a national security crisis. So I would have voted for that bill because it stopped the bleeding.”

Deaton said it wasn’t a “perfect bill,” but that it was a first step towards addressing the crisis.

Cain, a city councilor in Quincy where the Healey administration is hosting one of its “welcome centers” for asylum seekers and other legally present new arrivals, said he wouldn’t have supported the bill “in the way that it was presented.”

He referred to it as a “Chuck Schumer progressive open border bill” that “didn’t get to the heart of the matter.”

“If you talk to voters across Massachusetts, irrespective of their party affiliation, illegal immigration is the number one issue on their minds. People are looking for, again, a sensible solution to closing the border, adjudicating the backlog of illegal immigrants that have arrived here to this country, ending the catch and release program, and then figuring out how to get back to a normal legal immigration pathway for people that want to come here the right way,” Cain said.

Antonellis, who wore a Make America Great Again hat on the debate stage, called the bill “a red herring,” blaming President Joe Biden for “unraveling the border” and said if Donald Trump is reelected he “could fix it immediately.”

In response to Deaton’s comment that the bill would have “stopped the bleeding” while allowing for additional reform, Antonellis said Trump could sign an executive order to address the border crisis without lawmaker involvement.

“Stop the bleeding, that’s exactly what an executive order is meant to do. And that is to do something. So your red herring is actually do nothing, spending a lot of money. And how many transgender bathrooms are in that bill too? We don’t even know. They put all kinds of stuff into these bills. And an executive order would have solved that problem immediately,” Antonellis said.

Cain followed up by saying that he would support banning sanctuary states, cities and towns.

“People very well know we’re in this position that we are in in Massachusetts, which is enduring financial and physical burden here, because of the right-to-shelter law,” he said.

Deaton accused his opponents of not being willing to do anything about immigration.

“I think it says a lot that my two opponents on this stage actually shared the same position as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and that is to do nothing and to not vote for it,” he said. “The immigration issue here in Massachusetts is taxing our infrastructure, our hotels, our urgent cares, our schools. We have to do something about it.”