Massachusetts Leaders Hesitate on Safe Communities Act Amid ICE Raids

BY SAM DRYSDALE

As a wave of federal enforcement stokes fear across immigrant neighborhoods in Massachusetts, the state’s top legislative leaders acknowledged the anxiety but offered no new support Monday for a bill aimed at limiting cooperation between local and federal immigration authorities.

Following a weekend marked by high-profile Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in Greater Boston under “Operation Patriot 2.0,” Senate President Karen Spilka and House Speaker Ron Mariano stopped short of endorsing the legislation, despite acknowledging fear in their districts.

“I will say my communities are very concerned,” Spilka said. She recounted a recent incident in her district when Marcelo Gomes da Silva, a Milford High School student born in Brazil, was detained by ICE agents while on his way to volleyball practice in June. 

“They arrested the high school student, acknowledging that that student was not the person they were looking for, they still arrested him and took him in, and it took a while to get that student released,” Spilka said. “That promotes fear in all of our communities, all of our immigrant communities.”

She added: “People are concerned about going to work. They’re concerned about walking to go to their drugstores or their supermarkets. They’re concerned about being picked up.”

Mariano echoed that sense of unease, especially in increasingly diverse areas like his hometown of Quincy, which has a 40% minority population. He also said he wasn’t aware of “any specific incident that has occurred within the boundaries of my district.”

“But everyone who pays attention to what’s going on today has some fear of what’s going on,” he said. “The face-covered SWAT teams that pop up out of nowhere and come in and hassle people for no apparent reason. Everyone reads those stories in the paper, even though you may not have been witness to an incident yourself, you know they exist. And with that kind of heightened tension and anxiety about: Is it going to happen to us? Is it going to happen to my family?”

The so-called Safe Communities Act (S 1681 / H 2580), championed for years by immigrant advocacy groups and progressive lawmakers, would restrict local police from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement except in cases involving serious criminal activity. 

Asked whether this was the right time to advance the bill in response to increased ICE activity, Mariano said: “I don’t know if it’s a year for that.”

“The issue of enforcing immigration laws is a purview of the federal government,” he added. “It’s not a purview of the state government. We are here to enforce the state laws, and we do that. And we do it very well. And so I think that there has to be a way for us to coexist without having to get into defining and limiting each other’s specific charges.”

Spilka said much of what the Safe Communities Act calls for is already standard practice in Massachusetts. 

“Massachusetts has been clear that we will help federal ICE if and when there are criminal issues, criminals being arrested, and that has happened, and we have gotten criminals off the street,” she said. “But the concern is that they come in and they swoop in and they try to arrest people or take people away, not knowing — there’s no arrest warrant. There’s no clear issue for whatever reason that person is being taken away.”

Pressed again on whether the Legislature would pass the Safe Communities Act this year, Spilka replied, “That’s what, to a large extent, the state Safe Communities Act says.”

The legislation was last sent to a study order in 2023, effectively halting its progress.

Gov. Maura Healey, speaking alongside the legislative leaders, condemned the ICE enforcement campaign as a “show of force” orchestrated by the Trump administration to distract from economic failings.

“What we’ve seen far too often and in such great numbers here and across the country are construction workers and nannies and health care aides and agricultural workers who are being taken out of our communities, taken away from their families,” Healey said.

Healey added that increased ICE activity “only undermines local law 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 in the Boston area 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.