Massachusetts Migrant Crisis Part 2: The Crisis Arrives in the Town of Somerset

This is part two of a three-part series covering the migrant crisis in the south coast of Massachusetts. At the time of this reporting, veterans in Massachusetts did not have priority in the emergency shelters over newly arrived woman with children from other countries. As the daughter of a veteran who saw my father get very little support, that didn’t settle well with me.

Make sure you read Massachusetts Migrant Crisis Part 1: The Takeover of Taunton’s Only Hotel first.

Last fall, I was out celebrating a friend’s birthday when I received an after-hours text from a trusted source who told me a bus had just dropped off three dozen migrants at a small 40 room hotel in my town of Somerset. It was Saturday at 11:45 PM.

Now, as you can probably tell, I’m the kind of girl who knows pretty much everything going on in my small town. I can guarantee you, there was little-to-no notice given about this. A year into this crisis, we’ve now learned that is the modus operandi of the Healey administration; no communication about migrants until after they have been placed. Why give anyone a chance to prepare or, God forbid, ask for a reconsideration based on the inability to accommodate an instant dramatic rise in population?

Hours later, I made my way over to the hotel to learn more. Over the next two months, I was a regular fixture there, stopping by sometimes multiple times a week. I got to know the hotel owners, a couple from India who had come to the United States the old-fashioned way–legally–and worked their way through the hotel industry. They had just purchased the small hotel a year or two before COVID.

Discussing the migrants with my group of fellow moms, one thing was for sure: we were very sympathetic to the children who had just arrived. We heard there might be up to 40 children of all ages living there, so we pulled together resources and, when I showed up to the hotel the next day, I didn’t arrive empty handed. We gathered books and puzzles, flash cards and crayons. We also brought baby washes and toothbrushes, jump ropes and books.

The hotel owners were very eager to take care of these migrants, and they were grateful for the business. This was an unexpected perspective for me. The owners told me that during COVID, they were unable to kick out people who did not pay their bill and they lost tens of thousands of dollars during the first two years of the pandemic. The migrant situation created a life changing partnership with the state for this business and they were grateful. I hadn’t thought of that until I met them.

Don’t get me wrong: as legal immigrants themselves, the owners were keenly aware of the financial support these people were getting that they never had when they first came to the United States. We often spoke about how unfair it seemed, but they were too busy managing the influx to further lament the injustice.

The second day I visited, a van pulled up and brought dinner for everyone. The company was from Brockton, and they dropped off the food twice a day. This time, there were missing over 20 meals. The hotel owners used their own money and bought pizza to make up the difference. Over the next few weeks, this happened often, and the owners would always order food from a local Somerset establishment to fill in the gaps.

One morning, several women and children were coming in and out of the lobby picking up food. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I assumed migrants would appear emaciated and tired, with tatter clothing and bare feet. It was the exact opposite. Everyone was dressed well. Many of the children had phones or tablets. The women were dressed stylish, with many wearing jewelry. one woman had a full set of acrylic nails. I get it: these people were traveling with all that they owned in bags and suitcases. But the modern migrant looked more than comfortable to me.

At the end of the first week, I stopped over to visit and the lobby was filled with boxes from Amazon that filled the lobby. Boxes of every size. The owner’s wife told me that the boxes were filled with baby supplies. Someone from the state came and took count of how many children and babies there were and, a few days later, the supplies arrived. Cribs, bassinets, diapers–the works. There were many infants on site and many of the women were pregnant. One woman had given birth at Charlton Memorial Hospital in Fall River within 24 hours of arriving at the hotel.

While I was talking about the packages, a newly arrived woman ran into the lobby. Somehow, she was able to communicate to the owner that she had locked herself out of her room again. “She locked herself out of her room and her baby is alone on the bed,” the owner told me. “She does this all the time. She can’t leave that baby alone,” as she rushed to give her a new key.

Word got around town that we had 40 families living at the hotel and virtue-signaling Democrats showed up to drop off clothing and supplies, and there were sure to let everyone know about it. A former school committee member went to the hotel to deliver his tidings and made sure our local news guy came and took his picture in the hotel lobby. I caught wind of it from the hotel owners, who didn’t like the idea all that much, and I publicly shamed the former elected official on Facebook soon after. Not surprisingly, the pictures never made it to the local paper.

The usual suspects started to arrive: two people from the National Guard, Child and Family Services, school department officials, the Board of Health, and the traveling vaccination team to make sure everyone got their jabs. The school-aged children were enrolled in schools that scrambled to find ways to accommodate the non-English learns. The kids seemed very happy to go to school.

Next up, the journey from Somerset to Taunton.