Massachusetts Migrant Crisis Part 3: The journey from Somerset to Taunton

This is part three 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 part 1 and part 2 first.

One morning, I went by for a visit to the hotel in Somerset and I saw a group of about 15 migrant men standing together in the parking lot. The owner told me that some of them had been picked up and taken to go work for the day, he thought maybe to Providence. The rest waited around there to see if anyone came back asking for more workers. Despite what the Healey administration has stated, there are single men who are staying at these hotels. There were approximately seven rooms that had just men in each, debunking the notion that these were all families. Many of the women did not have men with them, just children. Even some of the pregnant women, who became pregnant on their journey here, did not have men with them.

I met one man who did travel with a pregnant woman. The couple fought often, and the hotel eventually had to move the man out of the room because the female was abusive to the man. She would lock him out of the room, keep their food stamps card from him, and scream and yell.

I met another woman whose husband had cancer. They had just arrived in Somerset when he was soon taken to a Fall River hospital and admitted. The hotel arranged transportation for her to go visit him every day, and others would watch their children so she could spend time at the hospital with him. His condition worsened and he was transferred to a Boston hospital. The day I met her, the hotel owner received a call from a state agency that had arranged for the family to be moved to a hotel closer to the hospital. I watched as the hotel owner typed into a translator on his phone to tell her to pack up all their things because a van was coming to move them to Boston.

The pride that the hotel owners took in ensuring that their hotel was being run well with the migrants on site softened me to the idea of having them there. Yes, I was still opposed to the open borders, and yes, I was bitter about the billions of tax dollars funding this disaster. But it was possible to set that aside and see the humanitarian need once they arrived. If they had to be here, then this is how it should go.

On a cool afternoon, I stopped by to check in and the owner’s wife was flustered. She told me that one of the occupants was refusing to open their door for a weekly check of the room. They were always concerned about things staying clean at the hotel. The owners even told me they didn’t want me to donate markers for the children because they were worried that they would write on the walls with them. Weekly checks of the rooms were a must. Eventually, the owner called Somerset Police Department to come over and get the migrant to open up the door. This particular room housed two men.

Using some of the funds they got from housing the migrants, the hotel owners went to the local Dollar Store and purchases cleaning supplies for each room. Once a week, they would leave a bucket with supplies in front of each door, and they told families they needed to clean their rooms. There was laundry on site and my mom-friends and I donated 20 laundry baskets to help with the daily laundry tasks. The owner would sometimes do laundry for the women who had babies and would have it folded in the lobby for them to come and pick up.

In an ironic plot twist, the Board of Health came to the hotel to ensure everything was up to code with the new tenants and they discovered the owners had built a small screened in porch area in the back, long before the migrants arrived. They hadn’t pulled a permit, and no one had ever checked before, but they were told they had to remove it. They were not happy.

A week before Christmas, I went to the hotel with some supplies the moms had gathered, and the owners were distraught. They had received notification that all the migrants would be relocated to the Clarion Hotel before Christmas. They told me the state, in an effort to consolidate all migrants, was eliminating the smaller hotels and moving them all to larger ones. But the owners claim that all the hotels that the state was using were owned by one company via a multi-million-dollar contract that cut off small business owners from getting apiece of the pie. “We had a chance to make up for the money we lost during COVID and not it’s gone.” the owner lamented.

The migrants were moved out of Somerset soon after. I drove by the hotel and saw the doors of each of the 40 rooms open wide and the owners outside cleaning. The migrants were gone and so was the money.

Without access to any migrant housing locations, I resorted to research: Freedom of Information Act requests, emails to the Taunton Police Department and Mayor’s Office, and lots of deep internet dives late at night. Eventually, I was the first to break the news that the Clarion Hotel ownership had been charged thousands of dollars in occupancy fees by the city of Taunton for having more migrants in their hotel than allowed by the city. After months of not paying the fees, the City of Taunton has taken the company to court. As of today, those fees have yet to be paid.

The Taunton hotel also housed several Massachusetts families who were homeless. I met one family who told me they had been there for a year after their apartment building was sold to new owners who evicted all the tenants. The family didn’t have the resources to get into a new place and were homeless. They were placed at the Clarion.

The family didn’t want to talk about what was happening there because they were afraid the hotel would find out and kick them out. Their teenage daughter, however, did tell me that it was very uncomfortable for her since the migrants arrived. She shared that many men walked around the hotel naked, and she had seen couples having sex in the hallways as well.

It had been six months or so since I had been to the Clarion and I thought it was time to take a ride up to Taunton and look to see what was new.

I got to the hotel on a recent Friday at around 3 p.m. and the parking lot was filled with cars. I thought that was odd. How does anyone here have a car? To be fair, I have no idea who all those cars belonged to. I did take observe a late 2000’s model Mercedes Benz that had four Haitian men working on it when I arrived. It looked like they were installing a speaker in the trunk.

I got to the door and there was a much bigger, more formal sign on the building that stated it was closed to the public. This one was professionally printed. I walked in and there were barriers directing me over towards a woman who was sitting at a small table with a laptop. There was no way I could get past her so I just asked her if I could talk to the police officer who was on duty.

He came over and identified myself as a reporter and that I was looking to update readers on how things were going at the hotel. He put his phone away and offered to talk to me outside.

He told me about the day-to-day operations of the hotel and, at first, I didn’t ask many questions. The conference center in the back of the building is still separate from the hotel where the migrants stay, and so is the gym. There are transportations services that come and go all day, bringing migrants where they need to go, like shopping or doctor’s visits. Children get picked up by buses and go to school. “It is no different than any other housing, apartment complex,” he told me. “Except you have 24/7 on-site police details,” I reminded him.

He said that the hotel had every right to make money and that it was a good business deal for them. I shared with him the tale of the small hotel in my town and how those migrants were here, depriving the owners from earning some of that state and federal money. He said he didn’t know anything about that.

What he did know is that there were people staying in the hotel who were working. State agencies have connected some of the migrants with businesses to get them work permit and jobs. he told me several women get picked up every day and go to work at a local hospital.

As we were talking, a van pulled up and I could hear a woman screaming and ca child crying loudly. The woman got out of the van and roughly pushed a screaming child ahead of her. She had a baby in a car seat as well. The child was crying, and the woman was screaming louder than he was. She was rough with the child and the officer did not interfere. I wanted to, but I thought the better of it.

I ended my chat with the officer and headed out. As I made my way to my car, the van that had just dropped off the screaming mother pulled up alongside me. With a Haitian accent he said, “That woman should not have children.” I quickly realized he was probably an Uber driver.

I told him I agreed, and it was hard to watch. He said she had been screaming at the child for the more than 30 minutes they were in his van, and the children were screaming and crying. I asked if he was an Uber driver, and he asked me if I had a boyfriend. He told me he picks up people from the hotel all day long.

When I asked him how the migrants pay him, he told me they all used prepaid debit cards. None used cash. I asked him if he knew who supplied the cards and he asked me if I wanted to go for lunch. I politely pushed on. He told me he thought the state provided them with the cards and I made a mental not to submit a FOIA request about this when I got home. Despite his unwanted overtures, the driver was actually very nice, and we chatted for another minute before I told him to have a good day. He made a flatter comment about my body as I walked away.

Since my visit, I did submit that FOIA for more information on the funding of transportation services for the migrants at The Clarion. The services and costs associated with the Massachusetts crisis, estimated at over a billion dollars to date, seems almost too massive to understand. Breaking it down one small item at a time, whether it’s the police details or the transportation fees or food services, somehow makes it easier to grasp. However, I’m not sure we’ll ever know the true costs.

But there are people who do know. Our local state representatives are the people voting to use taxpayer money to fund this program. One of my most surprising takeaways from talking to taxpayers about the local migrant crisis is that they don’t seem to realize their state representatives have that kind of power. Living amongst them, sometimes right in their neighborhood, are the elected officials who say “yes to the mess” that is the Massachusetts migrant crisis.