Trump deportation plan stoking Massachusetts economic concerns, reigniting debate about law enforcement cooperation

• Chris Lisinski

BOSTON, DEC. 10, 2024…..President-elect Donald Trump continues to pledge large-scale deportations of foreign-born residents, stoking concerns about massive economic consequences and reigniting debate in Massachusetts about law enforcement cooperation.

Trump spent much of his winning campaign calling for major action to deport people in the United States without legal status, and he’s doubled down since the election, albeit in sometimes vague terms.

In a wide-ranging interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired Sunday, Trump said his administration would prioritize undocumented immigrants with criminal histories, but he also suggested an openness to removing children who are here legally as part of mixed-status families.

“I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back,” Trump said.

Pressed on whether his administration would return to separating families as a deterrent against additional migration, Trump said the response “depends on the family.”

“The family may decide to say, ‘I’d rather have dad go, and we’ll stay here,’ in which case they have that option,” he said, adding, “When they come here illegally, they’re going out. Now, if they come here illegally but their family is here legally, then the family has a choice. The person that came in illegally can go out, or they can all go out together.”

The president-elect also suggested he wants to end birthright citizenship, which grants American citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. That policy is enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, so any attempt to change it would likely require a constitutional amendment — and therefore two-thirds support in both chambers of Congress or all 50 states — or trigger a massive legal fight.

“We’re going to have to get a change. We maybe have to go back to the people. But we have to end it,” Trump said on “Meet the Press,” incorrectly claiming the United States is the “only country” that has such a policy.

Trump’s months of promises about deportations have worried many Democrats. Gov. Maura Healey, long a vocal opponent of Trump, and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu have been drawn — or inserted themselves — into the crossfire with the incoming administration in Washington.

Three days after the election, Healey was asked a hypothetical in an MSNBC television interview: would she fulfill a Trump administration request for Massachusetts State Police to assist in mass deportations?

“No. Absolutely not,” she replied.

Since then, Healey has on multiple occasions argued that any immigration enforcement should remain solely under the purview of the federal government, and said pursuing a major deportation campaign would be “both cruel and also very, very destabilizing to our economy.”

“The concept of mass deportations — there are so many families with mixed status in this country. There are so many people who are gainfully employed, who are paying taxes, who are raising children here who are in schools, and it would crater our economy if that kind of activity were to occur,” Healey said during a panel event hosted by the Washington Post on Nov. 21.

That’s a similar argument raised by at least one local economist.

Michael Goodman, executive director of economic development and community partnerships at UMass Dartmouth, told lawmakers that Trump’s proposed immigration and deportation promises could have “very significant impacts on key industries, both here in Massachusetts and nationally.”

“When we think about a state like ours, where we’re not growing the population very quickly, where we’re heavily reliant on international migration as a source of labor force growth, this really does cause concern,” Goodman said at a Beacon Hill hearing last week about the state’s economic outlook. “Even tough talk, in our experience from 2016 to 2020 [during Trump’s first term], discourages the foreign-born, whether they have an immigration status or not that’s legal, from sending their kids to school, reporting to work, alerting the authorities when there’s a crime, and it makes these communities quite vulnerable.”

Some Republicans have suggested that deportations will focus on individuals with criminal histories, and described Trump’s victory as a mandate from voters.

“Let’s face it, it’s not just Michelle Wu. The entire state of Massachusetts has an open border, has a policy which is out of step with other states. We have a lot of illegal immigrants here,” Republican strategist Rob Gray said during an episode of WCVB’s “On the Record.” “People voted for immigrants to be deported. I think the Trump administration is going to focus on the criminals first.”

Immigration has been firmly in the spotlight in Massachusetts in recent years, driven in part by growing demand for emergency shelter services. Many of the thousands of people seeking shelter are immigrants, though Healey’s office has said they are all in the United States legally and pointed out that a majority of families receiving services are long-term Massachusetts residents.

The shifting dynamics could renew a Beacon Hill debate that had begun to fade from public view: whether to craft a statutory firewall between local law enforcement and federal immigration matters.

Groups that work to support immigrants for years have been unsuccessfully calling on lawmakers to enact legislation often referred to limit courts and police in Massachusetts from asking about immigration status and prohibit agreements with the federal government to deputize local law enforcement as immigration agents.

Several county sheriffs’ departments once had those 287(g) agreements in place that delegates to state and local law enforcement officers the authority to perform immigration officer functions under the oversight of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

According to the ACLU of Massachusetts, federal authorities ended a 287(g) contract with the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office in May 2021, the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Office ended its own 287(g) contract in September 2021, and the Barnstable County Sheriff’s Office moved last year to halt the same agreement with ICE. That leaves the state Department of Correction as the only Massachusetts agency with a 287(g) agreement in place, according to Elizabeth Sweet, director of the Massachusetts Immigrant & Refugee Advocacy Coalition.

Sweet and other activists want state law to prevent more of those deals from being reached, including with county sheriffs, who oversee jails and houses of correction in Massachusetts.

“Immigration policy and deportations is overwhelmingly a federal government function, so the role of the state is significantly less than the federal government’s role, and yet so much of the way that deportations and detention work right now is connected with our criminal justice system. Much of that, of course, is handled at the state level,” Sweet said in an interview.

A similar barrier already exists in Boston. The Trust Act enacted in 2014 and amended in 2019 blocks Boston police from helping federal officials enforce civil immigration violations, limiting cooperation to criminal instances.

Wu landed in a public feud with the Trump administration last month after pointing out the protections already on the books in the city. Incoming border czar Tom Homan called Wu “not very smart” in response.

“Either she helps us, or she gets the hell out of the way because we’re going to do it,” Homan reportedly said in an interview on conservative TV network Newsmax.

Despite the city-level policy and calls from some in the Legislature, top Beacon Hill Democrats for years have opted against embracing statewide legislation limiting cooperation with immigration enforcement.

The Senate in 2018 voted 25-13 to add some immigration enforcement-related language to its state budget bill, but that push did not survive in the House. Senate President Karen Spilka, who at the time had not yet ascended to the chamber’s top post, voted in favor of the measure, while her now-budget chief Sen. Michael Rodrigues voted no.

Since then, subsequent versions of the bill have moved through the committee process but never emerged for a vote in either chamber.

“We certainly hope that this is a moment that our lawmakers take very seriously the importance of the Safe Communities Act and any other actions that they can take to protect our immigrant communities from enforcement,” Sweet said.