Above photo: Demonstrators outside the Massachusetts State House in Boston. Micah Fong.
Putting Democratic Party on notice.
Through sanctuary state campaign, immigrant rights organizers highlight how both major parties are participants in anti-migrant persecution.
Grassroots organizers in Massachusetts are demanding that their state stand with immigrant communities in declaring Massachusetts a sanctuary state—ensuring that state officials will not collaborate with Trump’s policy of mass immigrant detentions and deportations.
Spearheaded by the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the campaign outlines a set of four demands of the Massachusetts state government: ending law enforcement collaboration with ICE, stopping racist demonization against immigrants, stopping any new restrictions on housing assistance, and keeping ICE out of the state’s public schools and other institutions.
During a press conference on January 22, Democratic Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey declared that her state is “not a sanctuary state” for immigrants who might be detained by Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE). “Officials here follow the law,” Healey emphasized. Massachusetts officials were ready “when it comes to investigating, prosecuting, and holding accountable those who commit crimes in Massachusetts.”
Some grassroots organizers in Massachusetts are calling out the Democratic Party which has positioned itself in opposition to Trump’s agenda, for not putting up enough of a fight against Trump’s mass deportation campaign. In January, ICE was conducting as many as 800-1,200 arrests per day—justifying these efforts as an attempt to detain criminals while sweeping up many immigrants with no criminal records at all. As of last week, ICE detention facilities have reached 109% capacity due to increased arrests.
Peoples Dispatch spoke to Ximena Hasbach, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, who has been part of the campaign to make Massachusetts a sanctuary state. The PSL organized a rally in Boston on February 9 to put pressure on Healey, and has another planned for February 16, marking the anniversary of a Day Without an Immigrant boycott in 2017, which took place after Trump was elected for his first term.
Hasbach contrasts Healey’s most recent anti-sanctuary comments with what she labels as Democratic Party “posturing” during Trump’s first term. Hasbach highlighted how when Healey was the Attorney General of the State during Trump’s first presidency, she issued harsh condemnations of his policies, including by joining a lawsuit challenging Trump’s “Muslim ban”. But according to Hasbach “all of that apparent fight back went away when President Biden continued to deport immigrants at a high rate.”
“Now that Trump is back, there isn’t even that pretense of standing with the immigrant residents of her state,” Hasbach continued. “She is fully parroting Donald Trump and his ultra right racist billionaire agenda, saying that Massachusetts is not a sanctuary state, saying that what ICE is doing is apprehending criminals, saying that immigrants are the reason for the strain on public housing.”
Indeed, Healey has proposed changes to Massachusetts’ “Right to Shelter” law, which guarantees emergency housing for pregnant women and homeless families. These proposed changes would require those seeking shelter to prove they are in the country legally. Healey’s proposal would “require all family members to show they are US citizens or lawfully present in the US, with the rare exception for those households that include a child who is a US citizen or a lawful permanent resident,” according to the governor’s office.
Hasbach says that “whether you’re an immigrant family or not, these additional requirements of paperwork will actually harm all families.”
“Our immigrant neighbors are not the reason for inadequate public housing. We fully reject that accusation, that narrative,” Hasbach continued.
Read the full interview with Hasbach below:
Peoples Dispatch: Massachusetts, in the context of the rest of the United States, is viewed as sort of a liberal bastion. But then you have Governor Maura Healey very explicitly saying Massachusetts is not a sanctuary state. Do you see this as a switch in how the government of Massachusetts is characterizing itself?
Ximena Hasbach: I think it’s definitely a switch, at least in the rhetoric. In Trump’s first term, there was more posturing by the Democrats. At the time, Maura Healey was the Attorney General of Massachusetts, and she joined a number of other Democratic state attorney generals in saying that they oppose increased deportations. But then all of that apparent fight back went away when Joe Biden continued to deport immigrants at a high rate.
Now that Trump is back, there isn’t even that pretense of standing with the immigrant residents of her state. She is fully parroting Donald Trump and his ultra right racist billionaire agenda, saying that Massachusetts is not a sanctuary state, saying that what ICE is doing is apprehending criminals, saying that immigrants are the reason for the strain on public housing.
Even before Trump came into office for the second time, she sent delegates from the state of Massachusetts to Texas to tell our immigrant neighbors to not come to Massachusetts. This echoes Kamala Harris’s statements, when she visited Central America, to say “do not come.” It’s getting harder and harder to distinguish between the rhetoric of the Democrats and the Republicans.
Healey has completely aligned herself with Trump and his rhetoric. That really goes against this idea that Massachusetts and these other blue states are progressive places. In fact, they’re not fighting for their people, immigrant or not immigrants, because like we said, the housing restrictions that she is proposing will actually affect all working people in Massachusetts.
PD: Trump’s administration has made immigrant workers a very explicit target. Why are immigrants being scapegoated, above a lot of other things, by the Trump administration and by the right-wing in general?
XH: They need a scapegoat because people are rightfully angry. Working class people in the United States are angry that the cost of living is going up, the cost of groceries, the price of rent. It’s getting more and more expensive to live year by year. And the rate at which our wages are going up certainly doesn’t match.
We’re seeing this, and rightfully asking the question of why? Why is it getting harder and harder, in the richest country in the history of the world, to just get by?
No one is providing real solutions like saying that we shouldn’t be sending billions and billions of dollars to wage war against our brothers and sisters in Palestine, that we should actually be funding our public schools, our health care, and our infrastructure.
Here in Boston, we had our rally to officially launch the campaign on February 9. That morning, we had two subway trains crash into each other. It was hard for some of our neighbors to even make it to the rally.
It’s so obvious what our money should go towards. We live in Boston, Massachusetts, and in a wealthy state, in a supposedly progressive state. Why don’t we have functioning trains? The governor’s response and the president’s response is to point the finger at our fellow workers because they were born somewhere else.
PD: There is this idea that exists in mainstream rhetoric that immigrants are criminals, that everyone that ICE is arresting is a criminal, as well as the idea immigrants are a strain on state resources. In your context in Massachusetts, would you say that working people in Massachusetts are under threat by criminal immigrants? Or that workers are denied state resources because of immigrants?
XH: Definitely not. This rhetoric just further serves to divide and draw this line between people who are immigrants and people who are not immigrants, even dividing the immigrant community itself between documented and undocumented.
I want to draw attention to the newly signed Laken Riley Act. It’s very interesting wording, because you don’t even have to be convicted of a crime to have ICE be able to arrest you under this new act. It’s just any undocumented immigrant who is accused of a crime. Even the most benign crime, like shoplifting, is enough to get somebody detained by ICE.
It’s getting more and more difficult to push this narrative that we live in a very dangerous society because of our immigrant brothers and sisters, rather than that people are more and more desperate because our needs are not being met. We had a case here in Massachusetts of a young woman in Lynn, a teenager, who is 18 years old.
She had a neighbor call ICE because she pushed her brother over a fight over a cell phone. This is a high school student, and two siblings in a fight. This girl was detained by ICE, and sent to a jail in Maine, taken several states away from her family. Her family was absolutely distraught. Later, obviously, there was an uproar. Lynn has a large immigrant community.
These are the cases we’re seeing. We’re not seeing actually dangerous people get detained by ICE. I would say you know, the ICE agents, the kidnappers, are the dangerous people.
PD: How are immigrant communities sort of responding to these attacks?
XH: At least in Boston and the surrounding area, there has been an atmosphere of fear ever since the inauguration.
I think initially there were a lot of rumors flying around, saying that ICE is going to raid this place tomorrow.
For example, there was a rumor that ICE was going to be at a subway station in the very densely immigrant neighborhood of East Boston. The subway was much emptier than usual after those rumors were coming out, and these are working people who rely on public transportation. The fear is such that people are changing their whole routines, moving around their whole lives to avoid potential arrest, potential deportation.
That’s one of the reasons why this campaign came about, why we want to go on the offensive. We want to say that not only will we not let the right-wing divide us, but we will not let them scare us.
This weekend, on February 16, is the anniversary of the Day Without an Immigrant in 2017. And so we are going to mark that day with a rally in Central Square Park in East Boston at 2 pm.
East Boston has the highest percentage of undocumented immigrants in the Boston Area. These are our community members. These are people who have been raised in East Boston and the surrounding area. And now, people are living in fear, especially since the inauguration.
We are going to strike back on Sunday. All of the Boston area is going to come to East Boston to stand shoulder to shoulder with our immigrant neighbors, to say that we reject this narrative. We know our people are not dangerous. The dangerous ones are the politicians pushing this narrative, the ICE agents, and the police supporting them, creating terror in our community. That is the danger.
We’re going to call on the government to meet our demands, but also to show our solidarity, show our power, show that we’re not going to be divided and we’re not going to be scared. We’re going to fight back.