Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said this week that if a proposed ballot question implementing rent control statewide made it to a vote this fall, she would vote in support.

“It’s not perfect,” she said of the ballot question during an interview on GBH’s Boston Public Radio on Tuesday. “But I’m not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good in this case when there is so much urgency and pressure from housing costs on our residents.”

As written, the ballot question would limit annual rent hikes statewide to the cost of living increase measured by the Consumer Price Index, with a maximum cap of 5%. It includes exemptions for owner-occupied buildings with less than five units and for the first 10 years that a newly constructed building is open.

Rent control was banned in Massachusetts in 1994 by a ballot question. Renters, advocates and legislators have repeatedly tried to reinstate it without success.

A previous effort to get rent stabilization on the 2024 ballot was abandoned after its proponents failed to get enough signatures to qualify.

The proposal is one of 12 initiative petitions currently in the running for the 2026 ballot, 11 of which are currently before the state Legislature. Legislators can choose to enact any of the proposed laws, or compromise versions of them, rather than letting voters decide in November. The deadline for the Legislature to do so is May 5.

For any that are not acted on by Beacon Hill lawmakers, supporters will need to gather and file 12,429 additional signatures from registered voters by July to officially make it onto the ballot.

Wu has been a strong supporter of rent control in the past, campaigning on the promise of bringing it back when she first ran for mayor in 2021. In her first term, she filed a home rule petition to implement rent control in Boston, which passed the City Council but failed to get the necessary approval from the Legislature.

Wu said in 2023 that she did not support the rent control question proposed for the next year’s ballot, saying she didn’t feel the initiative petition was the right process to use. However, she said this week that the city had tried on multiple occasions to create policies that would reduce the burden of housing costs on residents, only to be blocked by the Legislature.

She said she did not like that the language of the ballot question would put the same regulations in place everywhere, instead of allowing each city and town to decide what would work best for its community.

“Something’s got to give,” she said. “There’s always a better solution that comes out of legislating and being able to pass something with nuance than the kind of hammer of a ballot initiative. But we need to see something happen.”

Hundreds of University of Massachusetts Boston students have been displaced since Monday after a sprinkler pipe burst causing flooding in the East Residence Hall, said the Boston school.

“My friend from down the hall on the second floor was unable to get her stuff, and she’s with me right now. We’re kind of both just displaced at the moment. I’m living out of a suitcase, and she’s living with nothing,” Simone Trainor, a sophomore at UMass Boston, told Boston.com.

According to the university, the sprinkler pipe burst on the tenth floor due to extreme cold temperatures.

“Based on initial assessments, approximately 50 rooms in the blue hallway of floors 2-10 were impacted with varying degrees of water damage,” the university said in an email to students.

Students say they received little information, some lack a place to stay

Trainor said she was in a dissection lab Monday afternoon when a classmate told her that there was an emergency at their dorm. 

“I was in my lab doing dissections when a girl next to me, who also lived in East Residence Hall on the same floor as me, the second floor, told me, not by email, not by a statement from the school, but by word of mouth from another roommate, that I had ten minutes to grab my things and that a pipe burst and we were being flooded,” said Trainor.

On their way back to the dorm, she saw students walking past them with stuffed bags and suitcases. 

“That’s when we knew, and we started running faster to the dorms,” Trainor said.

When Trainor arrived, she noticed a long line of students milling about her residence hall all wanting to get up to their room. 

According to Trainor, police asked anyone who lived on the second floor to follow them so they could escort students to their room.

“There was water all over the stairs, and as I was walking up, the cops had flashlights,” Trainor said.

Once she made it inside her room, she said, she saw the floor covered in water.

Trainor had thirty minutes to pack herself and her roommates’ belongings before police banged on her door, telling her she had to leave.

“I’m just packing clothes into random bags that I’m finding in my room because it’s dark, and I can’t see anything. I don’t know where my clothes are. I’m just grabbing things,” Trainor said.

Once she left her dorm, no one else on her floor was allowed back in, Trainor said. 

Trainor is now safely staying with a friend who lives close to UMass Boston.

Carly Martin, who said she’s a concerned UMass Boston student, said students have received little information about a timeline for being allowed back into their rooms and what conditions the rooms are in.

“Some students were unable to be placed into the universities alternative housing which has resulted in homelessness. There are cases where students have been packing into hotels, sleeping on the streets and even forced to sleep on public transportation,” Martin wrote in an email directed at Mayor Michelle Wu Tuesday evening.

In her email, Martin shared what she said were comments from impacted students.

“If you get caught sleeping in the common rooms in West, they’ll kick you out. It’s just so funny to me that we were made homeless overnight, are getting no information, and then can’t even sleep in one of the few options we have at the moment,” said one student said.

“I was in a conference room and I got woken up at 1 am and told i have to leave by 7 am or theres gonna be issues,” wrote another.

UMass Boston did not answer questions Tuesday night about students being left without a place to sleep.

How UMass Boston plans to help displaced students

The Boston Fire Department and the State Building Inspector extended the “no occupancy” status for the dorm due to unsafe electrical systems, said the support website. 

“The building will remain closed for the next several days. The building will remain closed to allow facilities and remediation teams to repair damage, restore fire suppression systems, remove excess water, and fully assess the extent of the impact within the hall,” UMass Boston said. 

Once officials have deemed the building safe for students to enter, students will have supervised access to retrieve essential items and there will be limited entry to specific floors or wings, the university said in an email sent to students. 

The school has provided essential items like towels, bed linens or blankets, pillows, and cell phone chargers to impacted students, the university wrote on its website.

East Residence Hall hosts the only traditional dining hall, which was closed immediately after the flooding. The dining hall has been determined to be safe, and will reopen Wednesday morning, the university said in an email to students.

On Monday evening, the university sent out an email to impacted students notifying them of temporary housing at the UMass Amherst, Charles River Campus in Newton.

Students who moved to the neighboring campus have access to shuttles that return to UMass Boston every hour from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., the school wrote.

The school is actively looking for dorm locations closer to the main campus, university officials said. 

“We know that waiting for updates, especially when answers are uncertain, is stressful. We are committed to sharing information as soon as it is confirmed and to communicate clearly, even when timelines are still evolving,” the university said in an email to students. 

John Culleton recovered, miraculously, and moved back to Ireland, while Punter Culleton defied all medical expectations and lived a long, purposeful life before he died in 2016 of complications from a surgery designed to improve his quality of life as a quadriplegic.

For all the tragedy visited upon the Culletons in Massachusetts, Seamus Culleton loves Boston, loves the local community in Wakefield that’s embraced him, and loves Americans so much that last year he married one, Tiffany Smith, determined to make his life here forever.

After he and Tiffany got married, Seamus applied for a Green card to legalize his status. By entering that process, he was given a work permit that allowed him to work legally in a country where he had previously worked in the shadows.

All was going well, and he was in the final stages of the Green card process last Sept. 9, when ICE agents staked out the Home Depot in Saugus. After buying some materials for his plastering business, Seamus noticed some agents following him. They pulled him over and arrested him.

They allowed him a single phone call to Tiffany.

“He said, ‘Don’t panic. ICE picked me up.’ I wanted to know where they were bringing him, but ICE wouldn’t say,” Tiffany told me.

That one phone call was it for a week. It’s a tactic that ICE has perfected under the Trump administration, refusing Seamus’ requests to call his lawyer and his family, while they quickly moved him out of Boston, first to Buffalo, then to Texas.

ICE likes Texas because the state is full of judges who are more up on the Ten Commandments than the Constitution, except they always seem to skip over that pesky thing Jesus Christ said about loving your neighbors.

“They want to get you out of Massachusetts as fast as they can, so you won’t have support,” or judges that might challenge the legality of their tactics, Seamus told me over the phone from the detention center in El Paso where he’s been held for nearly five months.

The conditions are appalling, he said. More than 70 men are crowded into a large room, so tensions are high. Detainees fight over the small portions of food they are afforded, Seamus said.

“It’s a modern-day concentration camp, with filth and sickness and disease,” he said. “The people watching over us are inhumane. They are told to leave their humanity at the door, and they do so. It’s a nightmare.”

It is, he says, a nightmare with a purpose: to break down the detainees so they will sign documents consenting to be deported.

ICE claims that’s just what Seamus Culleton did.

Seamus and his lawyer, Ogor Winnie Okoye, say that’s a lie. They say someone in the government forged Seamus’ signature and found a judge in Texas who agreed with ICE even though the judge had no foundation or expertise in handwriting analysis.

Seamus said he has signed papers while in custody, to contest his deportation, not to consent to it.

Oyoke, who has spent her career sticking up for the little guy against an all-powerful government, told me that the government’s treatment of Seamus Culleton is the saddest, most pointless she has encountered.

“Seamus is a model immigrant,” she said. “He did everything right. The only thing he did wrong was not depart the US after 90 days.”

If you enter the US under the visa waiver program, as Seamus did, and overstay your visa after 90 days, you typically waive your right to fight deportation. But, Oyoke said, there is a statutory exception to that.

“If you marry a US citizen, as Seamus did, you are entitled to submit an application for a Green card,” she said, “and in the past ICE would give you the chance to legalize your status.”

But that was before Donald Trump rode into the White House on a platform of rounding up millions of immigrants who don’t have legal status. To quickly assemble a paramilitary force willing to execute his plan, Trump dropped any semblance of ICE being a legitimate, well-trained law enforcement agency. The government reduced training from six months to 47 days, eliminating age limits and educational achievement, and offering sign-up bonuses of up to $50,000 to quickly fill the ranks with tens of thousands of agents who are obsessed with filling quotas, not arresting dangerous criminals.

If Seamus Culleton had $15,000 for fees at his disposal, and the ability to donate $1 million to the US treasury, he would be eligible for a Trump Gold Card to legalize his status. Check out the residency program for rich people. It’s either laughable or Kafkaesque. Take your pick.

The idea that Americans are safer because Seamus Culleton is locked up in squalor and facing deportation is a joke. The idea that some poor American lost out on a plastering job because Seamus Culleton built a company out of nothing is preposterous.

And those two terms — a joke, and preposterous — perfectly describe an immigration policy that is built on performative cruelty.

Oyoke visited Seamus in El Paso.

“It is the most horrendous place,” she said. “When I went to see Seamus, he looked jaundiced. They don’t let them spend enough time outside. It’s cruelty. Pure cruelty.”

Tiffany’s coworkers at the Stoneham Animal Hospital set up a GoFundMe page, to help make up for Seamus’ lost income, as Tiffany keeps payments up on his truck and other financial obligations.

On Monday, I asked the Department of Homeland Security and ICE to comment on Seamus Culleton’s case. DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin, in a statement Tuesday, did not address the forgery claims. She said Seamus Culleton illegally overstayed his visa and was given full due process rights after he was detained.

“He was offered the chance to instantly be removed to Ireland but chose to stay in ICE custody, in fact he took affirmative steps to remain in detention,” McLaughlin said, a statement that is at odds with ICE’s claims that Seamus Culleton signed documents saying he was consenting to deportation.

McLaughlin also said any claims of “subprime conditions at ICE facilities are FALSE.”

Back in Ireland, Seamus’ sister, Caroline, has spent sleepless nights trying to find out if her brother is okay. She worries about his mental health as much as his physical health.

She doesn’t believe for a moment that her brother signed papers consenting to losing his wife, his home, his business, his American dream.

“Seamus can be stubborn,” she said. “I’m his sister. I know him. He didn’t sign those papers.”

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at kevin.cullen@globe.com.