Gov. Maura Healey pledged that the cost of running emergency shelters housing migrants and locals would decrease from its historic levels and pushed back on conservatives who have labeled Massachusetts a “sanctuary state” harboring illegal immigrants.
In an end-of-year interview with the Herald ahead of her third year in office, Healey cast blame on the federal government for immigration issues in the Bay State, but said the expected $1 billion tab taxpayers are set to carry in each of the next several years will eventually deflate.
“It’s going to go down,” she said from inside the State House. “This is not a permanent situation, and it certainly is not sustainable, which is why I felt comfortable making the policy decisions that I have made to ratchet down the numbers.”
Only migrants who are legally allowed or paroled into the United States can access the emergency shelter system, which Healey has placed a set of increasingly restrictive changes on ever since she declared a state of emergency in August 2023 amid an influx of migrants.
The restrictions, including a 7,500 family cap on the system and limiting length of stays, appear to have had some effect. State officials reported spending less on state-run shelters in fiscal year 2024 than originally anticipated — $856 million rather than $932 million.
The cost is still above the $325 million the state has historically spent on emergency assistance shelters, which were set up under a 1980s law to house homeless families with children and pregnant women.
Arriving migrants and the money spent to take care of them have become a flashpoint on Beacon Hill, where Republicans routinely tried this year to implement residency requirements on shelters and cut back spending.
Top budget writers working for Healey are expected to ask the Legislature to approve another round of spending early in the new year to cover shelters for the remainder of fiscal year 2025. Without another injection of cash, money is expected to dry up in January, officials have said.
Sen. Ryan Fattman, a Sutton Republican, said even though new arrivals “forced” Healey to cut shelter costs and reduce the number of families relying on state aid, that has not stopped her from asking for more dollars to fund the system.
“The cost is overwhelming,” he told the Herald in an interview this past month. “In my opinion, what cost containment looks like is reforming the amount of time that people from out of state coming into the state can stay. You want to say 30 or 60 days? Okay, that’s a good reform.”
Healey said the measures she has taken are working — though they have faced harsh criticism from some advocates — and are buoyed by the fact that 65% of families who have recently sought shelter from the state are from Massachusetts.
“We’re not a sanctuary state,” Healey said. “We have a limited budget, and the emergency shelter system really was meant for Massachusetts families who were experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity and needed a place to go that was temporary.
“We’re trying to get to that place where emergency shelter is temporary and that it’s really there just for a limited purpose for a family,” the governor added.
But even as Healey touts her changes to state-run shelters, she has started to face a wave of conservative criticism for running what Republicans say is a “sanctuary state” just as President-elect Donald Trump has promised to undertake mass deportations when he takes office next year.
The term “sanctuary state” generally refers to a state or municipality’s willingness to offer more protection to undocumented immigrants.
But just because a city or town in Massachusetts considers itself a “sanctuary” does not mean there is no federal immigration enforcement, said Sarah Sherman-Stokes, associate director of Boston University’s Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Clinic.
“There are gaps between some of the statewide laws and city policies that remain vulnerable and will still feed non-citizens into ICE custody,” Stokes told the Herald.
In Massachusetts, many point to a 2017 ruling from the Supreme Judicial Court that bars state and local police from detaining a person solely on the basis of their immigration status, a decision that has since been used to prohibit interactions with federal immigration officials.
Healey said she believes “violent criminals should be deported if they’re not here lawfully” and that local, state, and federal law enforcement should work together to investigate and prosecute crimes and remove people from the country who are criminals.
But the first-term Democrat said she does not back “showing up at a hotel, and rounding up groups of people who are suspected to be here unlawfully, who are here working, and just deporting all of them without a process.”
Healey said, “I think what we need to do is work together here in Massachusetts to do both things: investigate, hold accountable, deport as necessary folks who are here unlawfully, who’ve engaged in criminal activity, absolutely, and also stand up for and protect the people who have been working here, going to school here, raising kids here, to ensure that they are not scared to go to the doctors or drop their kids off or school or go to work.”
