Maura Healey on ICE: “I support them”

Massachusetts governor declines to end state’s partnership with ICE

This story was originally published by Welcome to Hell World.

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey spoke forcefully against ICE at a January 29 press conference, announcing a new executive order and legislation that she said were aimed at “protect[ing] the people of Massachusetts.”

“Federal agents,” the governor said, have been “instigating, antagonizing and, yes, causing violence in communities. People have been killed. … We’ve seen mothers and fathers ripped out of cars and from the arms of their children. United States citizens have been stopped, arrested and detained. Their homes broken into without a warrant. Citizens have been threatened with being put on a domestic terrorist watch list simply for holding a cell phone and filming ICE agents we’ve seen assault peaceful protesters.”

Healey’s executive order bans federal immigration agents from making civil arrests in non-public areas of state facilities without a judicial warrant or using state property like parking lots and parking garages for staging immigration-enforcement activities. And her legislation, if adopted, would ban federal immigration agents from making civil arrests at schools, childcare centers, churches, hospitals, health clinics, and courthouses without a judicial warrant.

However, neither of Healey’s initiatives will stop state and county officials from continuing to work directly with ICE to remove people from the state. Healey said at the press conference that she supports the Massachusetts Department of Correction’s 287(g) agreement to assist ICE with deportations. And her legislation would not prevent Plymouth County Sheriff Joseph McDonald from continuing to jail people whom federal officials have accused of civil immigration violations.

Jonathan Cohn, policy director of Progressive Mass, said the group was “glad to see that Governor Healey is finally being more vocal about ICE’s abuses.”

“However, it is disappointing to see that she still refuses to terminate the only existing 287(g) collaboration agreement in the state,” he added. “This agreement uses our state employees to do ICE’s work. It is unconscionable to think that Massachusetts is doing anything to make ICE’s work easier when they are acting like a rogue agency of death squads.”

In a statement, Rev. Annie Gonzalez and other leaders of the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network called Healey’s new initiatives a “win.” “It’s a win because people have pushed Healey to do something which is a good sign for our political strength,” the BIJAN statement said. “It is also not nearly enough.”

However, the group questioned whether Healey’s executive order and legislation are enforceable.

“We will have to see how it plays out,” the statement said. “Will ICE just wait outside courthouses and hospitals instead of going inside? Or will they totally ignore the law about warrants and just do whatever they want as they have been doing?”

BIJAN also criticized Healey for refusing to end the DOC’s 287(g) agreement and for not doing anything to stop the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Department from assisting ICE.

“This does little to actually limit ICE’s access to our state’s resources,” the group said.

“I actually support that agreement”

The Massachusetts Department of Correction has had a 287(g) agreement to collaborate with ICE on deportations since 2007. The alliance makes Massachusetts an outlier. According to information from the US Department of Homeland Security, there are 22 states with state agencies that are entered into 287(g) agreements—and after Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger ended all of that state’s 287(g) agreements on February 4, Massachusetts became one of just three with a Democratic governor.

As The Boston Globe reported in August: “The pact … empowers DOC staff to alert ICE that an inmate may be wanted for deportation, and to interrogate anyone who is detained at a DOC facility and is believed to be here undocumented about their right to remain in the United States. It also allows for such DOC officers to process immigration violations of deportable or undocumented immigrants, prepare charging documents, and issue immigration detainers.”

During her more than three years as governor, Healey has left the DOC’s 287(g) agreement in place and touted her participation in the program. 

“We have an agreement when people are getting out of … prison here in Massachusetts and they are here unlawfully, notice goes to ICE,” she said during a June interview with WBZ. “We have a regular working relationship with ICE.”

At her January press conference, Healey said she was “prohibiting state agencies from entering into any new 287(g) agreements unless there is a clear and imminent public safety need.” But that part of her executive order contains so many caveats as to be completely meaningless. By only prohibiting new agreements, Healey is keeping the existing one.

“I actually support that agreement,” she said. “When you’re incarcerated under … the custody of the Department of Correction, that means you’ve done something pretty bad.”

Healey’s executive order also includes a vague “public safety” exception, which leaves her the option of entering into new agreements while claiming that she’s still following the order.

“If there is an instance of imminent threat to public safety, then my secretary of public safety will certify that’s appropriate, and that may happen,” she said.

According to the Globe’s story from August: “Under the agreement, Massachusetts officials turned over 164 people who were in DOC custody to ICE in 2023 and 2024, the vast majority of whom—more than 95 percent, state officials said—had been convicted of ‘serious’ drug crimes or violent crimes.”

However, a spokesperson for the Healey administration did not respond to The Mass Dump’s questions, including a request for data on what specific crimes, if any, people whom the DOC turned over to ICE were convicted of and whether the governor believes ICE is respecting those people’s civil rights.

“Governor Healey’s own clemency guidelines acknowledge that our criminal legal system is marked by stark racial disparities, and that migrants face unequal treatment,” said Leah Hastings, an attorney at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts. “ICE’s 287(g) program takes people from that system and funnels them into a deportation machine with no right to appointed counsel, minimal due process protections, and horrid conditions. … We urge the governor to end it.”

Healey only included the prohibition on new 287(g) agreements in her executive order, not in the proposed legislation. That means that even if her bill becomes law, she or a future governor could still rescind the 287(g) restriction at will.

The executive order does not prevent sheriffs or local law enforcement from entering into 287(g) agreements. That would require legislation—and the bill proposed by Healey does not include such language.

“That’s a county issue”

Plymouth County Sheriff Joseph McDonald has played a key role in ICE’s ability to detain people and transport them out of Massachusetts.

McDonald’s department has a collaboration agreement to jail men accused of civil immigration violations on behalf of ICE that runs until September 29, 2029, according to a spokesperson for the sheriff’s department. The sheriff’s department also transports ICE detainees to Hanscom Field airport so that they can be flown out of state.

In exchange for holding the ICE detainees, the sheriff’s department bills the federal government, the spokesperson said, adding: “Since 2010, we have returned $209 million to the Commonwealth’s General Fund for appropriation by the legislature. In FY25, we returned $33.5 million.”

In December, Healey sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and the acting ICE director Todd Lyons, demanding that they “immediately stop” using Hanscom Field to remove ICE detainees from the state. In January, Healey sent a second letter to the executives of two airlines, GlobalX Airlines and Eastern Air Express, calling on them to stop assisting ICE with the flights.

“Flying these residents out of state—often within hours of arrest—is intentionally cruel and purposely obstructs the due process and legal representation they are entitled to,” Healey said in the second letter. “By contracting with ICE to execute these flights, you are profiting off these anti-American tactics and facilitating the obstruction of due process.”

However, Healey’s proposed legislation would not prevent McDonald or other sheriffs from assisting ICE. When someone asked her about McDonald’s agreement at the conference, she was dismissive.

“Well, that’s a county issue,” she said. “It’s not a state issue.”

The Plymouth County jail has 526 beds for ICE detainees, according to a spokesperson for McDonald. The spokesperson provided numbers showing that between January 2025 to January 2026, an average of 500 beds were in use on the first day of each month. They did not provide the total number of people the sheriff’s office has jailed for ICE during that time period.

McDonald defended his collaboration agreement with ICE in a letter to the Plymouth Select Board in December, saying that the Plymouth County jail “has a documented track record of humane care and custody, and people are safe and secure.”

“We do not have a role in immigration policy,” he wrote. “By having a contract with ICE, we can keep people in Massachusetts and closer to their families and attorneys.”

From January 20, 2025, through May, McDonald’s department transported 545 men to Hanscom Field airport so they could be flown out of state and detained in other ICE facilities, according to WBUR. McDonald told WBUR in June that he did not know where the detainees were being taken.

McDonald declined to tell the Dump whether he believes ICE is respecting the civil rights of detainees in the out-of-state facilities where he is sending them.

“Transfers are a core part of the violence of the ICE detention system,” said Hastings, the attorney with Prisoners’ Legal Services. “Allowing Plymouth County and Hanscom to continue operating as integral parts of the detention and deportation pipeline undermines the protective intent of this legislation. Massachusetts should do everything it can right now to reduce the number of people being taken into detention.”

“Call it whatever”

In recent months, Americans have watched as lawless ICE agents have abducted children, used chemical weapons on legal observers, and executed two US citizens in the street. As a result, the idea that the agency should be abolished is now a mainstream position supported by a plurality of US citizens.

According to a YouGov poll from January 30 to February 2, 46 percent support getting rid of ICE while 42 percent are opposed. The poll found that 79 percent of Democrats and 48 percent of independents favor abolition.

But Healey has made it clear that she wants the agency scaled back, not eliminated.

The day before Healey’s January press conference, a Boston Herald reporter asked her whether Massachusetts was becoming a “sanctuary state.”

“Massachusetts is not a sanctuary state,” Healey said. “I’ve said this time and time again. People can buy in and continue with the absolute bullshit rhetoric out of the Trump administration on this.”

At the press conference the following day, Healey said: “My real hope right now is that Donald Trump [will] call a timeout, get [ICE] back out of communities. Right? Fix this agency that is so desperately broken.”

She added: “State and local law enforcement continue to work with federal agencies in investigating and prosecuting crime in this state. That hasn’t changed.”

The day after the press conference, Healey appeared on the program Boston Public Radio, where cohost Jim Braude asked her whether she supported abolishing ICE.

“Customs and Border Patrol and ICE have had an important mission,” Healey replied. “I support them, what was the mission of CBP and ICE. What I don’t support is what ICE is right now in its current iteration. It is not fulfilling the mission it was set to fulfill.”

After Braude pushed her on whether she supported reform or abolition, Healey said: “What needs to happen is that ICE needs to be pulled back right now and needs to be fixed. Call it reform. Call it whatever.”

Alex Burness of Bolts also recently published a story about the Massachusetts Department of Correction’s 287(g) agreement with ICE, which is well worth reading. Here’s an excerpt:

Luis Perez waited 53 and a half years to be freed from prison. When his day finally came, on Jan. 16, 2025, he could practically feel the warmth and quiet of his daughter’s guest bedroom, where he planned to live after his release, and he could practically taste the home-cooked yellow rice and fried pork awaiting him. He was 73 years old, a lifetime removed from the murder he committed as a teenager after moving from Cuba to Massachusetts. 

In prison, Perez became a licensed minister and earned a community college degree. He mentored hundreds of younger prisoners in whom he saw the same societal failures that led him to prison in the first place: “Broken homes,” he said. “These were kids who got involved in gangs, who did drugs, who did robberies. No one wants to go to the root of the cases, but it’s not cut and dry.”

Just prior to his release, Perez has gotten a glowing review from the state parole board, which, he says, unanimously supported him, and made him feel as though he’d cleared every possible hurdle to freedom and had nothing more to worry about. His pre-release plan, which called for him to move in with his daughter, was approved at the prison. 

The day he was set to leave, he said goodbye to incarcerated friends and spent some final, heavy moments in his tiny cell. He walked out to the fence at the edge of the prison yard. “I wanted to look at it because I thought that was the last fence I was ever going to see,” he said. 

Prison staff came to show him out: “They said, ‘Are you ready to go?’ I said yes. I was happy,” he said. “After so many years, it was going to be something different for me.” On his walk from the cell block to fresh air and freedom and family, he was ushered through a doorway, on the other side of which stood three men he’d never seen before: ICE officers. They handcuffed him and drove him in a van to a detention facility in Maine. 

He spent 10 days in Maine, he said, before ICE put him on a plane bound for Texas, where he spent almost seven months in detention, before being ordered into a van that drove him, over three days and more than 1,000 miles, to Tabasco, Mexico, a place he’d never been before, and where he knew no one. There, at last, he was released. He bought and ate his first mango in decades.

Read the rest of this story here.

Inside ICE’s Only Contract with a Blue State - Bolts

As part of a 287(g) contract between state officials and ICE, Massachusetts continues to release prisoners into deportation—even as state lawmakers look to ban other forms of ICE collaboration.

BoltsMichael Barajas

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