Report: 1,000-plus ‘Serious Incidents’ at Massachusetts State Shelters

The Boston Globe published a shocking expose last week detailing rampant lawlessness at shelters housing families — including migrants — in Massachusetts under the state’s unique “right to shelter” law. That news dropped shortly after newly elected New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte (R), in her January 9 inaugural address, extended an invitation to her disgruntled neighbors in the Bay State to come on up as she warned about “the Massachusetts illegal immigrant crisis right down the road”.

The Massachusetts “Right to Shelter” Law. Speaking of inaugural addresses, in January 1983, newly sworn-in Massachusetts Gov. Mike Dukakis (D) called for “a statewide effort which will provide the necessities of life to those in desperate need”.

He continued: “If needed, we will draw on surplus state hospitals, unused public schools and, as a last resort, National Guard armories to shelter the homeless and to distribute surplus food.”

Legislators on Beacon Hill took up his idea, passing what has since become (with amendments) section 30 of chapter 23B of the General Laws of Massachusetts, formally captioned the “emergency housing assistance program”, but more commonly known as the “right to shelter” law.

It provides “a program of emergency housing assistance to needy families with children and pregnant woman with no other children” and directs an executive office to “administer the program in a fair, just and equitable manner”.

That directive, it should be noted, means without denying benefits to potential applicants simply because they are here illegally.

The program came to national prominence when large numbers of migrants who had been released by the Biden-Harris administration at the Southwest border got wind of the offer of free housing (and other benefits) that the state provides under section 30 and headed north to take advantage of the deal.

The Commonwealth Beacon explained in a February opinion piece what happened next:

Last summer, in the wake of a significant increase in migrant families coming across the US-Mexican border, Gov. Maura Healey issued an executive order declaring a state of emergency in order to suspend the statutory housing guarantee as the state’s shelter system was reaching its maximum capacity and the projected costs to the state budget were rising rapidly.

“More than 1,000 Serious Incidents Reported at Mass. Shelters”. Shortly after that piece was published, Cory Alvarez, a 26-year-old Haitian national who entered under the Biden administration’s “CHNV parole” program, was arraigned in state court in Massachusetts on one count of aggravated rape of a 15-year-old girl at a Comfort Inn in Rockland, Mass., that was being used as a state shelter.

It’s not clear whether that incident led reporters at the Boston Globe to file a state information request about the shelters in April, but regardless, the state provided some records related to the request in late December.

After poring through the responses, the paper ran an article on January 10 headlined “Drug arrests, domestic violence, rapes: More than 1,000 serious incidents reported at Mass. shelters”.

The Globe reports, among other things, that those records: “show that … more than a dozen alleged sex offenses were reported at Massachusetts’ emergency family shelters during a 20-month period that saw the program triple in size and expand into hotels and motels across the state”.

The timing of the release of those documents likely could have been better for current Gov. Maura Healey (D).

That’s because it came just days before the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) office in Boston announced that it had helped local cops in Revere, Mass., identify Leonardo Andujar Sanchez, a 28-year-old national of the Dominican Republic “accused of a host of firearm and drug offenses who was residing in a state-funded migrant shelter”.

According to Fox News, when he was busted following a tip from his girlfriend, Andujar Sanchez had at least one firearm (“an AR-style assault rifle”) “ammunition, two rifle magazines, digital scales and latex gloves” — and “five kilograms of suspected fentanyl”, worth about $1 million.

Having spent more than 30 years in and around law enforcement, I can tell you what that adds up to but suffice it to say that if it’s all true, the drugs were not for his own personal consumption.

Healy now claims that Andujar Sanchez — who according to ICE entered illegally without being admitted — didn’t apply for housing benefits himself, but rather “was staying with someone who was approved to receive benefits and services”, though I’m not sure that makes much difference.

The upshot of that arrest, according to the Globe, is that Healey on Monday has ordered “an immediate inspection of all shelter facilities and a ‘full review’ of intake procedures at those facilities”.

That sounds reasonable, except that thereafter her office was forced to acknowledge that “it hadn’t been performing criminal background checks on shelter residents”, something the governor “had assured Massachusetts residents had been happening back in March”, apparently following Alvarez’s arrest.

Please note that not all the residents of Massachusetts state shelters are migrants, or that any, most, or all of the “serious incidents” listed by the Globe in its report relate to migrant activity. As the paper explained:

The Globe first requested a log of the reports in April, but state officials initially provided only aggregated numbers. Lawyers for the Globe then negotiated with attorneys for Healey, who requested time to remove information that would reveal the location of shelters or identify specific people.

The Healey administration has argued that by withholding details, it is protecting the privacy of vulnerable families, including migrants, whose presence has prompted protests.

While I’m sympathetic to all involved (except the criminals), without personal identifying information, there’s no way to tell who’s an alien and who isn’t.

What is clear, however, is that many of the people living in those shelters are migrants and that they are making a bad homelessness crisis in Massachusetts worse. As the Commonwealth Beacon explained in February:

As of January 2023, the homeless population [in Massachusetts] was about double what it was in 1983 and the number of homeless families was five to six times greater. On a per-capita basis, Massachusetts’s homeless population was about 40 percent higher than the national average, and almost twice that of Florida. The numbers are even higher now, with 7,500 families living in emergency housing provided by the state (not counting so-called overflow shelters), which translates into about 24,000 people, about half of whom are recent immigrants.

Perhaps the Globe can obtain more information about those incidents and the immigration status of those who were involved, or perhaps the governor’s office will be more forthcoming about an issue — migrant criminal suspects living in taxpayer-provided housing — that has garnered intense interest, but this may be an issue that the incoming Trump administration wants to look into.

Gov. Ayotte’s Inaugural Address. Those who haven’t spent much time in New England may not know that Boston — the Massachusetts state capital and by far its largest city — sits in close proximity to the state’s border with New Hampshire, so close that according to latest estimates, more than 82,000 residents of the Granite State commute into Massachusetts for work.

It’s just over 68 miles from downtown Boston to Concord, New Hampshire’s state capital, where on January 9 former U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte took the oath as the 83rd governor. Minutes later, she started making the case for why more Bay Staters should move and become her constituents, instead.

She explained that in addition to having “the lowest tax burden in the country, and the lowest poverty rate”, New Hampshire has one other thing going for it — it’s not Massachusetts:

You heard me talk a lot about Massachusetts on the campaign trail, and the reason I did is because it is a cautionary tale. Look at the out-of-control spending, tax hikes, illegal immigrant crisis, people and businesses leaving in droves — what is normal today in Massachusetts wasn’t always this way.

. . .

We … need to ban sanctuary policies in our state, and I am counting on the legislature to do just that this term.

We’ve got the Massachusetts illegal immigrant crisis right down the road if you want to see what these dangerous policies do not just to communities, but to the state budget. They’ve spent over a billion dollars housing migrants rather than investing in their law-abiding residents. We can’t allow that to happen here.

Granted, Ayotte is a Republican and Healey a Democrat, and if the past four years prove anything it’s that our two major parties have very different takes on the issue of immigration generally and immigration enforcement in particular.

Still, Ayotte wasn’t exactly a “border hawk” during her six years in the Senate, voting for additional border fencing but also supporting the so-called “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill, which she termed “a thoughtful, bipartisan solution to a tough problem”.

That she is using Massachusetts migrant woes as a selling point for her state shows just how serious illegal immigration has become even a thousand miles from the Southwest border.

“Some Massachusetts Residents Haven’t Moved to New Hampshire Yet”. In the interest of full disclosure, I first became aware of both the Globe report and Ayotte’s inaugural address thanks to a January 11 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal’s “Best of the Web” feature headlined “Report: Some Massachusetts Residents Haven’t Moved to New Hampshire Yet”.

The author, James Freeman, had a slightly different take than I do, with Freeman more focusing on the economic side of Ayotte’s pitch, but his final point bears repeating: “Don’t be surprised if more Massachusetts residents embrace legal migration by scooting over the border into New Hampshire.”

One major benefit of U.S. citizenship and lawful immigrant status is the right to move wherever you want in this country and start a new life. Illegal migrants aren’t supposed to have that right, but so long as states like Massachusetts provide them sanctuary, they’ll keep coming.