Determined Healey attempting to rewrite historical past on migrant disaster

Gov. Maura Healey is desperately attempting to rewrite historical past on the $1 billion a yr migrant disaster, hoping to stave off a potent election yr subject which threatens her try at a second time period.

Healey has the monumental process of attempting to squirm out from underneath the issue, arising with a complete new narrative to cowl her ineptitude and errors in how she initially handled the disaster.

She clearly realizes what a crushing subject it could possibly be for her reelection subsequent yr, so is now claiming she “inherited” the migrant drawback from the Biden administration and is asserting Massachusetts just isn’t a sanctuary state.

After being sharply criticized by Republicans working for the Nook Workplace, Healey is attempting to flip the narrative, saying she’s the one who straightened out the mess.

Will voters purchase it? Most likely not. However Healey is in political mode now, the place she is at her greatest. She’s been a disappointing governor however is a superb campaigner.

“It is a disaster that I inherited after I turned governor and began in 2023,” she claimed in a televised “On the File” interview this yr. “We’ve labored actually onerous and I’ve taken quite a lot of steps to really reform the way in which the system operates and make modifications.”

That declare went unchallenged within the interview.

She repeated that story when interviewed by the New York Occasions.

“It’s been a difficult scenario, to say the least,” Healey stated. “And my frustration has been, you recognize, as a state governor, I’m inheriting the issues brought on by federal inaction.”

Requested within the TV interview concerning the $1 billion a yr the state has been spending for the emergency resort shelters, she stated “We’re on observe to scale back that. We’re additionally on observe to shut all motels. They had been motels that had been working after I turned governor.”

Healey’s declare about inheriting the issue is ludicrous and never plausible.

It’s true that late in 2022, underneath Gov. Charlie Baker, the migrant disaster was simply beginning, with about 3,000 households within the shelter system. However that quantity doubled in 2023 and 2024 whereas Healey was governor.

Even earlier than she turned governor, Lawyer Normal Healey opposed a Trump administration rule that may bar entry to the asylum course of for hundreds of migrants.

“The Trump administration has accomplished all the pieces doable to disclaim entry to asylum and make life depressing for folks looking for refuge in america,” she stated.

In her 2022 marketing campaign, she expressed help for migrants and employed a self-described undocumented immigrant as deputy political director.

In her first yr as governor, she arrange “household welcome facilities” for migrants, gave them drivers’ licenses, pushed for work permits and urged residents to take them into their properties.

“Our administration has been working onerous to satisfy this unprecedented want and use each useful resource at our disposal to assist households,” she stated in June 2023.

It wasn’t till August 2023 that she declared an emergency over the surge in migrants.

However even then, she stated migrants had been solely coming right here as a result of it’s “too harmful to remain” of their residence nations.

“They’re right here as a result of Massachusetts has and can at all times be a beacon of hope, compassion, humanity and alternative,” she stated.

Her administration opened dozens of resort shelters and put hundreds of migrants there. At one level late in 2023, greater than 100 motels had been getting used as shelters.

She additionally infamously positioned migrants on the Melnea Cass recreation middle in Roxbury over the sturdy objections of native residents who used it, a transfer that Boston Mayor Michelle Wu allowed and stood weakly by with out stopping.

It was solely in Might 2025 that Healey declared motels had been no place to lift a household and started a plan to shut them – greater than two years after she turned governor.

And it was solely in January 2025 that Healey ordered an inspection of all state run emergency shelters and a “full evaluation” of the consumption course of after a Dominican migrant was arrested at a shelter in Revere allegedly possessing an AR-15 and $1 million price of fentanyl.

“It’s outrageous that this particular person took benefit of our shelter system to have interaction in felony exercise,” she stated in an announcement to the Herald.

Healey additionally claimed final yr that everybody who enters the state run shelters is “vetted.” This got here after a Haitian nationwide was charged with raping a 15-year-old migrants woman at a Rockland shelter.

What concerning the two years that glided by when Healey was governor and did nothing to cease the felony exercise within the shelters, which was nicely documented? Her administration did not do background checks, permitting the issue.

Healey the truth is went to nice lengths to guard migrants residing right here illegally, doubling down on Democrats’ plans to combat mass deportations.

“The important thing right here is that each device within the toolbox has obtained for use to guard our residents, to guard our residents,” Healey instructed MSNBC final December after Trump vowed to start out deporting unlawful immigrants when he took workplace.

Now Healey is being non-transparent about the place the migrants residing within the motels are going to go. The place are all these folks going precisely? Nobody will say. Additionally left unclear is how the state will deal with the long run leases the administration signed with the motels.

Healey additionally conveniently neglects to say the scores of no-bid contracts her administration handed out to pay for the resort shelters and home and feed the migrants.