Determined Healey making an attempt to rewrite historical past on migrant disaster

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

Healey has the monumental process of making an attempt to squirm out from beneath 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 difficulty it might be for her reelection subsequent yr, so is now claiming she “inherited” the migrant downside from the Biden administration and is asserting Massachusetts is just not a sanctuary state.

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

Will voters purchase it? In all probability not. However Healey is in political mode now, the place she is at her finest. She’s been a disappointing governor however is a good campaigner.

“This can be a disaster that I inherited once I grew to become governor and began in 2023,” she claimed in a televised “On the Report” interview this yr. “We’ve labored actually exhausting and I’ve taken numerous steps to truly reform the best way the system operates and make adjustments.”

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 understand, as a state governor, I’m inheriting the issues attributable to federal inaction.”

Requested within the TV interview concerning the $1 billion a yr the state has been spending for the emergency lodge shelters, she stated “We’re on monitor to scale back that. We’re additionally on monitor to shut all accommodations. They have been accommodations that have been working once I grew to become governor.”

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

It’s true that late in 2022, beneath 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 grew to become governor, Lawyer Basic Healey opposed a Trump administration rule that might bar entry to the asylum course of for 1000’s of migrants.

“The Trump administration has accomplished every little thing doable to disclaim entry to asylum and make life depressing for folks looking for refuge in the USA,” 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 exhausting to fulfill 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 have 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 all the time be a beacon of hope, compassion, humanity and alternative,” she stated.

Her administration opened dozens of lodge shelters and put 1000’s of migrants there. At one level late in 2023, greater than 100 accommodations have 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 accommodations have been no place to lift a household and commenced a plan to shut them – greater than two years after she grew to become governor.

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

“It’s outrageous that this particular person took benefit of our shelter system to interact in prison exercise,” she stated in a press release 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 lady at a Rockland shelter.

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

Healey in actual fact 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 instrument within the toolbox has acquired for use to guard our residents, to guard our residents,” Healey informed 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 accommodations 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 accommodations.

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