The Dirty Truth Behind the Massachusetts Migrant Crisis
An inside look at the real cost of housing migrants in the United States
This article was first published in the Independent Womens Forum for their iW Features column:
https://www.iwfeatures.com/commentary/the-dirty-truth-behind-the-massachusetts-migrant-crisis/
I was born and raised in Massachusetts, just a half hour away from the ferry that takes residents over to Martha’s Vineyard for a day of shopping, lobster rolls, and warm beaches. The island is a popular summer destination even for those of us who live close by, offering a quintessential New England experience with the taste of salt water and, dare I say, wealth. The average home price on the Vineyard is around $1.7 million. I feel poor even typing that.
But like many upscale urban areas along the politically blue East Coast, Martha’s Vineyard — and much of the rest of my home state, for that matter — has embraced self-destructive policies that harm the community. Nowhere has this been more obvious than on the issue of immigration.
I was an on-air radio host in the fall of 2022 when the news broke that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had sent a plane with 50 mostly Venezuelan migrants to the Martha’s Vineyard in what some called a political stunt. DeSantis wanted to force Democratic-run, self-described sanctuary states to feel the strain of having to manage unexpected migrants with no notice, as Florida had been.
Within a few days of the migrants’ arrival, the posh island insisted they could not house, feed, or care for the several dozen migrants, who were then flown off the island to a military base, never to be heard from again.
My curiosity about where those individuals went afterwards was piqued. And just weeks later, the Biden administration began to ship thousands more migrants into Massachusetts, giving me an opportunity to see firsthand what the shelf-life of a Biden-era migrant really looked like. While everyone was looking at the southern border, I was looking inside my community and wondering where the heck these people were going to go.
Just 20 miles away from where I lived, the only hotel in the city of Taunton, Massachusetts, signed a lucrative contract with the state, closing its doors to the public and exclusively housing approximately 140 migrant families. I started there, and over the course of the next two years, I visited several other hotels where migrants were being housed nearly three dozen times. I witnessed a system that was borderline inhumane, expensive, and unsustainable.
Eventually, more than 55 hotels across the state would sign their own contracts with the Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities (ELOCH), housing more than 20,000 migrants at a cost of almost $2 billion of taxpayer dollars to date.
My observations at the Taunton hotel location were limited to the lobby (which I was escorted out of by police on at least one occasion) and the parking lot, where I watched migrants upgrading a speaker system to the trunk of a car, a mother smack her small child, and another migrant struggle to carry a brand new, still-in-the-box, 60-inch flat screen television into the hotel. Ubers and other contracted transportation cycled in and out of the parking lot and hot meals were served in the common area.
As months went on and the hotel stayed at capacity, I began to seek out just how much this was actually costing Massachusetts taxpayers.
I’m a big fan of public records requests. I often joke “A FOIA a day keeps the corruption away” and have hundreds of requests for public documents under my belt. As I type this, I have a dozen outstanding public records requests I am no-so-patiently awaiting.
My first public records request related to the migrant crisis was for all that transportation I saw coming in and out of the Taunton hotel location. Who was paying for those Ubers and how much did it cost?
I submitted that exact request to EOHLC and in turn received documents for two different contracts with two companies, indicating that it was costing taxpayers millions of dollars to provide transportation for migrants to places like grocery stores, doctor’s offices, and even meetings with immigration lawyers.
Over time, I learned that migrants in Massachusetts hotel shelters were receiving not only transportation but health insurance, three meals a day, cash benefits, SNAP food benefits, legal services, and, for shelters that don’t have laundry facilities on-site, wash-dry-and-fold service. Sources told me that the costs could be as high as $20,000 a month per family.
One contract I observed indicated the state pays $140 a night for a single hotel room. For just one family who has been in a hotel shelter since January of 2023 (which the majority have), the state has spent an astronomical $100,800 on their housing alone. With more than 7,000 migrant families pushed into the state, do the math: the amount is around $700 million on just hotel rooms alone.
As an independent journalist, I pushed as much of that information out to the public on my platforms as I could, but I was one of the few reporting on the frontlines. Mainstream media stayed far away from the gritty facts about the truth inside the Massachusetts migrant crisis.
In Bristol County, where I live and reported for an independent media outlet, I shared my findings about these shelters and costs, and perhaps not so surprisingly, the county was the largest Trump vote in the state during the November election. As I interviewed voters on why they voted for President Donald Trump, it became clear there was one thing on their mind: the money going to migrants and not their own families.
But it wasn’t the billions being spent on the migrant crisis by Massachusetts that I found to be the most egregious problem. In January of this year, the Massachusetts GOP submitted their own public records request for copies of reports written by shelter staff documenting any serious incidents that occurred at the shelters. I sat down to open the file and was overwhelmed to find thousands of pages of reports with close to 1,200 individual serious incidents documented.
The Massachusetts GOP did their best to sift through and pick out some of the most disturbing reports, but to truly understand what was happening inside these shelters, I knew I needed to read them all. Over the course of three days, I read each and every documented incident, from fires in hotel rooms to the rape of a 14-year-old girl by her father that resulted in a pregnancy.
Listen, I’m not going to sugarcoat it: it took a serious mental toll on me to read those reports. The overwhelming weight of some of the most disturbing stories I have ever read was too much at times. In particular, the suicide of a school-aged boy, the death of several infants, the savage sexual assaults, and the dozens of reports of child neglect in those hotel shelters changed me.
Ironically, the most documented type of incident was that of domestic abuse. Time and time again, shelter staff would document matters of violence between women and their male partners. While most of the reports were redacted, the pattern of violence was still prevalent and habitual.
What makes the domestic abuse reports so ironic is that while Massachusetts is not a sanctuary state, it is the only state in the nation with a right-to-shelter law. This law, established more than 40 years ago, was established to provide housing for women and children in need, especially those fleeing domestic abuse at home. It is this law that provided a pathway to Massachusetts becoming a drop zone for Biden border crossers and has now fostered an environment where women and children are living in small spaces with the men who abuse them. What’s worse? It’s all taxpayer-funded.
When the Venezuelan migrants arrived in Martha’s Vineyard, I remember saying that Massachusetts was going to be at the forefront of the migrant crisis. Sadly, that premonition has come to fruition. Just this month, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu was called before lawmakers in Washington, D.C. to speak to the status of her sanctuary city. Unsurprisingly, she deflected questions about safety and costs related to the influx of migrants.
And while Wu was in D.C., Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey was making the rounds on late-night comedy shows like Seth Meyers, not once talking about the $425 million she just signed to cover another five months of migrant-related costs. These are arguably two of the most powerful women in our state, and not once have they addressed the women in shelters getting abused and raped.
Maybe I’ll catch them on Martha’s Vineyard this summer.
This is good reporting Jessica, glad you're doing it. Residents/taxpayers need to know this.