Is the city doing enough to protect immigrants from ICE?

When Mayor Michelle Wu stood with elected leaders from Boston and surrounding cities and towns to announce a suite of new ordinances and executive orders aimed at curtailing excesses by ICE, including banning immigration officers from staging actions or making warrantless arrests on city property, many were heartened by the strong showing of local resistance against the Trump administration’s deportation agenda.

But some activists are saying the administration should be doing more.

“Cities are trying to push for policies that earn them a lot of credit, but they’re still not addressing some fundamental issues,” said Fatema Ahmad, executive director of the Muslim Justice League.

Ahmad and others point to the city’s participation in entities like the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the Metro Boston Homeland Security Region — all of which promote the sharing of information between local and federal law enforcement authorities.

While Boston’s TRUST Act bars local law enforcement from coordinating with federal immigration authorities on civil immigration matters, other federal agencies with whom police are sharing information work regularly with ICE.

Heather Perez Arroyo points to BRIC, where local police share office space with FBI agents. “You have local police literally sitting next to federal agents who have direct access to their information,” she said. “Of course, the information they have ready access to is going to be used to support the mass deportation effort.”

The BRIC office includes desks for an FBI agent and a Department of Homeland Security agent. Given that Boston Police Department officers have a history of official and unofficial information-sharing with federal immigration agents that have led to the deportation of immigrants who have not been charged with crimes, Ahmad sees a danger for immigrants in the sharing of information with federal authorities.

“When you look at videos of ICE detaining people, it’s not just ICE,” she said. “You see DEA and FBI agents. Every collaboration adds exponential possibilities for information to get to ICE.”

Noting the presence of FBI and Department of Homeland Security officers in the BRIC, Kade Crokford, director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, said, “Representatives for Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi work at the BRIC every day.”

While local activists and city councillors have in recent years raised concerns about Boston police sharing information with federal law enforcement, Mayor Wu said the Boston Police Department under her administration has made reforms.

“There’s been significant work over several years now to implement the local ordinances that were passed by the City Council, including language that I’m very familiar with, as I helped author and introduce that alongside our community organizations and other councilors,” she said during the press conference last Thursday. 

“And there are so many restrictions on information sharing, particularly when it comes to the Boston Public Schools.”

In a 2015 incident, a Salvadoran student legally in the United States and attending East Boston High School was incorrectly labeled “gang affiliated” in the BPD’s gang database, then written up in a report about a verbal altercation and later deported by federal immigration officials. 

Elected officials have ended the practice of sharing school incident reports with police, but, despite her 2021 election year pledge to dissolve the gang database, which is managed by the BRIC, Wu has declined to do so.

“There are restrictions on the use of surveillance and how that needs to be protected with access to the data and policies that define retention of that data,” Wu said. “And there have been additional efforts to ensure that the use of that database, with, for example, how long different individuals and how individuals are in that database that have been reformed through different changes in the Boston Police rules as well.”

BPD officers still add children and young adults to the gang database, using a point system and their best guess as to whether a person is a gang member or gang- affiliated. Such a designation can still appear on an arrest record or incident report, whether or not it’s true, Perez Arroyo said.

“It’s creating a risk of deportation for all people who are on that list,” she said.

While Boston police are designating people as gang members, ICE agents across the country are labeling demonstrators as “domestic terrorists,” using facial recognition software to identify them and log them into federal databases.

Perez Arroyo said the lack of a real firewall between local law enforcement and federal immigration officials is undermining public safety in Massachusetts.

“It’s really hard right now for people to have a sense of safety,” she said. “People feel they can’t trust the police.”

This story was originally published in the Dorchester Reporter.