Boston Mayor Michelle Wu recently took to the airwaves to offer her condolences to the family of Lemark Jaramillo, a career criminal who was shot by an off-duty Boston police officer when he tried to stab customers in a Chick-fil-A restaurant. Notably absent from the Mayor’s comments was any expression of sympathy for Jaramillo’s intended victims.
A few days later, in New Bedford, Mass., U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested a Haitian illegal alien charged in the courts of Commonwealth with two counts of rape, indecent assault and battery on a person 14 years or older, possession of child pornography, witness intimidation, and violation of a harassment prevention order.
What do these two events have to do with each other? Plenty. Mayor Wu and Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey have repeatedly shown themselves to be apologists for criminals. In 2024, Mayor Wu pushed to abolish the Massachusetts gang registry and argued that crimes ranging from theft to driving without a license should no longer be prosecuted. Meanwhile, Governor Healey has always been a staunch advocate for clemency – even for the most hardcore, violent criminals. Simply put, Michelle and Maura think everyone but the perpetrator bears responsibility for committing a crime.
Both Wu and Healey are also advocates of sanctuary policies. In essence, a sanctuary policy is when a state, county or city unilaterally decides to unlawfully ignore federal immigration laws and help illegal aliens avoid apprehension by ICE. Sanctuary policies, no matter how you dress them up, are nothing but an extension of the criminal coddling that Wu and Healey love so much to illegal aliens.
Unsurprisingly, when state and local governments publicly commit to actively helping immigration violators avoid immigration enforcement, those jurisdictions tend to attract illegal aliens in droves.
As the name “illegal alien” should make abundantly clear, any foreign national who enters or remains in the U.S. without authorization is, by definition, breaking the law. It is both a civil violation and a criminal offense to enter the U.S. without the permission of the federal government.
And illegal aliens inevitably commit a host of civil and criminal offenses, over and above their violations of Immigration and Nationality Act. In fact, it is impossible for them to open bank accounts, accept jobs, and otherwise engage in the transactions of daily life, without engaging in tax fraud, identity theft and a dozen other forms of criminal deception. Fraud is a gateway to any number of other criminal behaviors.
As a result of its soft-on-crime policies, Massachusetts has become a magnet, not just for garden variety illegal aliens, but for the worst kind of predatory foreign villains.
Anyone who doubts the truth of that assertion need only review the parade of horribles arrested by ICE across the Commonwealth over the last few months. It included the arrest – in a single day – of eight illegal aliens from Brazil, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Haiti, all of whom were charged with violent felonies; the detention of a Turkish illegal alien charged with abusing a disabled household member; the apprehension of a Guatemalan illegal charged with aggravated rape of a child; and the arrest of a Dominican national who had been convicted of murder.
Over the last several decades, Bay State politicians have refused to acknowledge that condoning lawless behavior simply invites more lawless behavior, repeatedly claiming that deliberately flouting federal immigration law has absolutely no negative effects.
But for everyone, save the most emotion-driven, fact-averse, social justice warriors, it should now be evident that babying brigands and other baddies is slowly killing the Bay State. Once upon a time, Massachusetts attracted the world’s best and brightest, who arrived in the Commonwealth seeking education at its world class universities and jobs in its innovative, high-tech companies.
But that trend is rapidly becoming ancient history. A recent report from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation (MTF) found that law-abiding, taxpaying residents are fleeing the state in droves. And they’re being replaced by foreigners.
The Pioneer Institute, a Boston think tank, found that “Massachusetts’ 2024 net international inflow” consisted of 90,217 individuals. But, according to Pioneer, this crop of migrants, “are not like replacements for the thousands of highly educated young people and high-income earners leaving the state every year and do little to fill skilled positions that continue to see shortages.”
In case you missed the implication, that’s polite, academic-speak for, “Massachusetts has now added to its population a massive pool of low-education, low-skill workers who will inevitably end up on the state-funded dole.” Apparently, Pioneer thought it was too gauche to point out that many of the migrants in this pool are also what our Puritan forebears would have called “idle tosspots, thieves, cutpurses and highwaymen.”
If Mayor Michelle and Governor Maura would stop coddling criminals, the Bay State might once again find itself attracting Lawful Permanent Residents with entrepreneurial dreams and J-1 Exchange Visitors with Nobel Prizes, rather than visa overstays with Interpol Red Notices and illegal aliens with active warrants. But that isn’t likely to happen until foreign criminals are correctly portrayed as deserving recipients of federal justice, rather than innocent victims of ICE discrimination.
Matt O’Brien is the Director of Investigations at the Immigration Reform Law Institute and the co-host of IRLI’s podcast “No Border, No Country.” Immediately prior to working for IRLI he served as an immigration judge. He has nearly 30 years of experience in immigration law and policy, having held numerous positions within the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. O’Brien is a native of Lynn, Massachusetts.
