Illegal immigrants will no longer be able to camp out at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Instead, Massachusetts will start housing migrants in an emergency center paid for by taxpayers.
On Friday, Gov. Maura Healey (D-MA) broke the news that migrants will not be able to stay in the state’s biggest airport after July 9. Instead, the sanctuary state will send the migrants to a center in Norfolk that is paid for by taxpayers. Massachusetts is starting an emergency shelter in a building that used to be a minimum-security prison. The shelter can hold up to 450 people.
Scott Rice, who is in charge of emergency aid for the state, said in a statement that “the airport is not an appropriate place for people to seek shelter.” Instead, Rice called the work made on the shelter in Norfolk “progress” and said that it would end the practice of families spending the night in the airport. It’s not clear how much the building will cost.
In her statement about the decision, Healey told migrants at the southern border again not to come to Massachusetts without a plan for where to stay because the state is “drained out of shelter space.”
The release said, “We will keep spreading the word that families traveling to Massachusetts need to have a plan for housing that does not include Logan Airport or our Emergency Assistance shelters.”
The news came after Healey sent a group of state lawmakers to Texas to tell migrants at the southern border not to come to Massachusetts.
Rice said the trip was “an important chance to meet with families coming into the U.S. and the groups that help them at the border to make sure they have correct information about Massachusetts’s lack of shelter space.”
In the next fiscal year, the state plans to spend $915 million on temporary housing for migrants. In February, a poll paid for by the Fiscal Alliance Foundation showed that most Massachusetts voters did not want to help pay for housing for migrants.
It’s not clear how many people are in Massachusetts illegally. The Department of Health and Human Services says that there is no “comprehensive count” of the refugees in the state.
Massachusetts’s number of illegal immigrants rose by about 120,000 between 2010 and 2021. That number does not include details from 2020. Nearly 18,000 people asked for shelter in the state in 2022. The Healey government kept track of an extra 11,000 migrants from October 2022 to September 2023, which is 152% more than the previous fiscal year.
