Members of the National Guard were deployed on Wednesday to help the state of Massachusetts handle an influx of immigrants as shelter capacity dwindles.
Over 6,000 immigrant families have flooded emergency shelters in Massachusetts, which has a right-to-shelter policy in place, meaning that officials are required by law to provide emergency housing and support to homeless families with children and pregnant women.
Massachusetts Democratic Governor Maura Healey previously called in the National Guard after issuing a state of emergency due to the ongoing immigrant crisis.
“Over the past six months, the demand for emergency shelter has skyrocketed,” Healey said in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas last month. “Shelter entries per month are more than double the number of entries per month during the pandemic and roughly one-third higher than pre-pandemic levels.”
Healey has also asked for an expanded budget for emergency shelters and support, since the state’s current budget only covers a maximum of 4,700 families. Healey has asked for an additional $250 million to add to the current budget of $325 million, due to the recent immigrant influx and the likelihood of the numbers continuing to rise.
Massachusetts has eight sanctuary cities, including Boston, Amherst, Cambridge, and Concord, which intentionally limit their cooperation with federal immigration laws.
Massachusetts Democratic Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll recently said that between twenty and thirty-five families are seeking shelter every day, creating an “immediate need.”
“All of our typical emergency shelter sites were filled a month ago,” Driscoll stated. “The plan that we have in place today with the deployment of the National Guard, which happened just last month, will put National Guard staff in locations as part of a response to our non-service providers, essentially creating rapid response teams in places that we do not have the ground service contractors or case management services happening on a regular basis.”
Driscoll added that the crisis has grown larger than the administration could have imagined. “We have never had this many people in shelter in this commonwealth before,” she remarked. “That is taxing all of us to try and identify solutions and to ensure that we have the resources when we need them, where we need them.”