It would be fair to say that Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston, and the Trump administration do not get along.
Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, has threatened the city with increased immigration enforcement and suggested that the police chief should resign. “I’m coming to Boston, and I’m bringing hell with me,” he said last month.
Ms. Wu, a first-term Democrat, called the comments “clueless.”
A Harvard-educated progressive who speaks fluent Spanish, Ms. Wu, 40, has done little to retreat. She has instead spent time assuring immigrants that the city remains a safe and welcoming place.
A flashpoint in tensions between the Trump administration and the city is a local law known as the Trust Act. It prohibits Boston police officers from participating in most federal immigration enforcement actions, though they can assist in some cases when crimes have been committed.
Earlier this year, federal officials accused the Boston police of ignoring dozens of federal requests to detain undocumented immigrants. Police officials said that they had never received most of the requests because Immigration and Customs Enforcement had disregarded the department’s request in 2023 to submit its requests by email instead of fax.
Mayor Wu has defended the city’s approach as the best way to preserve trust between immigrant communities and law enforcement. And she promotes Boston’s public safety record: In 2024, there were 24 homicides, the lowest number since at least 1957.
Gov. Maura Healey has taken the brunt of the criticism, especially for the state’s failure to conduct criminal background checks on shelter residents. And Massachusetts had difficulty handling the 2023 surge in migrants.
Many of them arrived from Haiti, drawn to a long-established Haitian American community in Boston and the state’s longstanding right-to-shelter law. Contracts with motels and hotels cost Massachusetts hundreds of millions of dollars.
For her part, Mayor Wu, who is up for re-election this year, seems ready to spar during the hearing.
“I’m there, no matter how challenging the circumstances, to stand up for Boston, and also to stand up for the truth, the facts, of who we are,” Ms. Wu, a daughter of immigrants from Taiwan, told reporters when asked about the hearing.
“Some people are trying to paint a story of cities where immigrants live as dangerous places,” she said, “when in fact we are proof of the opposite.”
