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By Aleks Phillips
U.S. News Reporter
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The lieutenant governor of Massachusetts has asked residents and those with spare space to house migrants after the state declared an emergency over an influx of migrants that has caused "a severe lack of shelter availability in the state."
In a press conference on Thursday, Kim Driscoll urged citizens to "step up if you're willing to have an additional family be part of your family."
The request prompted criticism from many, while some expressed support for Driscoll, citing Massachusetts' history as one of the first colonies founded by European migrants.
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The state became the latest in the U.S. to declare an emergency over the number of migrants arriving there on Tuesday, saying that it currently had 5,600 families in state shelter, or around 20,000 individuals including children and pregnant women, up 80 percent on the 3,100 families a year ago.
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"In recent months, demand has increased to levels that our emergency shelter system cannot keep up with, especially as the number of families leaving shelter has dwindled due to a lack of affordable housing options and barriers to securing work," Maura Healey, the Democratic Massachusetts governor, said upon announcing the emergency.
In a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Healey blamed "federal policies on immigration and work authorization, inadequate production of affordable housing" and "the end of Covid-era food and housing security programs" for the problems the state was facing.
She said the state was attempting to address what she described as "a federal crisis of inaction that is many years in the making" and urged Mayorkas to seek "meaningful" legislation from Congress and use executive powers to remove "burdensome" barriers for migrants seeking jobs.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said it had provided $2.8 million in humanitarian relief to the city of Boston, adding that the Biden administration "will continue to collaborate directly with city and state officials to coordinate our efforts and we continue to call on Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform."
Healey noted that 1,800 families were currently residing in hotels and motels as demand for shelter had skyrocketed and that the state was investing over $45 million a month in migrant programs.
"If you have an extra room or suite in your home, please consider hosting a family," Driscoll told citizens. "Safe housing and shelter is our most pressing need."
"If you're a local official, a college president, a business owner or a faith leader with an available building or space in your community, please work with us to offer it as a shelter site. If you're a hotel or motel owner, consider opening it up for emergency assistance," she added.
"If you're a landlord or property owner, we could use you too. Everyone has something they can offer."
Several Democratic state and city leaders have declared emergencies over the influx of migrants into the areas they oversee since last year. New York State and Chicago, Illinois, declared emergencies earlier this year, while New York City did so in October 2022.
"Democratic governors and mayors, mayors in Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles, here in New York, El Paso, Brownsville, all of the mayors have been saying that this is a national problem and we need national leadership. We all should be talking about this in a very real way," New York City Mayor Eric Adams said at an unrelated press conference following Healy's announcement, per Politico.
Reacting to the remarks on X, formerly Twitter, Eric Spracklen, a conservative digital strategist, described them as "UNBELIEVABLE," adding: "This is insane," in a post that has been viewed more than 110,000 times.
"These people are crazy," Arthur Watkins Jr., president of the Fill Station Pillow Kiosk in Spring Hill, Tennessee, wrote on X.
"As we learned the articles of the Constitution, most would laugh at the third amendment, no quartering of troops," Jennifer Lynn Lawrence, a former Breitbart reporter, posted. "Now it seem[s] that one could be very important going forward."
However, the X account for the podcast Not Your Power Couple wrote: "I seem to remember something similar like this happening in Massachusetts around 1774-75," an allusion to the period when the first stirrings of revolution against British rule began to grow in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Newsweek reached out to the office of the governor and lieutenant governor of Massachusetts via email for comment on Friday.
Healey noted that in Massachusetts, the primary driver of the crisis was migrants' ineligibility for jobs. "Our new arrivals are most eager to work. The last thing they want is to be dependent," she wrote in the letter to Mayorkas.
Update 08/14/23, 4:45 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include comment from a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson.
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