Republicans ramp up attacks on Boston as Mayor Wu prepares to testify before Congress

Every Friday, GBH News’ Morning Edition discusses the big ways that the Trump administration and its decisions are intersecting with the politics and people in Massachusetts. GBH political reporter Adam Reilly joined host Mark Herz to share his analysis on the week’s developments. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Mark Herz: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is headed to Washington on March 5 to testify in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about what the city does and does not do when it comes to immigration enforcement. We might not be discussing her trip again, were it not for the fact that the House Committee released a pretty remarkable video . Give us your take on this video.

Adam Reilly: It really is a remarkable video. I cannot recall seeing a comparable video released before congressional testimony in the past. It may have happened, but if it did, I missed it. The video looks like a trailer for an action movie in which the four Democratic mayors, who are slated to testify next week, are the arch villains. It starts off with footage of President Trump. He says that, in his words, “a radical and corrupt establishment has allowed law abiding Americans to be victimized by dangerous criminals who were here illegally.” Then, you see a copy of the Constitution burning the page curls as the flame flickers over it and consumes it. You see a close up of Boston City Hall, and you see Mayor Wu’s face, along with an assortment of headlines coming out of Massachusetts that are supposed to make the president’s point. The other cities that are going to be under the microscope get a similar treatment. Then we hear from James Comer of Kentucky, the chair of the oversight committee, who closes with a threat ...

James Comer: If they’re going to continue to disobey the law, then I think we should cut as much of their federal funding as we can cut.

Reilly: And you hear that dramatic sting at the end? I talked about it as resembling a movie trailer a moment ago. It almost has a pro-wrestling aesthetic to it. Like you’re trying to get the crowd hyped up before a wrestling match. We know that President Trump has an affinity for that aesthetic.

Herz: They’re going to help the FBI keep their people in shape, we were hearing.

Reilly: Right, right. So, it’s a case study, I think, in the way that, not to get too esoteric here, but in the way that aesthetics and politics are intersecting at this moment in time.

Herz: It’s worth reminding people that the history of all of this focus on Boston from the Trump administration — this dramatic ramp up we’ve been listening to — it comes after Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, promised to unleash “hell” on Boston. This was at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC on Feb. 22.

Reilly: Yeah. Again, the sort of comments that you might expect in a pro-wrestling competition. And Homan’s remarks were pretty striking. He was angry about comments that Michael Cox, Boston’s police commissioner, had made on the WCVB TV show “On the Record.” Let’s take a quick listen to what Homan said and how he said it at CPAC.

Homan: I read a story last night. The police commissioner of Boston, you said you doubled down on not helping the law enforcement officers of ICE. I’m coming to Boston, I’m bringing hell with me.

Herz: Is Homan right, Adam? That Commissioner Cox doubled down on not helping federal immigration authorities?

Reilly: Well, first, I’m bummed out that we didn’t get to hear the crowd chanting. “Homan, Homan.” And after, just to further drive home the point that I’m trying to make here, I don’t think that Holman is right about that. Although that was the title of a Fox News story about Cox’s interview, which I think Coleman got his information from.

If you go back and watch what Cox said in this interview, I would say it was actually pretty innocuous. He said the BPD is limited by state and local laws when it comes to cooperating with federal immigration authorities, and the city is. But that limit has its own limitations.

Let me try to sketch out how it works. This can be confusing, but there’s a Supreme Judicial Court ruling from 2017 that bars all local law enforcement officers in Massachusetts from working with federal authorities, when the only alleged illegality is that someone is undocumented. There is an ordinance on the books in Boston, the Trust Act, that does much the same thing. But the Boston ordinance explicitly says that the BPD can and will work with the feds on cases that involve both illegal immigration and significant threats to public safety and the SJC ruling, as I understand it, I’m not an attorney, but the SJC ruling allows for that too.

So the only thing state and local law do not let Boston do is hold people in so-called civil immigration detainers, which, again, are inquiries from the federal government which say that the feds might want to deport someone and they want them held because they may be here illegally. They don’t get into criminality or a lack of criminality. So that’s the status quo in Boston. Cox likes to say, “Yeah, that the city doesn’t care.” The BPD doesn’t care when it comes to crime about your immigration status. If you are a victimizer, they want to track you down and apprehend you. If you are a victim, they want to protect you regardless of whether you’re undocumented or not.

Herz: Well, as far as we know, the Trump administration wants to focus on undocumented people who are criminals.

Reilly: That’s what they’ve said.

Herz: So it starts to sound like this is more about optics, this focus on Boston.

Reilly: It does start to sound like that. I think Boston and Cambridge are sort of favorite conservative punching bags. I watched the reaction to Cox’s comments play out on X in the conservative ecosystem there, and I saw a lot of headlines that just fundamentally misrepresented what he said. People tweeting, “Boston police commissioner says he won’t deport violent criminals from the city. Come and get him, Tom Homan.” And that’s just that’s just a fundamental misrepresentation of what he actually said.

Herz: So between the congressional GOP video and Homan’s threat of bringing hell to Boston, do you think maybe Mayor Wu is not as enthusiastic now for her visit to Congress?

Reilly: If she is on some level, it would be hard to blame, or at least for being a little apprehensive. Hard to know what she’s thinking privately. But my sense is that she really, genuinely thinks that Homan and other Washington Republicans fundamentally don’t understand the way things actually work in Boston, which we’ve been discussing. I think she also wants to drive home this point. She’s very proud of Boston’s public safety record, as we’ve talked about here. She thinks that a big reason Boston is an unusually safe, big city is because people who are undocumented are comfortable coming and talking to police about serious crimes that are going on or serious threats to public safety in a way, they might not be in a municipality where if you went and talked to the police and you were undocumented, you might have to worry about being deported. I think she wants to drive that point home, too, not expecting her to be given a gracious set up by Republicans on the committee. There are Democrats on the committee, Steve Lynch and Ayanna Pressley who I think are going to tee her up to make those points.

Herz: You’re going to be in D.C. to watch this, right?

Reilly: Yes. I will be going down, doing the congressional special: fly down in the morning, come back in the evening. And I’ll be on [All Things Considered] talking with Arun [Rath].