Boston Democratic Mayor Michelle Wu has announced a plan to identify and contact private property owners who express interest in leasing parking spaces to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Wu said her administration will seek the information through public-records requests as ICE searches for 249 contiguous parking spaces in Boston. The mayor acknowledged that the city cannot prevent private owners from leasing their property to federal authorities. Her administration nevertheless plans to track down those owners and pressure them against cooperating.
Wu discussed the effort during an appearance on WCVB’s “On the Record,” where she was questioned about the federal government’s search for parking in Boston. ICE is looking for spaces near existing or planned facilities as part of a broader search covering more than a dozen cities. Wu said Boston has already acted to prevent ICE from staging operations on city-owned property and is now turning its attention to private owners.
“We as a city will be filing another FOIA request for any responses that have come in from the Boston area so that we know what information they may be sifting through,” Wu said. “We strongly oppose any expansion of their efforts here and would encourage and will be reaching out to property owners to try to ensure that they’re not adding to a surge of unlawful and dangerous activity.”
The mayor conceded that her office lacks the power to prohibit a private transaction. “We cannot block private property, but we will be contacting property owners to make sure they understand our view on how dangerous this could be for our residents, and that this is not a way to make our community safer,” Wu said, according to WCVB. She added that city officials intend to gather “as much information as possible” concerning ICE’s plans and the properties under consideration.
The federal search was disclosed through a “Sources Sought Notice” posted on the General Services Administration’s contracting website. As WBUR reported, the notice says ICE is conducting market research to locate owners capable of providing parking near federal immigration facilities. Any eventual Boston lease would carry a five-year term, with the first three years firm, although the government has not yet committed to acquiring a particular property.
Wu had previously said Boston joined seven other local governments in declaring that ICE should not be permitted to stage from public property or use municipal buildings. “When it is private property, we will have to look into our, our full legislative and legal options,” she told reporters earlier in August. Wu said the records request is intended to identify which private owners responded to the federal notice even though those owners remain legally free to conduct business with ICE.
Watch Wu describe the city’s plan here:
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Wu justified the proposed pressure campaign by pointing to immigration-enforcement operations elsewhere in the country. “Unfortunately, we already have proof of what happens when they conduct a surge operation,” she said. The mayor cited incidents in Maine and the Twin Cities while accusing federal officers of following “a directive that is very far from protecting the public.”
ICE’s regional Enforcement and Removal Operations field office is located outside Boston in Burlington. Inside the city, the federal government operates an immigration court on New Sudbury Street, while ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division maintains an office on Causeway Street. The parking inquiry could still provide federal agents with a staging location inside the city if ICE decides to proceed and finds a willing private owner.
The Department of Homeland Security responded by accusing Wu of attempting to intimidate residents who might cooperate with federal law enforcement. “Pro-criminal Mayor Wu knows she has ZERO authority to block ICE from utilizing private property — so now she’s trying to intimidate Bostonians,” the department said. “If PRIVATE citizens want to allow federal law enforcement onto their OWN property, they should be allowed to do so. They should not face threats from their radical mayor who shamelessly compared ICE agents to a neo-Nazi group.”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video.