Massachusetts Towns Blindsided by Migrant Relocations Without Notice from State

Leaders of two Massachusetts towns spoke out late last week about the arrival of migrants being transported in with no advance notice. State officials transported the migrants into their towns without giving any warning to local officials.

Community leaders from the Massachusetts coastal communities of Kingston (population 13,000) and Plymouth (population 61,000) held a press conference late last week to complain that state officials gave them no warning before placing dozens of migrants into their towns without notice, the Boston Herald reported.

“A heads up would have been nice,” Kingston Town Administrator Keith Hickey told the Herald. He expressed his frustration about the lack of notice from the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development.

Kingston residents lined the streets to express their displeasure regarding the relocation of migrants into their communities.

Casually driving through small town America

Kingston Massachusetts #Boston pic.twitter.com/vWEonGIPmF

— TigerSlam.og (@tiger_slam) October 30, 2022

Hickey said he did receive notice on October 21 that the state was placing nine migrants in need of emergency housing into a Kingston hotel — immediately. That number rose to more than 100 by the following Monday morning.

The migrants included mostly non-English speaking Haitian migrants including 64 children, the Boston newspaper stated.

Town Manager Derek Brindisi told the Boston newspaper that state officials contacted him last Tuesday to expect the immediate placement of migrants into 27 hotel rooms — eight migrant families. Brindisi said the state told them to expect 16 more migrant families in the coming weeks.

“We would have hoped that we could have been part of the planning process early on, so that this would have been a more seamless transition into our community,” Brindisi told reporters at a press conference.

In contrast, the town of Normandy, Texas, (population 29) received the unexpected crossing of approximately 300 migrants on Tuesday morning — in a single border crossing event, Breitbart Texas reported. While some of these migrants will be returned to Mexico under Title 42 authority, many will be released without notice into the city of Eagle Pass, Texas, which has a population of only 29,000. More than 1,000 migrants arrive in this border community on a daily basis — all without notice.

Massasachuttes State Representative Mathew Muratore told town leaders to expect more of the placement of migrants into their communities during the coming months.

“This is not going to end here,” he stated.

State officials warned they would likely not be able to move the migrants to longer-term housing until the end of the year.