After looking the “other way” as migrants came into the city, a Revere dad says the arrest of an illegal immigrant who allegedly had an AR-15 and loads of fentanyl at a shelter is a wake-up call that the safety of citizens must be prioritized.

This comes ahead of the city council considering two bills related to the situation.

“The illegal immigrants, they need to go,” city resident Anthony Parziale told the Herald on Saturday.

“I don’t know where these people are going to go,” he added, “and I’m sure not all of them are bad people, but I’m not willing to roll the dice anymore with my daughter’s life, my son’s life when they’re finding AR-15s and a million dollars worth of fentanyl in the city of Revere.”

Parziale, who has a teenage son and a 10-year-old daughter and is running for a citywide City Council seat, made his comments in the aftermath of authorities arresting a 28-year-old Dominican illegal immigrant on gun and drug charges at the Quality Inn in Revere. The hotel has been used to house migrants and homeless families with children and pregnant women.

The Dec. 27 arrest has in part prompted Gov. Maura Healey to order an inspection of all emergency shelter units across Massachusetts, an independent review of security at the state-run facilities, and criminal background checks on all residents in the program.

Healey also filed a $425 million spending bill last week to cover the Bay State’s emergency shelter costs through the rest of this fiscal year — current money is expected to run dry by the end of January without another infusion.

Locally, the Revere City Council is set to take up a pair of motions related to the arrest of Leonardo Andujar Sanchez, who faces state and federal charges, at its meeting on Monday.

Council President Anthony Cogliandro is requesting the police department “work together with hotel management from each hotel within the city … to investigate each occupied room for suspicious and/or illegal activity.”

Councilor At-Large Michelle Kelley is seeking a committee meeting with representatives from the state Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities and the Healey administration to “discuss the procedures for vetting people who obtain EA Shelter” and steps being taken to “ensure situations such as the recent incident … will not happen again.”

Cogliandro and Kelley did not immediately respond to a Herald request for comment sent to their council emails.

Monday’s agenda had been posted before it came to light that the Healey administration was not fully looking into the potential criminal histories of all state-run shelter residents.

Healey, a first-term Democrat, had maintained for months that emergency shelter residents were fully vetted before entering the system, including in the wake of an alleged rape in Rockland when the governor said everyone provided shelter was “vetted.”

“We’re deploying all that we can in terms of vetting individuals,” the governor said last March.

Sanchez had lived at the Revere facility since Oct. 15, according to a spokesman for the state housing office, which partially runs the emergency shelter program. The office has said it conducts warrant checks of all residents every 30 days and all residents undergo background checks when they apply for a shelter.

However, Sanchez himself did not apply for the program but instead accompanied an unidentified person who had successfully applied to the program, Healey told reporters last Tuesday.

The illegal immigrant has submitted to voluntary federal detention after appearing in federal court on multiple charges — possession with intent to distribute more than 400 grams of fentanyl and being an alien in possession of a firearm who has entered the United States unlawfully.

On her council Facebook page, Kelley posted a letter that the Revere License Commission sent last Monday to the Quality Inn’s hotel management, raising concerns in light of the arrest.

“While it is understood that your business has contracted with a state agency to provide hotel services, that does not relieve you of your obligation to take all possible precautions to maintain a safe environment for both the people staying at your hotel and neighboring residents,” the letter, addressed to “Jiten Hotel Management,” states.

One resident responding to Kelley’s post said: “When this is settled, that hotel has to go. They are nothing but trouble for our city.”

Eliot Community Human Services, the Revere shelter’s service provider, had told the Herald last week that it takes “numerous steps to create a safe environment for our residents and the employees who support them,” including informing and cooperating “fully with law enforcement.”

Mayor Patrick Keefe said the city “increased the police presence” at the Quality Inn and plans to hold the “operator of the property responsible for any and all fees or costs associated with this additional enforcement support.”

“We cannot let individuals who prey on vulnerable people and who seek to do harm access our country through systems meant to help those fleeing the same violence in their homelands,” Keefe said in a statement.

Thousands of pages of “Serious Incident” reports, released last week, exposed incidents of child rape, domestic violence, brawls, drunkenness, drugs and more in the Massachusetts emergency housing shelter system, dating back to 2022.

Healey said Friday she asked state officials last spring to run background checks against the criminal offender record information database for all shelter residents in the emergency assistance program but was only “recently informed” that those were not happening.

The governor said she is re-upping that order.

Jon Fetherston, who served as director of an emergency shelter in Marlborough in 2023 and 2024 and filled in on some shifts at the Revere site, said he never heard about Healey demanding CORI checks last spring until the development broke on Friday.

Fetherston, a conservative podcaster and an Ashland Housing Authority commissioner, has blown the whistle on crime that has occurred at migrant shelters over the months. He called the Revere scandal “almost impossible” to understand.

“Maura Healey needs to come clean with the taxpayers of Massachusetts,” he told the Herald on Saturday. “She can no longer call these isolated incidents. She’s spent $2.5 billion of our tax money, and women and children are at risk because of her … inaction. She should either resign or fire her entire staff.”