Lucas: Healey changes tune on border
Welcome to Healey’s Hotel House of Horrors.
It is Gov. Maura Healey’s state run hotel emergency housing assistance program for immigrants, illegal or otherwise.
Like the Hotel California, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave, unless you are allegedly carrying an assault rifle, like American newcomer Leonardo Andujar Sanchez.
Sanchez, 28, from the Dominican, is Joe Biden’s latest guest to be busted, this time at the Quality Inn in Revere, a state funded family shelter, where he had been staying.
Sanchez had entered the country illegally in the past year from an unknown location.
He was arrested Dec. 27 by the Revere Police with the assistance of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations and charged with possessing an AR-15 and $1 million worth of fentanyl and other drugs, according to ICE.
Sanchez had apparently been staying with an eligible family at the hotel under the assistance program that provides shelter for homeless pregnant women and families with children.
Healey said she was “outraged” by the news and promised to launch “a full review” of the intake process as well inspections of the shelters.
It would be understandable if the Sanchez arrest was an isolated incident, but it is not.
Even as the Sanchez bust took place, the Herald reported on a series of crimes taking place in various immigrant family shelters across the state, including child rape, domestic violence, fights, illegal guns, drunkenness, drugs and more.
The “Serious Incident Reports” by the state Office and Housing and Livable Communities, obtained by reporter Rick Sobey, showed that there have been cases of lawlessness from the beginning of the program.
And while the invasion of illegal immigrants into the state and the country began under President Joe Biden, who opened the border, Healey, progressive partisan that she is, continues to blame Donald Trump, who closed it, and who will close it again.
She blamed the crisis on Trump’s opposition to a weak bipartisan border bill that would have done nothing to stop the immigration invasion unleashed by Biden.
There were no illegal immigrants with assault rifles and fentanyl at the Quality Inn in Revere when Trump was president. Nor were thousands of migrant families with children in state funded hotel shelters either.
Healey now hopes that Trump will solve the open border problem that Biden created. “I hope so,” she said in a WGBH radio interview.
Now that Healey is aboard the secure border brigade, it is worth keeping in mind that when she was attorney general, she sued Trump 100 times during his first administration.
That would be 25 lawsuits a year during the four years that Trump was president.
Thirteen of those suits challenged Trump’s initiatives dealing with illegal immigration. They ranged from separating children from families to banning entry to immigrants seeking government funded welfare programs.
In 2019, Healey joined 20 other Democrat attorneys general to sue Trump over construction of the border wall, which was then, and is today, one of the Trump’s main missions in life.
In fact, back then Trump declared the matter a national emergency to enable him to switch federal funds around to build the wall, which he did, at least partially.
Biden, upon election, shut the construction project down. And he recently sought to sell off the remaining construction equipment for pennies on the dollar before a judge halted the plan.
Now, among the first things on President-elect Trump’s to do list, is to complete the construction of the wall,
In 2019, in filing the suit to halt construction of the wall, Healey called Trump’s action “unlawful.”
She said it was “an illegal power grab by President Trump and a violation of the constitutional separation of powers.”
That was long before an illegal immigrant was caught running around in one of Healey’s state subsidized Horror Hotels with fentanyl and an AR-style assault rifle.
If you build it they won’t come.
Peter Lucas is a veteran political reporter. Email him at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com
Revere Police photo of the drugs and weapon seized as part of the arrest at the Quality Inn. (Revere Police & Suffolk Sheriff)
Members of the California National Guard assemble near the Otay Mesa Port of Entry along the border with Mexico last month in San Diego. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File)