Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey has been saying for years that her state is not a sanctuary for illegal immigrants. In an opinion piece for American Thinker, Dale L. Wilcox argues that this claim cannot survive contact with the state’s own statutes — and that the only remaining explanation is that Healey knows exactly what she’s doing.
Wilcox is executive director and general counsel at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington-based group that advocates for stricter immigration enforcement. His piece, published Sept. 19, 2026, is less a work of reporting than an argument: that Massachusetts has built one of the most comprehensive sets of protections for illegal immigrants in the country, and that denying the sanctuary label is a political maneuver rather than an honest description.
The claim Healey keeps repeating
Wilcox anchors his argument in a 2024 interview Healey gave to Boston’s WBZ-TV, in which she said flatly, “We are not a sanctuary state.” He writes that she continues to make that claim, and that it can only be explained two ways — profound delusion or deliberate deception — before concluding that the latter is far more likely.
His reasoning: admitting that a state functions as a sanctuary for illegal immigrants would be roughly as popular as announcing a tax increase, particularly in an election year. That framing sets up the rest of the piece, which walks through the policies Wilcox says make the sanctuary designation unavoidable.
A 2017 court ruling as the turning point
The foundation, according to Wilcox, was laid in 2017, when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decided Lunn v. Commonwealth. That ruling, he writes, effectively made the entire state a sanctuary by holding that local law enforcement has no authority under state law to detain someone based solely on a federal immigration detainer request.
The practical consequence, in Wilcox’s telling, is that jurisdictions across the Bay State routinely release criminal aliens back onto the streets rather than transferring them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. He says the ruling “opened the floodgates” for dozens of Massachusetts towns to adopt their own sanctuary policies.
Boston features prominently in that account. Wilcox notes that the city reaffirmed its Trust Act in 2024, a measure that bars Boston police and other city departments from cooperating with ICE on civil immigration detainers. The result, he argues, has been and continues to be the release of criminal aliens into communities.
The PROTECT Act and the word no one said
Wilcox calls the “real clincher” a bill Healey signed on Aug. 5, 2026, titled “An Act Promoting Rule of Law, Oversight, Trust and Equal Constitutional Treatment” — known as the PROTECT Act. In his reading, the title is deceptive: the law, he writes, offers protections for illegal immigrants only.
Among its provisions, he says, the law prohibits new 287(g) immigration-enforcement partnerships in Massachusetts and imposes sweeping restrictions on cooperation between state and local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities.
He cites two reactions to the law. State Sen. Cindy F. Friedman, a Democrat from Arlington, said the measure helped “clarify that Massachusetts law enforcement have no role in aiding civil immigration enforcement.” Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, said the PROTECT Act would “help to establish a firewall between Massachusetts law enforcement and federal immigration officials.”
Wilcox points to what he considers a telling omission: the word “sanctuary” never came up during the bill-signing fanfare, even as, in his assessment, the state acquired one of the most comprehensive sets of protections for illegal immigrants anywhere in America.
The benefits argument
For Wilcox, codified restrictions on cooperation with federal immigration enforcement are already enough to satisfy any semantic purist’s definition of sanctuary. But he says Massachusetts goes further by offering what he calls generous rewards to people residing in the state unlawfully.
He points to July 2023, when two sweeping bills became law. The Work and Family Mobility Act grants driver’s licenses to Massachusetts residents regardless of immigration status. Separately, legislators passed a measure allowing undocumented students to qualify for in-state tuition and state financial aid at Massachusetts four-year colleges.
Wilcox describes the combination as a “honeypot of benefits” — a deliberate draw for illegal immigrants.
Costs, crime and a Boston operation
The piece then shifts from policy to consequences. Wilcox writes that years of sanctuary policies produced predictable outcomes: surging numbers of new illegal immigrants, taxpayer burdens and crime. He cites a figure of 393,000 illegal immigrants now residing in Massachusetts, costing taxpayers $2.91 billion annually.
On crime, he points to a five-day federal operation in Boston. Shortly after Tom Homan was appointed the Trump administration’s border czar, Wilcox writes, Homan prioritized Boston for an operation involving ICE and five other federal agencies that resulted in the arrest of 370 illegal immigrants. According to Homan, a majority of those arrested were “significant” criminals. Wilcox adds that ICE operations in Boston are ongoing out of necessity to maintain public safety.
The numbers behind the label
Wilcox closes by widening the frame beyond Massachusetts. He writes that if the state’s policies don’t qualify as sanctuary policies, then by definition no state does — and he asserts that the Bay State “fits the sanctuary definition like a glove,” alongside 17 other states, the District of Columbia and roughly 1,000 local jurisdictions nationwide.
His conclusion is that the denial is itself the point. Politicians like Healey, he argues, want to obscure the policies they support that aid and abet illegal migration. Voters know the reality, he writes — and so, worse yet, do illegal immigrants looking for their next safe place.
He ends with a line attributed to the management writer Peter Drucker: “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”
It’s worth being clear about what this piece is. Wilcox is not a neutral observer; he leads an organization with a long-standing advocacy position on immigration enforcement, and his essay is an argument built to reach a conclusion he already holds. Healey’s office has not responded to the characterization in his piece, and the governor has publicly rejected the sanctuary label on the record.
What Wilcox does offer is a checklist: a court ruling, a city ordinance, a new state law, two benefits programs, a set of cost estimates and a federal enforcement operation. Readers who accept his definition of sanctuary will find the case straightforward. Readers who think the term is contested — that a state can decline certain cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement without earning the label — will see the same evidence differently.
Either way, the gap between what Healey says and what Wilcox says the statutes do is now the central fact of the debate in Massachusetts.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/even-now-gov-healy-won-t-admit-massachusetts-is-a-sanctuary-state/