As more than 80 communities in the state are housing migrant families, Massachusetts is looking to address growing concerns about resources during a meeting with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
The UMass Lowell Inn and Conference Center is no longer housing college students. School leaders explained in a letter that the facility may instead provide shelter to migrant families.
The Town of Foxboro has also announced they will be housing 93 families in a hotel as early as next week.
Lowell City Councilor Corey Robinson said there’s a lack of information coming from the state about sending migrants to Lowell.
“We’ve been hearing rumors for the past couple of weeks of a potential influx of a few hundred families being sent to Lowell,” Robinson said.
Robinson said as Lowell struggles with its own unhoused population, he’s concerned about a lack of state assistance.
“We have hundreds of unhoused residents within our community that we’ve been struggling to help,” Robinson said. “We’ve been looking for resources and assistance in dealing with what we currently have and now to further burden these other services and resources of the city with the influx of additional people is something that really concerns me.”
Lowell is not alone. There are more than 80 Massachusetts communities housing migrants right now.
“Every day we continue to see families come to Massachusetts, and everyday we have to hustle as best as we can to find lodging and housing for them,” Gov. Maura Healey said. “It’s a very fast moving process. It’s not the way we would’ve designed this but it’s the situation we have frankly because of Congress’s failure to pass needed immigration reform.”
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas is in the state and meeting with Healey about the migrant crisis.
“This administration has called for two things – one, federal funding to assist with the migrant situation, and the expediting of work authorization,” Healey said.
As the state explores using the facility in Lowell, the university said they are relocating students to other parts of the campus.
“The decision to pre-emptively move students to new locations was made to avoid a potentially much more disruptive move mid-semester,” the school said in a statement.
Lowell City Manager Tom Golden said there has been no information on when the migrants are coming, how many or for how long.
“There’s financial concerns with the ICC going offline,” said. “This is really a work in progress.”
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