The purpose of the collaboration, according to the agreement, is to identify and process undocumented immigrants who have been incarcerated in the state’s correctional system, and could be eligible for deportation.
As the Trump administration looks to expand such programs across the country, including in New England, the agreement in Massachusetts continues to spark debate over whether it’s an appropriate law enforcement tool to aid the immigration system, or simply an accomplice in the federal government’s push to carry out mass deportations.
The divide has particular resonance in Greater Boston, where multiple communities have bylaws that explicitly restrict the ways their local police can interact with ICE.
Governor Maura Healey, a Democrat who often jousts with Trump, touted the agreement in a television interview that aired last month, citing its parameters and saying she’s happy to work with federal officials “when it comes to getting bad guys off the streets.”
“We have an agreement: When people are getting out of jail, prison here in Massachusetts, and they are here unlawfully, notice goes to ICE,” she said in a WBZ interview.
The first-term Democrat said the agreement does not signal her support of the Trump administration’s targeting of people without criminal records.
“That is not something that Donald Trump said he was gonna do,” she said. “He said he was going to get the bad guys.”
The agreement rankles many immigration advocates who say the state should refrain from assisting ICE in any way.
“It’s well past time for the Healey administration to stop subsidizing Trump’s deportation machine with Massachusetts taxpayer dollars,” said Oren Sellstrom, litigation director for Lawyers for Civil Rights Boston.
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin defended the program in a statement.
“Our 287(g) partners work with us to enforce federal immigration law without fear, favor, or prejudice, and they should be commended for doing so,” she said. “287(g) is critical to having the enforcement we need to arrest criminal illegal aliens across the country.”
Though the US Department of Justice has previously cited local law enforcement officials in other parts of the country for using the program to racially profile people it encounters, McLaughlin said that criticism is “disgusting and categorically false.”
The DOC agreement was implemented in 2007, under then-governor Deval Patrick’s administration, and was re-authorized in 2020 under then-governor Charlie Baker, according to an agency spokesperson.
Under the pact, the DOC agreed to cooperate with any relevant federal probe “to the full extent of its available powers, including providing access to appropriate databases, personnel, individuals in custody and documents.”
The pact also empowers DOC staff to alert ICE that an inmate may be wanted for deportation, and to interrogate anyone who is detained at a DOC facility and is believed to be here undocumented about their right to remain in the United States. It also allows for such DOC officers to process immigration violations of deportable or undocumented immigrants, prepare charging documents, and issue immigration detainers.
They can serve and execute arrest warrants for immigration violations and fingerprint, photograph, and interview undocumented immigrants, as well as prepare affidavits and take sworn statements.
Under the agreement, Massachusetts officials turned over 164 people who were in DOC custody to ICE in 2023 and 2024, the vast majority of whom — more than 95 percent, state officials said — had been convicted of “serious” drug crimes or violent crimes.
A DOC spokesperson said this week he did not have data covering 2025.
But the Trump administration has issued press releases highlighting instances in which state officials have filed detainers for immigrants under such agreements.
In June, for example, ICE officials said a DOC official at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley “encountered” a Guatemalan citizen who had been convicted of multiple counts of child rape and sentenced to up to 18 years in prison. The unnamed official “placed an immigration detainer and warrant on the subject.”
The incarcerated person, whom ICE did not identify in the report, entered the US “without inspection” and has a final order of removal, according to federal officials.
ICE officials included similar instances in reports from Massachusetts prisons in April, March, and February, too. The reports, however, are relatively brief, usually spanning three to four pages, and are intended to provide only a “sampling” of cases, effectively serving to tout the program’s success in identifying those charged or convicted of serious crimes.
Massachusetts has what appears to be the longest-standing 287(g) agreement in New England and one of the longest in the country. In total, there are 14 agreements with law enforcement agencies in New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts — 13 of which have been signed since February.
The number of so-called 287(g) agreements has exploded since Trump began his second term, many of which involve county or municipal agencies. Agreements with state prisons, however, remain relatively rare: Massachusetts is one of only 12 state departments of corrections that has one, and is one of only two states — Arizona being the other — that’s currently led by a Democratic governor.
DOC is not compensated by the federal government for its involvement, and all DOC staff “are responsible for ensuring this policy is followed,” according to a DOC spokesperson.
Some Massachusetts law enforcement offices have dropped 287(g) agreements in recent years, including sheriff’s offices in Barnstable and Plymouth counties, though the Plymouth County sheriff’s office has a different kind of agreement to be the lone remaining ICE detention facility in Massachusetts. The Biden administration ended its agreement with Bristol County in 2021. There are no 287(g) agreements in Rhode Island, Connecticut, or Vermont, according to available online federal records.
Heather Yountz, senior immigration staff attorney for the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, is another of the 287(g) critics. She recently said that all such agreements “are inherently harmful because they lead to racial profiling, they allow local officers to harass Latino and Black populations, they create civil rights violations, and they force immigrants to withdraw further from their communities.”
More concerning than the DOC’s program, she said, is that there is nothing preventing sheriffs in the state from signing new pacts with ICE.
“The Healey administration and the Legislature should focus on preventing future 287(g) agreements,” she said.
Additionally, local police are provided with a “truncated training on an extraordinarily difficult field of law, one that some lawyers struggle to grasp quickly,” said Yountz.
“Instead of further entangling our state and local government with the Trump administration, we need to stop doing ICE’s job for them,” she said. “This is particularly true in a time where ICE officers are repeatedly violating the civil and human rights of immigrants in order to make their daily arrest numbers.”
Jennifer C. Bade, a Brookline-based immigration attorney, called the existence of the DOC program “more than disappointing.”
“I honestly feel that it is a betrayal of the values this state claims to stand for,” she said.
She stressed that 287(g) is a voluntary agreement: “The DOC is not required to act as ICE’s deputy.”
She called on Healey to nix the agreement.
“All this does is actively help support Trump’s agenda of ridding the US of immigrants of color and poor immigrants,” she said. “This is not where I want my tax dollars going.”
ICE officials have said the program could speed up deportations and negate policies that curtail local collaboration with federal immigration authorities.
Boston, for instance, has a Trust Act, a local law that bans Boston police from keeping immigrants in custody for possible deportation by federal officials unless a criminal warrant has been issued for the person’s arrest. City councilors reaffirmed that city mandate in recent months. Other local municipalities have similar ordinances.
