Last July, a Tewksbury detective sergeant phoned a federal immigration agent at midnight with a timely tip.
“We had an arrest of a guy for trafficking fentanyl,” the detective said on the call.
Hours earlier, his police department had busted a Dominican man for allegedly selling $840 worth of the deadly opioid to undercover cops. In the call, the detective explained he had run the man’s name through a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement database.
The agent asked which court, and the detective told him Lowell District. Later, the agent said, “Should be good. Thank you very much. I appreciate the call.”
WBUR obtained a recording of the call from the Tewksbury Police Department in response to a public records request. The man was eventually deported to the Dominican Republic, according to Lowell court records, and was unable to fight the criminal charges he faced.
The case is just one instance of the kind of law enforcement cooperation that happens in Massachusetts more often than the Trump administration claims — local police arrest someone, then volunteer their whereabouts to federal immigration agents.
Despite the portrayal of Massachusetts as a “sanctuary state,” local police in some places cooperate with ICE routinely. This cooperation varies town by town, largely at the discretion of each department. That includes whether to volunteer information to ICE, and whether to hand people over to ICE as they’re released from custody.
Tewksbury’s police chief ignored multiple requests for comment about his department’s policy on communications with ICE. The department bans “bias-based policing” on the basis of immigration status, though Tewksbury does not appear to have written guidelines about partnering with ICE.
A patchwork of policies
Massachusetts is home to more than 320 local police departments, plus 14 sheriffs’ offices and the state police. While a handful of large cities, like Boston, limit police collaboration with ICE to criminal matters, others have no policies on their interactions.
In Quincy, cooperation with ICE is allowed when “public safety or national security” are at stake.
“My job as the police chief in the city of Quincy is to keep our community safe,” said Quincy Chief Mark Kennedy. He knows federal immigration enforcement from the inside. Kennedy started his career as an Immigration and Naturalization Service agent at Logan Airport, before joining the Quincy police and rising through the ranks.
Quincy’s policy went into effect in February 2025. Kennedy said the impetus for it came during the state’s shelter crisis, when a neo-Nazi group protested the housing of migrants at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy.
Kennedy said there are some good reasons to work with ICE, including when those his officers arrest are involved in violent crimes, drug dealing and illegal firearms.
“If we find out that they are in this country illegally, we are cooperating with ICE to get these people out of our community,” he said.
Kennedy said Quincy partners widely with federal law enforcement, including on task forces that pair agents with local cops. Quincy detectives are assigned to work with the Drug Enforcement Agency, the U.S. Marshals Service, as well as Homeland Security Investigations, the branch of ICE that deals with cross-border crime. The exception, he said: Quincy officers don’t help ICE arrest people over civil immigration violations, like overstaying a visa.
Kennedy said when Trump returned to office last year, the federal task forces were getting pulled in to do immigration enforcement, but they didn’t try to involve Quincy officers.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
As for volunteering information to ICE, Kennedy said Quincy doesn’t do that when people are arrested for minor crimes like shoplifting.
“We find out that they’re not documented, we are not taking the affirmative step of calling … the DHS removal operations center to say: ‘Hey, we have this person if you want to come and get them.’ We don’t do that.”
But Quincy’s policy also stipulates that any “foreign-born person arrested” is subject to a “Immigration Alien Query.” That refers to an ICE-controlled database that can indicate the person’s legal status and whether they’re wanted by ICE.
That part of Quincy’s ICE policy drew the attention of criminal justice researcher Josh Dankoff. He’s been gathering information from the largest police departments in Massachusetts on how they deal with ICE. Dankoff, who works for the group Citizens for Juvenile Justice, began his inquiry when ICE arrested three teenagers after they were released by Chelsea police.
“We’re seeing police departments that have policies that are all over the place,” Dankoff said. In his view, “all it takes is one officer” deciding it’s in the interest of public safety for them to collaborate with ICE.
Of the 42 local police departments he’s approached, Dankoff said 23 provided immigration-specific policies. Fifteen said they do not have policies, and four did not respond. Beyond internal police rules, he said, several municipalities have ordinances that govern police cooperation with ICE.
Dankoff argues that individual police officers should not have the power to determine who ends up in ICE custody, even in cases involving serious crimes. Instead, he said, police in Massachusetts should have to abide by uniform rules.
“There is not adequate guidance and guardrails right now from our state Legislature, or from the attorney general’s office, or from the Peace Officer Standards and Training Commission, around what police agencies can do, in terms of talking with and sending information to — and collaborating and colluding with – ICE,” he said.
But some counter that local police need the discretion to determine when to work with ICE. Among them is Dennis Galvin, president of the Massachusetts Association for Professional Law Enforcement, a group working to advance policing standards.
“Police chiefs need to be given latitude as to how they operate so that they can balance the interests of their local community with the federal law,” said Galvin, a Republican who served in the Massachusetts State Police for nearly three decades.
In Washington D.C. this week, top DHS officials were called to testify about immigration enforcement before the House Committee on Homeland Security.
Republican members took aim at so-called “sanctuary jurisdictions” where police don’t act on civil ICE detainers — those are voluntary requests from ICE to hold people for up to 48 hours after they’d otherwise be released.
Todd Lyons, the acting head of ICE who formerly ran the agency’s Boston office, was among those on Capitol Hill. He seemed to acknowledge some local laws prevent police from honoring those detainers, including a Massachusetts high court ruling cited widely in communities with policies on immigration enforcement. But he still pressed for more coordination between federal agents and local police.
“ICE respects and abides by state and municipality laws,” Lyons said at the hearing, “where sometimes you can’t hold [a detainee] for any reasons. But a simple phone call to let us know that that individual’s going to be released — or if that individual is released — sharing that biographical data with us will go a long way.”
Lyons and others in the Trump administration have argued that ICE actions would cause less community chaos if they got more help from local law enforcement. Tom Homan claims increased cooperation in Minneapolis after two U.S. citizens were killed by federal agents led the government to draw down ICE forces there.
Here in Massachusetts, ICE agents often get more help than they admit, even as state and local leaders look for ways to rein them in.
Database dealings
Some contact between police and ICE is automatic. When police run fingerprints through a federal crime database, that information is available to ICE agents, who can then move to arrest someone as they leave police custody.
That’s allegedly what happened in November in Lynn. A 23-year-old Guatemalan man was released from a city police lockup after a traffic stop, when ICE agents walked into the lobby.
“Two men walked in, young guys, and said, ‘We’re immigration,’ ” recalled the man, who WBUR agreed to call by his first initial, S., because he fears retaliation by federal agents.
According to ICE records reviewed by WBUR, agents had “received communication from an officer at Lynn Police Department that [S.] had posted bail and would be released from custody.”
Fifteen minutes later, S. was in belly chains and on his way to the ICE lockup in Plymouth, the records show. He was there for 15 days before being released pending immigration proceedings.
“A lot of people are saying they’ve had the same thing happen to them as happened to me,” S. said in Spanish. “I’m not the only one. So we want to make sure that doesn’t happen, and that we don’t distrust the police.”
Lynn police said the department called ICE — but not to facilitate an arrest.
In a statement, Lynn police said after officers ran fingerprints on S., ICE called to say they intended to pick him up. As the release paperwork was being finalized, the commanding officer on duty notified ICE that S. was going to be released “in order to prevent an unnecessary ICE response.”
But it was too late.
“Do we fundamentally trust what ICE, the Border Patrol, the federal government are doing with information about each of us in the community?”John Grossman
An attorney for S. told WBUR he has a legal status that was recognized by the Biden administration — Special Immigrant Juvenile Status — but ICE is now targeting people with that status.
The ICE arrest outraged immigration advocates and some community members in Lynn, which has one of the highest concentrations of immigrants in the state. In the statement, Lynn police said its top brass and Mayor Jared Nicholson met with S. and other residents “to hear their concerns and provide a full and transparent account of what occurred.”
The Lynn Police Department said it has issued “updated directives prohibiting any proactive communication with ICE, or any federal agency, regarding civil immigration enforcement,” according to the statement. Police did not provide WBUR with any written policy.
Massachusetts police have long utilized federal crime databases that make local arrest details available to federal agencies. But as the Trump administration looks to carry its mass deportation campaign, the practice is facing renewed scrutiny.
“Do we fundamentally trust what ICE, the Border Patrol, the federal government are doing with information about each of us in the community?” said John Grossman, who oversaw the state system for accessing federal crime databases under Gov. Deval Patrick.
Grossman said police need to be able to check databases in case a person is wanted for a federal crime or in another other state — but Massachusetts can’t control what the federal government does with local data.
And he said that’s coming at a cost to local communities: “What’s the level of trust between local police and primarily immigrant communities if local police are — even if not explicitly, but inevitably — seen as cooperating with ICE?”
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Freelance journalist Jon Gerhardson first obtained copies of correspondences between ICE and Tewksbury police.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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