State House

Gov. Maura Healey insists the feds speed up migrant work authorization approvals, as she says employment will get them out of shelters sooner.

In a Thursday letter to U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Healey asked for a handful of regulatory changes that she said would help migrants quickly and immediately apply for work authorizations. The governor also urged the Biden administration to digitize immigration processes.

“Thousands of families are living in emergency shelter in our state, with a significant rate of increase in the past several months,” Healey wrote in the letter. “Many of these new arrivals are drawn to Massachusetts for a safe haven, but arrive with neither the means nor personal connections to secure shelter and access to fundamental human necessities.”

Healey said there is “historic demand” in Massachusetts for workers across all industries amid low unemployment. Tens of thousands of job openings could be filled by new arrivals, she said.

“Every work authorization issued represents an opportunity to meet employer needs, support our economy, and reduce dependency among new arrivals,” Healey wrote.

Healey declared a state of emergency in Massachusetts last month, a move that was paired with a call to the federal government for expedited work authorizations and additional funding to deal with an overburdened shelter system.

In the weeks since, the emergency shelter crisis has shown no sign of letting up, with the Healey administration projecting as many as 1,000 families could enter the system each month.

The governor met with Mayorkas weeks after the emergency declaration during a private huddle at the State House, during which, she has said, she had a “productive conversation” to “support Massachusetts’ needs to address the rapidly rising number of migrant families arriving in Massachusetts.”

Healey said the letter was a “direct follow-up from our most recent discussion.”

Two direct regulatory changes would immediately support more new arrivals working, Healey wrote.

Those are allowing migrants to work once they’re granted immigration status by the feds and that they can use their application as a provisional employment authorization document.

“These fundamental changes in rules,” she wrote, “… could be pivotal for those arrivals’ chances of beginning to earn income.”

She also suggested logistical and technical improvements for arrival and employment authorization processing including increased digital communication between U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and improving access to online forms with direct language translations.

“Massachusetts has stepped up to address what sadly has been a federal crisis of inaction that is many years in the making,” Healey wrote. “We appreciate your direct engagement, but even with the exhaustive efforts of your team within the bounds of what is allowable by law, we will still be in desperate need of expanded federal partnership, federal funding, and urgent federal action.”

The Healey administration considered suspending the state’s decades old right-to-shelter law in the run up to an emergency declaration last month, but opted against it after taking into consideration the complicated legal concerns associated with such a move.

Officials at the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities reached out to multiple providers to inform them of the plan to suspend the law, which requires the state to provide housing and services to homeless families, in the days before the emergency declaration.

But the idea was ultimately scrapped after the administration realized it did not have the authority to suspend a 1983 law signed by then-Gov. Michael Dukakis.

“We had heard before the announcement from state officials themselves that they were looking to suspend the right to shelter,” said Kelly Turley, associate director at the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, adding the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, not the governor’s office, made calls to advocates. “Many of us heard from them in the days before the announcement was made that that was their intention.”

At a press conference announcing the state of emergency in early August, Healey said she did not consider suspending the state’s right to shelter law.

“No, I was never going to end nor did I have the authority to end the right to shelter in the state,” she said when asked if there was ever consideration to temporarily lifting the law.

In a statement Thursday, Healey spokeswoman Karissa Hand said the administration had “many conversations about various potential strategies to confront this emergency.”

“Right to shelter is the law and we remain committed to ensuring eligible families have a safe place to stay,” Hand said.

A month into a state of emergency in Massachusetts, Healey has taken few sweeping public actions to respond to an overburdened emergency shelter system brimming with displaced families and newly arrived migrants.

That has drawn criticism from Republicans, who say the administration’s response is lacking to an emergency shelter crisis where hotels and motels housing people often pop up in communities across the state without much warning to locals.

But housing and migrant advocates say the true impact of the emergency status is felt on the ground and in the sped up bureaucratic processes that often hold up contracts or other decisions on Beacon Hill.

In one instance, the International Institute of New England, a regional resettlement organization, said it submitted a $450,000, one-year contract at the end of last week to provide legal assistance with employer authorization documents to people staying in one the roughly 40 emergency shelters that do not have contracted service providers.

State officials and the organization are scheduled to meet again on Monday, said Jeff Thielman, president and CEO of the institute. Both sides are ready to ink an agreement, an example of the emergency “putting everyone in state government, I think, on alert to respond to this crisis,” he said.

“I would say that this is a pretty expedited contract process. So they’re moving the contract process through more quickly than they normally do. Though, I haven’t seen it yet,” he told the Herald by phone. “We keep having discussions about it. So they’re trying to move it through as quickly as possible. So it feels like they’re moving as fast as possible on contracting, reviewing.”

Healey has touted several moves over the past month, including activating up to 250 members of the National Guard last week to help more than 40 emergency shelters that do not have contracted service providers.

The governor also held a private meeting with U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas at the State House last month. Healey also publicized last month $1.9 million in federal funding to expand shelter and transportation services for migrants, though it was the City of Boston that applied for those dollars earlier this summer with the state as a sub-applicant.

“I declared an emergency. I’ve received $2 million dollars from the federal government. We’ve housed another 600 families successfully,” Healey said Thursday. “I met most recently with Secretary Mayorkas and the Biden administration Department of Homeland Security to press for expedited work authorizations.”

Since the start of the emergency, at least 721 families have entered the state’s shelter system, according to data from the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities.

More than 6,271 families were in state shelters as of Thursday, according to the state. Officials estimate that more than a third of families in the emergency shelter system are migrants.

Still, some say Healey has not done enough to deal with what they describe as an immigration crisis in Massachusetts.

The Healey administration’s response has been “inadequate,” said state Rep. Peter Durant, a Spencer Republican who is running for a state Senate seat vacated earlier this year.

Communities are getting hit hard with an influx of newly arrived migrants and displaced families “with little or no warning,” he said. And Massachusetts is appealing for people fleeing unstable home countries because of “all of the benefits that are available to them,” he said.

“It’s a pretty good deal to come to Massachusetts,” he told the Herald.

Nobody likes living in a hotel, Thielman said as he rejected the idea that people are coming to Massachusetts because of its right-to-shelter law.

“The shelter law doesn’t attract anybody to Massachusetts. It’s just not a true statement. So I don’t think repealing the law is the solution. I think the solution is that we need to have a better federal immigration system,” Thielman said. “That’s a big part of the problem. People should come here with work authorizations if they’re paroled into the country and they meet certain criteria.”