When Boston Mayor Michelle Wu defends the city’s sanctuary status before a Republican-controlled Congressional committee next month, she’ll do so with the public support of one of her most vocal critics on the City Council.
The office of Councilor Julia Mejia, a native of the Dominican Republic who was raised in the U.S. by a single, undocumented mother, sent an email to her Council colleagues earlier this month to invite them to rally with her outside City Hall “to show our support for Mayor Michelle Wu” while Wu testifies in Washington, D.C.
“On behalf of City Councilor at-Large Julia Mejia, we invite you to join us in solidarity on Wednesday, March 5 at 11 a.m. on the City Hall Plaza to show our support for Mayor Michelle Wu, who will be testifying before Congress on Boston’s status as a sanctuary city on this day,” Mejia staffer Julisa Curet Rodriguez wrote in a Feb. 14 email to councilors obtained by the Herald.
“Please save the date as we stand in solidarity with our mayor and the immigrant community,” Curet Rodriguez added.
Mejia joined in on the City Council vote last December to reaffirm the Boston Trust Act, a 2014 local law that prohibits city police and other departments from cooperating with federal authorities on civil immigration detainers.
Wu was one of four mayors ordered to testify before a Republican-controlled Congressional committee on sanctuary city policies and their impact on public safety. She will be in Washington D.C. for the March 5 hearing.
The other mayors set to testify are from Chicago, New York City and Denver.
Mayor Wu, who has struck a defiant tone against President Donald Trump’s efforts to carry out mass deportations, including his latest move to end protections for Haitian migrants, is challenging another one of his administration’s decisions.
Wu co-led a coalition of mayors last Wednesday in writing and filing an amicus brief in federal district court in Boston “to stop the Trump administration’s drastic and illegal cuts to federal research funding and immediate job losses in cities nationwide,” as her office put it in a Thursday news release.
More than 40 mayors, cities and counties from across the country joined the brief, Wu’s office said, while describing the participating cities as “homes to universities and hospitals that employ hundreds of thousands of Americans in cutting-edge medical and scientific research.”
“For decades, Congress has made a clear choice to use federally-funded research to invest in cities, build a broadly-distributed infrastructure for scientific discovery, create jobs, and drive economic growth in communities across the United States,” Wu said in a statement.
“We join with cities across the country — in red states, purple states and blue states — to stop this illegal action that will cause layoffs, lab closures and undermine scientific progress in American cities,” the mayor added.
The amicus brief was filed in response to the National Institutes of Health’s Feb. 7 announcement that medical research funding would be immediately cut.
The new policy temporarily went into effect Feb. 10. On that same day, 22 states and organizations representing universities, hospitals and research institutions filed separate lawsuits to stop the cuts.
A federal judge again blocked the cuts this past Friday, following a court hearing that was held in Boston.
A briefing from a Wu administration official on Boston’s long-standing plan to rebuild the Long Island bridge out to a future addiction recovery campus drew skepticism from a working group dedicated to combating the city’s opioid crisis.
After hearing an update on the project — which gained MassDEP approval for a key permit last month but saw that ruling immediately appealed by Quincy’s mayor — Steve Fox, a member of the South End, Roxbury, Newmarket working group on addiction, recovery and homelessness, said the plan was years away from reality.
“We’re talking about a bridge reconstruction that’s probably going to cost $250 million,” Fox said at the group’s meeting last week. “It is probably just short of a billion dollars in terms of getting the facility up and running and moving in a direction that we envision it to be — to be the kind of campus we want.
“And nobody knows how long it’s going to take for Quincy’s options to get exhausted,” Fox added. “But in any event, counting that and the reconstruction, we’re talking somewhere in the neighborhood of seven to 10 years before we could ever see … Long Island functioning as a recovery center.”
Quincy’s mayor Thomas Koch has vowed that his city would do “everything in its power to keep the city of Boston from building that bridge.” He has appealed every permit approval, saying the plan would exacerbate traffic and safety issues.
The bridge update was provided during a meeting that focused heavily on residents’ concerns about spiking violence and drug use at and around Mass and Cass, the longtime epicenter of the city’s opioid crisis.
Residents, business leaders and elected officials who make up the group made another pitch for their “Recover Boston” concept, an interim recovery campus they say would serve as a stop-gap measure for the problem until the city can rebuild the bridge out to a permanent campus.
The City Council recently approved a resolution in support of the concept, but there hasn’t been much movement on it otherwise.
Chris Osgood, the city’s director of climate resilience, indicated at the meeting that the city’s focus was on the long-term bridge plan. He said work to stabilize buildings on the island will wrap up this summer, but the actual timeline and cost of the plan remains unclear.
Osgood said, “Certainly the promise of one place which is owned by the city that is a significant public health campus to serve a critical need for this city and for this region for generations is why we continue to pursue this.”
