A Revere city councilor says the state’s right-to-shelter law is a “perfect example” of how “woke” ideologies are harmful, as he addressed the arrest of a migrant who allegedly had an AR-15 and 10 pounds of fentanyl at a local hotel.
“It was never meant for migrants,” Councilor At-Large Anthony Zambuto said of the right-to-shelter law. “It was meant for citizens, but when these good intentions go awry because we all want to be woke, and we all want to feel good and feel like we are doing the right thing, that’s where we go wrong.”
Zambuto’s comments come as the city responds to a 28-year-old Dominican illegal immigrant’s arrest in late December at the Quality Inn. The hotel has been used to house migrants and homeless families with children and pregnant women.
Leonardo Andujar Sanchez, who faces state and federal drug and gun charges, has submitted to voluntary federal detention after appearing in federal court last week.
The Revere City Council approved measures connected to the incident on Monday.
Zambuto voiced his stance, adding he’s hopeful President-elect Donald Trump retaking office will be the end of “woke” policies, minutes before the council approved a motion seeking a meeting with state housing officials and personnel from the Healey administration.
The discussion would focus on steps to “ensure situations such as the recent incident … will not happen again.”
A spokesperson for the state Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, which partially oversees the emergency assistance program, told the Herald on Tuesday that the “administration remains in communication” with the city “about shelter operations in Revere and how the state is strengthening public safety and security in the … system.”
“We look forward to our continued engagement with the city to provide additional support and address their needs and concerns,” the spokesperson added.
Sanchez lived at the Revere facility since Oct. 15 before the Dec. 27 arrest. The state housing office has said it conducts warrant checks of all residents every 30 days and all residents undergo background checks when they apply for a shelter.
However, Sanchez himself did not apply for the program but instead accompanied an unidentified person who had successfully applied to the program, Healey told reporters last week.
Revere City Councilor At-Large Michelle Kelley filed the motion demanding answers from the state before a revelation came out late last week that the Healey administration was not fully looking into the potential criminal histories of all state-run shelter residents.
Gov. Maura Healey has since ordered an independent review of security at the facilities and criminal background checks on all residents in the program. Before the development broke, Healey had demanded an inspection of all emergency shelter units last Monday.
The first-term Democratic governor had maintained for months that emergency shelter residents were fully vetted before entering the system, including in the wake of an alleged rape in Rockland.
Kelley, underscoring how “the public’s anger is justified,” slammed the system and the “unique ‘right-to-shelter’ law” for being “so fundamentally flawed. She added that the 10 pounds of fentanyl seized is an amount “capable of killing over two million people.”
Kelley said the “most shocking” development is that criminal background checks were not being conducted.
“For context,” Kelley said, “I was required to undergo a CORI check just to volunteer at our senior center – so it’s outrageous for me to learn that the Commonwealth did not see the need for such basic safeguards in shelters where children and families reside.”
“This is a lapse in judgment,” she added, “a clear failure of due diligence, and a prime example of common sense being thrown out the window.”
Healey has also signaled an openness to residency requirements for the emergency assistance program, saying that the right-to-shelter law, a decades-old statute that created the state-run shelters, should “align” with its original intent to house homeless pregnant women and families with children.
Revere Mayor Patrick Keefe said last week his city, of roughly 58,000 people, had “increased the police presence” at the Quality Inn and plans to hold the “operator of the property responsible for any and all fees or costs associated with this additional enforcement support.”
Thousands of pages of “Serious Incident” reports recently exposed incidents of child rape, domestic violence, brawls, drunkenness, drugs and more in the Massachusetts emergency housing shelter system, dating back to 2022.
The City Council also approved placing a motion on file that requests the police department to “work together with hotel management from each hotel within the city … to investigate each occupied room for suspicious and/or illegal activity.”
“This is 100% in response to the weapons and drugs that were found inside of a hotel,” Councilor Anthony Cogliandro said. “This is a public safety issue. The migrant issue is a whole different issue…”
“The amount of fentanyl that was found, if you distributed that evenly amongst the children in this city, they’d all be gone,” he added. “That’s scary to me.”