(Image by Gerd Altmann via Pixabay)

RENEE GOOD – shot three times and killed this month in Minneapolis by a masked Homeland Security agent, who then called her “a fucking bitch”.

George Retes, a US citizen and Army combat veteran, arrested by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in California and held for three days, allowed no communication with family or lawyers, and then released – without explanation, charges, or apology.

Rümeysa Öztürk – a Tufts graduate student snatched off the street in Somerville by a team of government agents because she had the temerity to write an op-ed in the university newspaper criticizing the school’s response to the Israel-Hamas war.

Incidents like these that are the result of the Trump administration’s efforts to rid the country of people it deems unworthy are profoundly alarming – but often distant – to many us who are comfortable in our status.

But every citizen of the Commonwealth is indirectly supporting and benefitting from this effort. The 2026 Massachusetts budget anticipates collecting more than $25 million from the federal government for housing ICE prisoners at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility — the only facility in the state currently contracted with ICE to detain people. 

We need to own the consequences of this budgetary — and moral – decision. The intuitive reaction is that this is blood money. We must refuse to lease beds in our correctional facilities to ICE.

Despite the visceral appeal of such a stance, we need to take a more nuanced view. Prohibiting ICE from holding prisoners in Plymouth County might actually harm the very people we are trying to protect. That said, if we are going to let ICE detain people here and take their money, at the least, we must not treat the funds like they are just another neutral source of revenue.

There’s a compelling argument that no part of the state government should make ICE’s job easier: Collaborating with immoral action is never justified. We should, under this thinking, immediately cancel the contract with ICE.

How the country addresses immigration is, admittedly, not an easy issue. We need immigrants – and have long been a place where those from other countries sought to a build a new, better life — and we also need secure borders. I know how hard striking this balance can be.

When I served under Gov. Patrick as an undersecretary of public safety and security, I was tasked with defending why the Commonwealth was participating in the Obama administration’s Secure Communities program – an effort to identify when local and state police had arrested someone without immigration documentation. 

This is not an argument about the substance of who should be able to enter the country and under what circumstances. Whatever the validity of the underlying policy goals, ICE is engaged in activities that we cannot tolerate. As a prosecutor and public safety official, I have learned that process matters: How you go about enforcing the law is at least as important as the objective. Good policing is deeply mindful of that. 

It is not acceptable for government agents to act like the secret police in a totalitarian state, detaining people without identifying themselves by name or agency. It is neither necessary nor productive to go into the streets in full military kit carrying rifles designed for combat. These actions are designed to bully and intimidate, not preserve community safety. And – notwithstanding the recent opinion of the Supreme Court – it should be plainly unconstitutional for the government to stop and question people because of their race or ethnicity.  

Cancelling the Commonwealth’s contract with ICE would make every detention more costly and logistically complicated, as the federal government would have to spend more time and money on transportation. We should consider anything that throws sand in the gears of the deportation machine. There is even some evidence that jurisdictions with fewer detention beds see less ICE activity.

I had concluded, therefore, with great rectitude, that there is no reason that we should allow ICE to hold people in Plymouth County – and that we should end our cooperation. Then I shared my opinion with a colleague who was personally affected.

She is the close friend of someone who had just been arrested. She argued that banning ICE from holding people here would be a mistake. She couldn’t visit her friend if he was brought to a detention facility in Louisiana or Florida. 

As with all policies, it is important not to make decisions from afar. We must listen to people who are actually impacted. My friend prompted me to consider whether, as long as ICE is going to snatch people off our streets, we might decide that we want our immigrant neighbors held as close to home as possible, for as long as possible.

Ending the ICE contract with the state might not mean fewer arrests in the Commonwealth. It might just mean ICE bundles even more detainees off to faraway for-profit prisons in jurisdictions with less sympathetic courts, further from counsel and family, and beyond the reach of inspection by state officials and state law.

There is no easy answer. But this much, it seems to me, is clear: If we continue contracting with ICE, we must stop quietly collecting money from this arrangement and pretending that it does not facilitate ICE’s cruelty. Instead, the Commonwealth must match its rhetoric about supporting immigrants with its budget: Every dollar ICE pays us should be dedicated to programs that counter that agency’s inhumanity.

The $25 million we expect from ICE this year could increase the state’s allocation to immigrant legal defense by 500 percent. Or it could more than double the Refugee Social Services Program. If we redirect ICE payments in this way, the Commonwealth would need to absorb the cost of housing the ICE detainees in Plymouth. But this is the only way we can allow ICE to use our facilities and still align our actions with our values.

Gov. Healey and the Legislature must take this opportunity to be a national model for how to use ICE’s own resources to mitigate the horror of its policies.

John Grossman was a Massachusetts assistant attorney general from 1995 to 2007 and an undersecretary of public safety and security between 2007 and 2011. He has worked since then in various capacities to make government programs, including policing, more effective and more equitable.