By Rich Lowry
Syndicated Columnist
The Mayor of Boston wants everyone to know that her city is all about the fundamentally American value of protecting lawbreakers.
Michelle Wu, a first-term Democrat, is a fierce defender of Boston’s sanctuary city policies that seek to frustrate federal immigration enforcement.
She sees a direct connection between King George and President Donald Trump. The British monarch imposed the Intolerable Acts of 1774, which closed Boston Harbor and restricted self-government in Massachusetts; the president of the United States sent his border czar to arrest criminal aliens.
Separated by 250 years, these two actions both supposedly raise the question: Just how much tyranny can the Cradle of Liberty tolerate?
Wu declared in her State of the City address last week: “No one tells Boston how to take care of our own. Not kings, and not presidents who think they are kings. Boston was born facing down bullies.”
It is a strange reversal of values when the government agency that wants to remove people who have broken laws is the “bully,” and the people who committed the crimes are the victims.
The Boston mayor exemplifies the perverse morality of a Left that pushed Joe Biden to create a de facto open border, and then defended his cataclysmic handiwork to the last. Now, with Trump delivering on his enforcement promises and benefiting in the polls, progressives like Wu still can’t give up their near-theological commitment to illegal immigration.
For much of the Left, illegal immigration isn’t so much about gaining additional voters in the future — although that’s a consideration — than triumphing over the artificial constraint of a border that shouldn’t separate us.
“We may not always agree or see eye to eye,” Wu said of her fellow Bostonians in her address, “but at the end of the day, we are a family. If you come for one of us, you will get all of us.”
This is a banal sentiment that plays on natural feelings; no one is against family togetherness. But there is a distinction between a law-abiding, civically engaged member of Boston’s community and someone from Honduras who crossed the southern border illegally twice, traveled to Boston because it was a cheap bus ticket, and got jailed on a drunk-driving rap.
That Wu can’t tell the difference isn’t a symptom of her generosity but of her ideologically besotted vision.
In a sweep intended to highlight the danger of sanctuary policies, ICE in Boston last week arrested 370 illegal aliens. More than 200 of the arrestees reportedly had significant criminal convictions or charges, including for homicide, rape and manslaughter. Just members of the Boston family, right, Mayor Wu?
Boston’s sanctuary law allows the police to cooperate with immigration authorities regarding offenders charged with offenses like sex and drug trafficking, but otherwise is meant to obstruct the deportation of illegal immigrants.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, during the Biden years, sanctuary jurisdictions released roughly 22,000 immigrants from jail that ICE was seeking for deportation. At the very least, this makes ICE’s job more difficult; at the worst, it results in entirely avoidable tragedies.
Last year in New York City, an illegal immigrant released into the country by the Biden administration in 2022 brutally raped a woman when the city refused to hand him over to ICE after a prior arrest. The New York Times headlined its story, “How a Migrant Accused of Rape Was Freed and Charged with Rape Again.” And yet sanctuary supporters like Wu dare to assume a posture of great righteousness.
There is a sign that some Democrats realize their error. Asked on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” if there’s anything that he likes about Trump’s second term, Senator Bernie Sanders cited the president’s work at the border and acknowledged Joe Biden should have done more. In other words, Biden’s abdication was too much even for the socialist.
It’s Wu, though, who still speaks for much of the party, in a voice that is resolutely clueless.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.
(c) 2025 by King Features Synd., Inc.