Interior states like Massachusetts not receiving enough federal funds to support migrants, delegation says

Massachusetts did not receive an equitable share of federal funds designed to help states pay for shelters, leaving the Bay State to “expend increasingly large sums of money” to support an influx of migrants and local homeless families seeking help, the state’s congressional delegation wrote in a Wednesday letter.

About four months after Gov. Maura Healey declared a state of emergency in response to the number of migrants arriving seeking shelter, the emergency shelter system is still maxed out at 7,500 families.

Massachusetts finds itself in a “particularly precarious position,” federal lawmakers wrote in a note to U.S Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell.

“The United States has been experiencing a virtually unprecedented number of new arrivals, with an increasing trend of migrant families ending up in interior states like Massachusetts. This shift in migration patterns has given interior states a larger role in the immigration process,” the letter, signed by the entire Massachusetts federal delegation, said

Healey signed into law this week a budget bill that directs $250 million to support the state’s response to an influx of migrants and the emergency shelter system. That is on top of $325 million allocated to emergency shelters in the state’s fiscal year 2024 budget.

FEMA handed the state and City of Boston $1.9 million earlier this year to expand shelter and transportation services. But the federal delegation said that is not enough, and interior states dealing with immigration issues should receive an “equitable distribution.”

“States like Massachusetts, New York, and Illinois have encountered significantly higher rates of migrant arrivals over a short period of time, placing a heavy burden on states’ systems that were not designed to process such high numbers of arrivals,” the lawmakers wrote.