The PROTECT Act’s name is, in a literal sense, quite misleading. It’s not chiefly about “protecting” Massachusetts residents. In part, that’s because many of the people it protects aren’t lawful Massachusetts residents, and partly because one of its sections would render it easier for them to gain legal status by expanding the U-visa certification process. 

The bill currently sits in a conference committee where, with the legislative session closing this month, lawmakers are hurrying to reconcile the the House and Senate iterations. The two diverge on several important points, most notably the right to sue federal agents, which the Senate wrote in and the House explicitly wrote out. Whichever version survives, though, one thing is reasonably clear: it will backfire — including, and especially, on the politicians who wrote it.

The first problem is exceedingly well-documented: refusing to cooperate with ICE does little to stop deportations. It merely relocates them, and virtually always someplace undesirable. Naturally, the safest place to hand someone into federal custody is the jailhouse door, where the individual is already detained, identified, and contained. Roughly half of all ICE arrests nationwide happen inside jails, and when states refuse this option, they simply opt to vastly increase the amount that occurs in less savory locations. 

This is wholly lost on the Massachusetts legislature. Absent a judge’s warrant, the PROTECT Act would bar officials from telling ICE a person’s release date, time, or location, from sharing nonpublic details like a home or work address, and from timing a release or transfer so ICE can take custody at the door. In other words: It forecloses the single smoothest, least dangerous, and most controlled handoff option — and forces the precise opposite to proceed in the public square. 

So Massachusetts residents can expect the raids to be joining them in their communities: worksite sweeps, parking-lot stops, cars with windows smashed in, bystanders caught in the middle — everything that went wrong in Minnesota. ICE itself warns against exactly this, calling at-large arrests “dangerous to the public, aliens, and federal law enforcement officers.”

This, without mentioning that releasing undocumented convicts into your communities is, irrespective of enforcement dangers, not especially wise in and of itself. Massachusetts has seen several cases of illegal migrants released onto the streets under its current laws, despite ICE detainer requests, only for them to be arrested months later — in a recent case, for assault and battery on a pregnant victim.

Ironically, many of these same legislators spent the past year decrying “masked agents dragging people off the street,” and while I share their contempt for such scenes, they are now eagerly writing a law that all but guarantees much more of it.

MAURA HEALEY AND THE UNRAVELING OF AMERICA’S GREATEST SCHOOL SYSTEM

This isn’t the only courtroom drama we can expect from this bill. The provision Massachusetts is fighting hardest over, the right to sue federal agents personally in state court, for money, already had a slightly less extreme cousin, Illinois’ “Bivens Act,” hauled into court by the Justice Department. 

This puts the boldest, most ridiculous provision in the entire bill on shaky legal ground. As for the rest of the bill, it appears to mostly work against the interests of the politicians who wrote it, the citizens they claim to protect, and the migrants it purports to serve. It’s impressive, really, that they managed to fit all of it into one bill.