Civil liberties advocates are putting pressure on the Boston City Council to reject a sizable federal anti-terrorism grant, saying that the police surveillance work it helps to fund could be used by the feds to target the immigrant community.

Advocates on Thursday pointed to this week’s arrest of a Tufts University graduate student with pro-Palestinian views that was made by Department of Homeland Security agents and last week’s ICE Boston sweep that led to 370 arrests, some of which were collateral, as proof that the grant may be used for similar activities.

“It is very clear that the agenda right now is that the entirety of DHS is going to focus on deporting and detaining immigrants,” Fatema Ahmad, executive director of the Muslim Justice League, said. “Other grants are getting cut. Those that are remaining are going to be shifted to focus on that.

“So it is really, really dangerous for us to think that’s not going to happen with this grant that we already know is tied to information sharing with federal law enforcement … I think that applying for this in this moment is just incredibly dangerous. We’re already seeing that our city, Boston, is being targeted.”

The grant being discussed at the day’s hearing of the Council’s Public Safety and Criminal Justice Committee was the city’s annual counter-terrorism grant issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Last year, the Council received and approved a roughly $12 million grant with relatively little fuss, but the year before proved to be a battle with the Council voting to block a $13 million grant twice.

After being publicly slammed by a couple of councilors, a congressman, and a state senator who moved to take away the Council’s public-safety grant approval authority based on the blocked vote, the body eventually approved the grant months later, in early 2024.

Committee Chair Henry Santana said he chose to hold early hearings on the grant, which is typically voted on in December, to address “unanswered questions” from the community and city councilors, most of whom didn’t show up on Thursday.

The “Urban Area Security Initiative Grant,” administered by the city’s Office of Emergency Management, is the annual funding source for the Metro Boston Homeland Security Region, which includes nine cities and towns: Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Quincy, Revere, Somerville, and Winthrop.

Boston, as the lead city, is tasked with acting as the approval authority for the grant. Advocates say the Council should consider rejecting it this year, given that the Hub is one of the sanctuary cities federal immigration authorities have focused on.

Such a move would seemingly be unprecedented, according to Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Program at ACLU Massachusetts, who said she couldn’t think of another city that opted not to accept a federal UASI grant.

Crockford and other advocates centered many of their concerns around the portion of the anti-terror grant that is allocated to the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, the intelligence arm of the Boston Police Department, and the information they say the BRIC shares with Homeland Security.

“The ACLU has never taken the position and will not take the position that the Boston Police Department should not collaborate with the FBI on serious criminal investigations,” Crockford said.

“What concerns us deeply … is that the Boston Police Department may inadvertently share information with federal agencies who have been ordered by the most powerful person in this country to stop work on these serious criminal investigations to turn their attention to the grandmas and aunties and uncles who are law abiding immigrants in this country for deportation.”

Crockford said that as the Council prepares to take up the grant later this year, it should look at what BPD has done to change its policies and procedures, “given this new reality” and “new federal landscape.”

“This is not the FBI under the Biden administration,” Crockford said. “These people … do not have a respect for the rule of law. This is a totally different beast that we’re dealing with here, and in my view, the city ought to act accordingly.”

Ryan Walsh, director of the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, said the BRIC received roughly $2 million from last year’s anti-terror grant, and that there’s “no direct query ability” between federal law enforcement and the BRIC as it relates to its intelligence data sharing.

“We take very seriously the need to confirm with them that there’s a full criminal investigation before we would share anything with them from the gang database or any BRIC information system or BPD information system,” Walsh said.

Boston is a sanctuary city under the Boston Trust Act, which bars city police and other departments from cooperating with federal authorities on civil immigration matters.

“We stringently adhere to the Trust Act,” Walsh said. “The commissioner has made it a priority for us to be concerned about fear of crime in the city and fear among our residents. We’re understanding that this is a particularly fearful time, unfortunately, and so we’re very sensitive to that.”

A Wu administration official who took part in the hearing said the city hasn’t been notified about whether it would receive the DHS grant this year, or if funds would be lower than in past years.

Councilor Ed Flynn, who bashed his colleagues two years ago for blocking a $13 million anti-terror grant, said that it would become a “national story” if Boston were to not accept the federal funds this year.

“Does that make Boston an even bigger target from the federal government, for the federal government to say, well, they’re not going to do any of the critical public safety support that’s needed,” Flynn said, “and maybe there’s a bigger role for the federal government to play in Boston, because they don’t even want to accept our money to do the basic public safety function.”

_________

©2025 MediaNews Group, Inc. Visit at bostonherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.