President Donald Trump has established a pattern in his second term of targeting states for enforcement crackdowns and withholding federal funds, often focusing on those where he received little electoral support.
Massachusetts, where Trump received only 36% of the vote in his successful 2024 race against former Vice President Kamala Harris, features prominently among them.
Last month, the Trump administration again denied disaster relief for communities recovering from a devastating February 2026 blizzard, which caused $45 million in damages and business disruptions prompting Mass. Gov. Maura Healey to respond: “I’m outraged.”
The Republican White House attention on the Bay State has extended beyond disaster aid and immigration enforcement.
It has also targeted cuts to state business and development, as well as the administration’s high-profile battle with Harvard University.
The consequences have been felt in classrooms, colleges, city halls, workplaces and major infrastructure projects, affecting everyone from immigrant families and students to municipal leaders, researchers and manufacturing workers.
“Massachusetts has greatly benefited from the President’s America First agenda,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, told MassLive. Trump’s agenda focuses on strengthening border security, boosting domestic energy production and enacting sweeping government and economic reforms, according to the administration’s website.
“President Trump is a president for every American, including the people of Massachusetts,” Rogers said.
“The White House is trying to rewrite history,” a spokesperson for Gov. Healey’s office told MassLive. “He’s done nothing but make life harder, more expensive and less safe for the people he was elected to serve.”
Trump’s denial of disaster aid comes amid Massachusetts’ longstanding history of paying more in taxes to the federal government than it receives in federal aid. A recent analysis in Rockefeller Institute of Government found that Massachusetts spends more money per capita to the federal government than it receives than any other state.
Below are the seven most significant ways the Trump administration has singled out Massachusetts during Trump’s second term.
ICE enforcement ‘bringing Hell’ to Boston
Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Trump’s Border Czar, Tom Homan, said in February 2025 that he was “coming to Boston and I’m bringing hell with me.”
Following his remarks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials said in April 2025 the agency was planning a “surge” in Mass.
In May 2025, officials claimed they had arrested more than 1,400 individuals in Massachusetts through ICE’s “Operation Patriot.”
In September 2025, the agency said an additional 1,400 arrests took place, which they called “Operation Patriot 2.0.”
According to the Deportation Data Project, maintained by the University of California through public records requests and litigation, ICE arrests with detentions in Massachusetts jumped past other states during those months.
They exceeded all but Texas and Florida in May — even passing California — and reached the fourth-highest in September.
Homan said these targeted operations aimed to arrest “the worst of the worst.” But an analysis of arrest records showed that nearly half of those arrested had no criminal record.
Among those cases of those without criminal records were:
-
Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish national studying for her doctorate at Tufts University, who was arrested in March 2025.
-
Marcelo Gomes Da Silva, a Milford teenager arrested in May 2025 on his way to a high school volleyball practice.
-
Juan Francisco Méndez, who was arrested without a criminal record in April 2025 after agents smashed his car window with a hammer.
Massachusetts was a rare state singled out by two operations, though similar one-month spikes appeared in Illinois and Minnesota in Oct. 2025 and Jan. 2026, respectively.
In January, protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by ICE agents during the enforcement surge in Minnesota.
In Massachusetts, the surges have had severe consequences, with thousands of students afraid to go to school, advocates said.
There were around 7,000 fewer English learners in Massachusetts K-12 schools in 2025 than the year before, according to data MassLive obtained in February from the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Teachers said many families are pulling their children out of school entirely, homeschooling or leaving the country. Declining attendance or enrollment leads to schools losing per-pupil funding, districts facing layoffs, and teachers struggling to help students catch up.
Rogers, the White House spokesperson, wrote that as a result of the Trump administration “enforcing law and order and federal immigration laws, fatal shootings in Boston fell to the lowest on record.”
Fatal shootings in Boston have been on a downward trend since a high of 46 in 2018, according to Boston police data. As of Monday, 16 fatal shootings have taken place in the city in 2026. Nineteen fatal shootings took place in 2025, which was the same number that took place in 2024 when Joe Biden was president, the data showed.
Gov. Healey’s office noted that these reductions preceded Trump taking office in 2025, with the year 2024 having the lowest number of homicides in Boston in 67 years.
Making an ‘example’ out of Harvard University
Trump has spent most of his second term in a near-constant battle with Harvard University.
Shortly after taking office in January 2025, Trump froze nearly $3 billion in research funding, ended federal contracts and attempted to block Harvard from hosting international students.
In March 2026, the U.S. Justice Department filed a federal lawsuit in Massachusetts, accusing Harvard University of failing to address campus antisemitism in violation of Title VI.
The filing before U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns marked an escalation after the high-stakes conflict in 2025.
U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs, a federal judge in Massachusetts, ruled against the administration in September 2025, reversing the initial funding cuts and calling the administration’s antisemitism rationale a “smokescreen.”
The administration’s new lawsuit under Stearns was likewise dismissed in August, after the court ruled the government had not adequately proved the university violated the law. The Trump administration has appealed the ruling.
A former Trump administration attorney accused the president of targeting Harvard and other select institutions before finding that the university had broken any laws.
The whistleblower, Haley Van Erem, further claimed that the White House took punitive steps against Harvard before completing its investigations.
Gov. Healey noted that the state was likely to suffer as a result of the attack on Harvard.
Harvard is the state’s fourth–largest employer, and its international students contribute $400 million to the local economy every year, Healey said.
International students slated to attend Harvard were forced to reconsider coming to Massachusetts.
A White House spokesperson said President Trump signed the Working Families Tax Cuts, which the administration claimed protected 139,000 Massachusetts jobs and preserved $13 billion in wages for the state’s workers.
Additionally, “Historic investment has flooded the state thanks to the President’s pro-growth economic policies,” the spokesperson wrote.
Gov. Healey’s office claimed there is no “substantive evidence” that the jobs or wages were actually protected as a result of the law, and further said that at least $5.9 billion in federal funding for Massachusetts was cut, canceled or otherwise disrupted since President Trump took office.
Funding threats to two sanctuary cities
Somerville and Chelsea, which list themselves as “sanctuary cities,” sued the federal government in February 2025 after the Trump administration threatened to cut funding over their lack of cooperation with immigration enforcement.
The cities said the proposed cuts would be detrimental to their budgets for police and basic city services.
Somerville and Chelsea, as well as Boston, have argued that their policies improve public safety because they make residents feel more comfortable approaching local police and assisting investigations without fear of being targeted for their immigration status.
The complaint from Somerville and Chelsea, filed in U.S. District Court in Boston, states that the Trump administration’s “illegal campaign of bullying and intimidation” aims to force local jurisdictions to sacrifice local public safety resources, their values and their determinations about what is best for their residents.
This pressure campaign is described as “particularly harmful for smaller cities” that would be “grievously harmed” by any loss of federal dollars.
Massachusetts was among 14 states and the District of Columbia singled out for a federal funding review in the opening days of Trump’s second term over their sanctuary policies. Every one had backed Trump’s Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, in the 2024 presidential election.
Federal grants can fund road repairs, police equipment and training, and other vital city functions.
Trying to halt nearly complete wind projects
In what some leaders characterized as an attack on both Massachusetts jobs and state infrastructure, the Trump administration said in December 2025 that it was pausing federal leases for Vineyard Wind and other wind projects, claiming they were a national security risk.
Vineyard Wind, along with developers behind four other East Coast offshore wind projects, including Revolution Wind, Sunrise Wind, Empire Wind and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, challenged federal stop-work orders in court and won rulings that allowed the developers to resume construction.
In January, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston halted the administration’s stop-work order. Murphy cited potential economic losses from the delays and the developers’ likelihood of success on their claims.
Vineyard Wind said in a court filing that the project was “95% complete” when the construction freeze occurred and that it was costing the company $2 million a day in direct and indirect costs.
Despite the federal halt, Vineyard Wind 1 ultimately completed installation of its final blade in the spring and 60 out of 62 turbines are currently operational, feeding power to the grid.
However, the Trump administration also canceled funding for addition wind projects, including a wind staging terminal in Salem, and failed to permit the next major Massachusetts wind project: SouthCoast Wind. Gov. Healey sought $70 million from the state Legislature to keep the Salem project moving.
The wind construction workforce has been disrupted by this dynamic, according to Frank Callahan, president of the Massachusetts Building Trades Unions.
“Some people are just not working right now that have those skills,” Callahan told MassLive. “They trained up for those specific jobs. In particular, I’m thinking of the electricians. They were taking in bigger apprenticeship classes to meet the needs of those projects, and there’s not as much work right now.”
Denying federal disaster aid
A February 2026 blizzard dumped more than 2 feet of snow, and in some places 3 feet, across Massachusetts and surrounding states.
But the Trump administration refused to release federal disaster aid for the storm, reportedly worth $45 million, which is more than three times the amount that should have been the threshold for the state to qualify for federal aid, according to Healey’s office. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) denied a request for the disaster declaration in July, and then denied the state’s appeal in September.
The decision follows Politico reporting that Trump personally overruled his own agencies to block aid to Massachusetts, as well as New York, Rhode Island and New Jersey.
Reporting by The New York Times revealed that disaster relief was more than twice as likely to be denied in Democratic states than Republican states during Trump’s second term.
“I’m outraged that President Trump has once again turned his back on Massachusetts,” Healey wrote after the state’s appeal was denied. “Our first responders, public works crews and local officials worked around the clock to keep people safe and clean up after this storm. They did their jobs. We did ours. President Trump should do his.”
Without the federal aid, the state is relying on $100 million in “Millionaires’ Tax” money to help cities and towns cover their extraordinary winter storm costs.
White House spokesperson Rogers wrote that Trump “responds to each request for Federal assistance under the Stafford Act with great care and consideration, ensuring American tax dollars are used appropriately and efficiently by the states to supplement — not substitute — their obligation to respond to and recover from disasters. There is no politicization to the President’s decisions on disaster relief.”
“The Trump administration remains committed to empowering and working with State and local governments to invest in their own resilience before disaster strikes, making response less urgent and recovery less prolonged,” another White House spokesperson told MassLive.
Squeezing the state’s most vulnerable through SNAP
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, contained major cuts to federal spending on programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid, fundamentally altering eligibility rules and slashing federal administrative funding.
Specifically, Congress lowered the acceptable “payment error” threshold for SNAP, formerly known as “food stamps,” to 6%, which Massachusetts surpassed with a 12.5% error rate.
That covers mistaken payments and not fraud. This means the state will have to cover 15% of its SNAP benefit costs starting Oct. 1, 2027, according to The Associated Press.
This shifts a large burden onto the state budget, with Massachusetts expecting to pay $319 million annually from state tax revenues.
The SNAP changes affect all states, but the Trump administration claimed it would withhold SNAP food aid from recipients in Democratic-controlled states, including Massachusetts, unless the states provided data about people receiving the assistance.
Under new federal rules requiring people to work sufficient hours and complete additional paperwork to receive SNAP, 160,000 fewer Massachusetts residents receive SNAP benefits, including nearly 60,000 children.
Starting in FY27, Massachusetts estimates an additional $53 million annually in SNAP administrative costs. For FY28, a new federal benefit cost-share could cost the state up to roughly $400 million annually, depending on payment accuracy, Healey’s office told MassLive.
Delays and uncertainty surrounding MBTA rail car production
A federal crackdown on imports suspected of being connected to forced labor in China created uncertainty for 160 manufacturing workers.
In May 2025, subway car shells imported from China for the MBTA’s Red Line, destined for the CRRC MA rail car plant in Springfield, were held up by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
CBP said this was because it “was worried that CRRC might be making components using child laborers or by the forced labor of members of the Uyghur Ethnic minority,” The Republican reported.
The disruption forced the company to lay off 160 workers at the factory in January because production could not continue without the detained materials. In March, officials agreed to release the shells. But not all workers returned to the job immediately.
U.S. Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-1st District, said the remaining 64 individuals still on layoff returned to the facility in September, The Republican reported.
Read the original article on MassLive. Add MassLive as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
