‘On fire!’ First photos of Boston rec center turned into migrant shelter spark FURY among residents

Locals in a struggling, majority-black Boston community are furious over a recreational center being turned into an illegal alien migrant shelter.

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey confirmed in a letter sent Monday to state and city officials that she intends to convert the Melnea A. Cass Recreation Complex into a “temporary” illegal alien migrant shelter.

The move sparked an immediate backlash, resulting in a rowdy Monday night forum where parents slammed the governor for pushing out a track-and-field club for kids that’s been at the facility since 2011.

One woman said the state is treating the community “like garbage,” according to the Boston Herald.

“Why us?” another community member asked.

“Rich communities won’t get this,” a third participant rightly noted. “It’s disrespectful.”

“Roxbury is on fire! On fire! And this is a wake-up call,” an older man, Derrick Evans, added.

“We want to help but not at the cost of our own children,” resident Fernandes Anderson maintained.

“Things seem to be taken more from the community than given to it,” Roxbury resident Laura Keating said, according to local station WFXT.

Even Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has gently spoken out against the plan, arguing that the decision to make a struggling community take on the burden of illegal alien migrants seems “painfully familiar.”

“For the first community where this is being proposed to be Roxbury, a community that over so many decades has faced disinvestment, redlining, disproportionate outcomes, it’s very painful and it’s painfully familiar,” she reportedly said on a radio program.

“It feels like a particular inflection point when we are now taking offline buildings that are beloved and well-used and dedicated to community programs because we now have such a crisis,” she added.

Critics blame Wu anyway because she didn’t put up any fight:

“While Wu made clear on Monday that she didn’t really support the decision, she didn’t give any indication that she would put up a fight to stop it,” critic Joe Battenfeld wrote in a column on Tuesday for the Herald.

In her letter sent Monday, Healey reportedly said that the recreational facility will remain a migrant shelter until at least the end of May. What she didn’t mention in her letter is what exactly she intends to do about all the programs that are usually held at the center.

“The fact that they can’t tell us today that they have alternate sites for the programs they displaced is just despicable to me,” former state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, a Democrat, said. “It’s inexplicable. It should not be acceptable on any level.”

The only good news is that there’s at least some recognition in Boston that the true culprit for all this is President Joe Biden.

“Massachusetts’ emergency shelter crisis — with roughly 600 families on the waitlist — is not a problem that was created by the state, Wu said, pointing to a ‘broken federal system and an exponentially increasing flow of people who are vulnerable,'” the Herald notes.

However, Gov. Healey didn’t appear to get the memo.

“We’re here today because we really don’t have a choice,” the governor said on Wednesday after touring the facility. “We need to make sure we have a place for people to go safely. At the same time, “I continue to call on Congress to act. President Biden has put forward a plan.”

In reality, President Biden has not put forward any plan to resolve the crisis. Critics say all he’d have to do really is simply reenact all the Trump era policies that he’d revoked upon taking office in 2021.

But instead of reenacting these policies, the president has tried to shift the blame for the crisis on congressional Republicans, claiming that they’re somehow preventing him from doing his job.

Republicans for their part have tried to push forward a tough border bill, H.R. 2, that’d resolve the crisis, but Democrats have steadfastly refused to consider the bill …

Vivek Saxena

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