Testimony: Welcoming Communities Are Safe Communities

Tuesday, November 25, 2025 

Chair Cronin, Chair Cahill, and Members of the Joint Committee on Public Safety: 

Progressive Massachusetts is a statewide, multi-issue, grassroots membership organization focused on fighting for policy that would make our Commonwealth more equitable, just, sustainable, and democratic. We urge you to give a favorable report to H.2580 / S.1681, An Act To Protect The Civil Rights And Safety Of All Massachusetts Residents.

This Thanksgiving, families will be gathering across Massachusetts. But at many tables, there will be missing chairs due to the kidnapping of our immigrant friends and neighbors by ICE agents. 

Since Trump took office in January, ICE has escalated its activities in Massachusetts, terrorizing immigrant communities. ICE arrests have gone up by more than 250% since last year, driven by their targeting of individuals without criminal records. ICE has brutalized children, torn families apart, and engaged in rampant racial profiling. With Congress approving $170 billion to expand deportations, this will only get worse. 

Our immigrant communities are helping to keep our communities healthy, they are innovating and educating, and they are helping us build a better future for all of us. We need to do right by them. 

Immigrants’ rights advocates from across the Commonwealth our aligned on what steps that you can take as a Legislature to protect communities: 

  1. Prohibit new 287(g) agreements

Massachusetts should follow the steps of seven other states and prohibit any new 287(g) agreements. These agreements, in which state and local police are deputized as federal immigration agents, threaten public safety by diminishing trust, overburdening public financial and managerial capacity, distracting from real threats to public safety, and breaking apart communities. 

  1. Prevent partnerships between local law enforcement and ICE

It’s simple: local law enforcement should be focused on keeping communities safe and preventing and investigating crime. Getting involved with immigration raids and arrests diverts time, money, and resources from this goal and undermines the trust on which public safety depends. 

  1. Prohibit local law enforcement from asking about immigration status 

If people fear that interacting with law enforcement could lead to the deportation of them or their loved ones, they will not feel comfortable doing so. This means that incidents of domestic violence, wage theft, and other abuses will go unreported, and communities will be less safe. 

The Trump administration is creating never-ending, everyday crises for so many of our residents. Communities across the Commonwealth need you to lead. 

Sincerely, 

Jonathan Cohn 

Policy Director 

Progressive Massachusetts 

ACTION ALERT: This Thanksgiving and Always, Families Belong Together

This Thanksgiving, families will be gathering across Massachusetts. But at many tables, there will be missing chairs due to the kidnapping of our immigrant friends and neighbors by ICE agents.

Federal immigration agents have been terrorizing communities across Massachusetts in service of Donald Trump’s xenophobic, hateful agenda. Families are torn apart, workplaces stripped of employees, and documented immigrants have feared their status will be revoked. Massachusetts can and must take action to better protect our communities.

Three key pro-immigrants’ rights bills will have hearings tomorrow:

  • Safe Communities Act (H.2580 / S.1681), which would end the voluntary involvement of our public safety officials in civil immigration matters
  • Dignity Not Deportations Act (H.1588 / S.1122), which would prohibit sheriffs from voluntarily renting beds to ICE and ban agreements to deputize state and local law enforcement to ICE
  • Immigrant Legal Defense Act (H.1954 / S.1127), which would ensure that immigrants navigating our complex immigration courts have legal representation and make permanent a recent budgetary appropriation

First, take a moment to email your state rep and state senator in support of these bills:

Email Your Legislators

Second, if you’ve already emailed recently, take a moment to call. Find your legislators’ phone numbers here.

And third, join us at the State House tomorrow for a rally and the hearings for these bills.

Protect Massachusetts Communities | Pre-Hearing Rally
Tuesday, November 25, 2025 at 9:00 AM
Massachusetts State House | Room 428

The Dignity Not Deportations bill and the Immigrant Legal Defense Act will have hearings at 10 am in Room A2. Information here.

The Safe Communities Act will have a hearing at 11:30 am in Gardner Auditorium. Information here.

If you are unable to attend in person, you may log into the livestream of the hearing at the Massachusetts Legislature website.

Follow-ups to Wednesday’s “MA Fights Back” Forum

Thank you so much for joining Wednesday’s “MA Fights Back” forum on democracy! And if you weren’t able to join us, we missed you!

You can watch the recorded part of the forum here: 

Follow-ups from Justin Lam of the Brennan Center

Folks can sign up for the Brennan Center’s newsletters here or follow them on Instagram, TikTok, etc. @brennancenter. For more on federal interference in elections, here’s a deeper-dive report, and here’s an explainer on the Voting Rights Act and what’s next.  

Follow-ups from David Weinberg of Protect Democracy 

Follow-ups from Shanique Rodriguez of the Massachusetts Voter Table 

Follow-ups from Marisol Santiago of MassVOTE 

PM in the News: Do Millionaire Surtaxes Lead to Millionaire Exodus?

Richard Solomon, “Do Millionaire Surtaxes Lead to Millionaire Exodus?,” People’s Policy Project, November 17, 2025.

“On a political level, passing Fair Share was a Herculean effort that squeaked by at 52% yes-vote, even in deep-blue Massachusetts. This might present a challenge for those seeking to replicate the strategy elsewhere. I spoke with Jonathan Cohn, policy director at Progressive Mass, as well as Enid Eckstein who served on the steering committee for the organization Raise Up that led the fight for Fair Share. According to them, Raise Up created a winning coalition for the amendment, backed by service worker, building, and teacher unions, even the AFL-CIO. The campaign survived a Supreme Court objection by finding a runaround through constitutional convention. Raise Up came out early on TV ads, canvassed nearly a million doors, and had disciplined messaging on earmarking funds and the home-selling issue.”

The wealthy were caught off guard by the amendment’s passage. Cohn told me that right-wing interests, having realized that repealing the millionaire surtax is a losing battle, are now collecting signatures to reduce state income taxes as a whole. According to Eckstein, the task ahead is not just staving off relapse to a more regressive tax structure but extending progressive gains to a corporate fair share tax on excess profits concealed offshore. Finally, as the People’s Policy Project has argued, further inroads against inequality and poverty will require plans to socialize capital income and fund generous welfare states.

Protecting Massachusetts Communities: Rally & Hearing

Federal immigration agents have been terrorizing communities across Massachusetts in service of Donald Trump’s xenophobic, hateful agenda. Families are torn apart, workplaces stripped of employees, and documented immigrants have feared their status will be revoked. Massachusetts can and must take action to better protect our communities.

Three key pro-immigrant bills will have hearings next week:

  • Safe Communities Act (H.2580 / S.1681), which would end the voluntary involvement of our public safety officials in civil immigration matters
  • Dignity Not Deportations Act (H.1588 / S.1122), which would prohibit sheriffs from voluntarily renting beds to ICE and ban agreements to deputize state and local law enforcement to ICE
  • Immigrant Legal Defense Act (H.1954 / S.1127), which would ensure that immigrants navigating our complex immigration courts have legal representation and make permanent a recent budgetary appropriation

Join us at the State House next Tuesday for a rally and the hearings fo rthese bills.

Protect Massachusetts Communities | Pre-Hearing Rally

Tuesday, November 25, 2025 at 9:00 AM

Massachusetts State House | Room 428

The Dignity Not Deportations bill and the Immigrant Legal Defense Act will have hearings at 10 am in Room A2. Information here.

The Safe Communities Act will have a hearing at 11:30 am in Gardner Auditorium. Information here.

If you are unable to attend in person, you may log into the livestream of the hearing at the Massachusetts Legislature website.

Legislative Session Update

Today was the last day for the MA House and Senate to take recorded votes before going on recess until the new year.

So far, only 61 bills have become law:

  • 31 of them were home rule petitions about specific cities or towns
  • 15 were personnel matters about specific individuals
  • 8 were budgets or supplemental budgets
  • 2 were bond authorizations
  • 2 were disease awareness days

That leaves only three other bills: a temporary extension of hybrid meeting access (good; make it permanent), setting next year’s state primary as September 1 (terrible for turnout), and updating our shield laws protecting access to abortion care and gender-affirming care (good and necessary).

Clearly, there’s work to do.

New State House Accountability Tool Launched

Two weeks out from the Legislature’s new deadline for committees to report out bills, a new tool — Beacon Hill Compliance Tracker (https://beaconhilltracker.org/) — highlights the extent to which the MA Legislature has yet to follow its own new rules.

In June, the MA House of Representatives and MA Senate agreed to joint rules for the first time since 2019. Following years of activist organizing around greater transparency in the legislative process, Beacon Hill adopted key reforms like public committee votes, public bill summaries, and 10-day notice for hearings. The House also adopted a series of rolling deadlines for reporting out bills from committees, with action required by 60 and, at latest, 90 days following a hearing.

The Beacon Hill Compliance Tracker, an independent, citizen-built tool developed in collaboration with us here at Progressive Mass and with Act on Mass, measures how well the Massachusetts Legislature complies with its own new commitments to transparency.

Democracy in Action: House’s MAGA Energy Bill Delayed

Because of calls and emails from people like you, the House delayed their MAGA energy bill that would have rolled back our climate, clean energy, and energy efficiency commitments.

The House will be redrafting an energy bill to vote on in the new year, so pressure will still be needed to ensure that we move forward, not backward. Stay tuned.

Testimony: MA Needs Action on Our Housing Crisis

Wednesday, November 19, 2025

Chair Cyr, Chair Haggerty, and Members of the Joint Committee on Housing. 

I am submitting testimony on behalf of Progressive Massachusetts. PM is a statewide, multi-issue, grassroots membership organization focused on fighting for policy that would make our Commonwealth more equitable, just, sustainable, and democratic. 

We see it all the time in polls, we hear it on the doors, and we see it in the data: Massachusetts has a housing crisis. More and more residents are unable to afford to live in our commonwealth anymore, priced out from one community to another and then out entirely, or face severe housing instability. 

We need a comprehensive approach to the housing crisis, and strong protections for tenants must be a part of it. We urge you to give a favorable report to H.2328: An Act enabling cities and towns to stabilize rents and protect tenants, H.1544 / S.998: An Act to guarantee a tenant’s first right of refusal, and S.968: An Act promoting access to counsel and housing stability in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts has a lot to offer, but that does little if people can’t afford to live here. The US News & World Report’s annual state rankings put Massachusetts at #47 in housing affordability. [1] A worker earning minimum wage in Massachusetts would have to work 91 hours a week to afford a modest one-bedroom rental home at market rate. [2] 

Clearly, Massachusetts has an affordable housing crisis. This is unsustainable. It has led to expanding economic inequality, increased homelessness, and damage to our economy, as talented workers often leave the state for less expensive regions.

Solving this affordable housing crisis will require us to use every tool in the toolbox. That requires zoning reform that encourages the creation of walkable, sustainable, and inclusive communities. It requires public investment. And it requires strengthening tenant protections that ensure that communities can remain affordable, inclusive, and stable.

However, municipalities across Massachusetts are blocked from taking the necessary steps to address the housing crisis. The misguided statewide ban on rent stabilization policies and a stringent home rule system that prevents municipalities from passing their own laws to govern the basic aspects of civil affairs hamstring municipalities.

By enabling our cities and towns to pass rent control ordinances tailored to their local needs, we can stem the displacement that is hitting so many communities.

We cannot build our way out of the crisis alone because the people at the highest risk for displacement will already be pushed out before they can benefit from any medium to long-term reduction in rents.

There is a lot of fear-mongering around rent control, but I want to make a simple point. If you don’t think a landlord should be able to double or triple someone’s rent in a year after doing no work on the property, you believe in rent control, and the question is just a matter of percentages and exemptions.

On too many issues, Massachusetts is haunted by the ghosts of ill-advised ballot initiatives past. It’s 2023, and we need to act like it.

Empowering cities and towns to respond to our housing crisis also requires passing the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA). The TOPA bill, which is similarly an enabling bill, recognizes that we need to preserve our affordable housing stock. Too often, when large landlords sell a building, a mass eviction or rent hike follows for the tenants. TOPA shows that there is another way: as has been a proven success in DC for decades, we could enable tenants to come together to purchase the building—and be granted the right of first refusal in doing so. It’s a common-sense policy for community stability and affordable housing at no cost to the state.

Finally, the Legislature has made a commitment to access to counsel in the most recent budget cycle. However, we need to make this permanent in statute. S.968 bill would provide legal representation for low-income tenants and low-income owner-occupants in eviction proceedings. The eviction moratorium that the Legislature passed earlier in the pandemic was a vital lifeline for so many, but eviction filings have now been climbing past what they were in 2019, pre-pandemic. Tenants enter such eviction proceedings at a major disadvantage: according to FY2024 Trial Court data, while 90% of landlords are represented, less than 5% of tenants are represented. Tenants facing eviction are disproportionately poor, female, and BIPOC, and evictions can have lasting negative impacts on physical and mental health.

Connecticut, Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Washington have already passed Right to Counsel policies, and Massachusetts should join them. 

Sincerely, 

Jonathan Cohn 

Policy Director 

Progressive Massachusetts

Testimony: Our Youth Deserve Second Chances

Tuesday, November 18, 2025

Chair Day, Chair Edwards, and Members of the Joint Committee on the Judiciary: 

Progressive Massachusetts is a statewide, multi-issue, grassroots membership organization focused on fighting for policy that would make our Commonwealth more equitable, just, sustainable, and democratic. We urge you to give a favorable report to H.1923: An Act to Promote Public Safety and Better Outcomes for Young Adults and H.2051 / S. 1087: An Act to End Lifetime Parole for Juveniles and Emerging Adults. 

A decade ago, Massachusetts raised the age of juvenile court to keep 17-year-olds out of the adult system. Supporters of this reform argued that keeping young people out of the adult criminal system would reduce recidivism. The data is in: they were right. Juvenile crime has declined, and Massachusetts has seen faster declines in violent and property crime rates than the national average. 

It’s time to build on that success by raising the age to 21, as this bill would do. Young people are highly influenced by their environments: it is no surprise then that adult jail and prison environments increase offending behavior. By contrast, in the juvenile system, adolescents have better access to educational and mental health resources that are critical to rehabilitation and successful re-entry, as well as stricter supervision.

Mass incarceration policies have hit communities of color in Massachusetts especially hard. As a criminal sentence too often closes off educational and employment opportunities, our criminal legal system perpetuates racial inequalities. A focus on rehabilitation would give youth a better chance to grow up and contribute in their community and, by doing so, would help reduce intergenerational poverty. When our criminal legal system centers human dignity, rehabilitation, and accountability, rather than punishment and vengeance, we are all safer and healthier in the long run.

As the framing of today’s committee  implies, this bill would mean better access to health care and other supports. However, we want to underscore that merely improving the adult prison system—a task desperately needed and which other bills heard today would do—is not sufficient to address the issues at stake here. Federal and state protections differ, as do long-term legal consequences. 

Similarly advancing these priorities, H.2051 / S. 1087 would address the current situation where youth aged 14 to 21 can face lifetime parole after 15 years in prison. This is costly to the parole system and is ineffective toward achieving stated goals of safety or rehabilitation. We know, through a significant body of research, that most youth will “age out” of offending behavior, and the parole system, which imposes sanctions on parolees for a long list of minor infractions, harms their ability to get back on their feet. 

Sincerely, 

Jonathan Cohn 

Policy Director 

Progressive Massachusetts