BOSTON — The Healey administration is refusing to hand federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents the confidential and undercover license plates the agency uses to do its job — and the Trump Justice Department has fired back with a Thursday letter giving Massachusetts one week to reverse course.

The Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles will still issue confidential plates to any "federal, state or local agency engaging in legitimate criminal law enforcement work," Healey spokeswoman Jacqueline Manning said. The Healey administration has decided, on its own, that ICE's deportation arrests don't qualify, WGBH first reported.

That's a state government telling federal officers — operating under federal law, enforcing federal immigration policy — that Beacon Hill has decided unilaterally where the line is.

DOJ: 'blatantly unlawful'

Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, who runs the DOJ Civil Division, sent the Healey administration a letter Thursday, May 14, demanding the state lift the policy by May 22.

"This discriminatory policy is not only deeply dangerous as a matter of public safety but also blatantly unlawful as a matter of constitutional law," Shumate wrote.

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Healey's framing

Manning framed the standoff in sanctuary-state language, casting ICE's standard practice of using confidential plates as itself a rights violation.

"Massachusetts is not going to allow state resources to be used to help ICE operate in secret while they are violating people's rights and making us all less safe," Manning said. "This is an agency that can't and won't even tell us who they are arresting and why. We are not going to enable their tactics."

The Justice Department's position is that nothing in federal law gives a state government veto power over which categories of federal law enforcement get to use the same confidential plates Massachusetts routinely hands out to other federal agencies.

What ICE actually wants the plates for

Confidential and undercover plates let federal officers blend into traffic — useful when surveilling targets who would otherwise scatter at the first sight of an ICE badge or a clearly-marked vehicle. So who exactly is ICE Boston putting in cuffs?

ICE has arrested more than 7,000 people in Massachusetts between President Trump's inauguration and mid-March, per the Healey administration's own numbers. The administration likes to point out that 46% had no pending criminal charges at the moment of arrest. What it doesn't dwell on is who the other 54% are — and who ICE keeps showing up to grab. From MDN's own reporting over the past several months:

The Brazilian fugitive killer ICE Boston cuffed last week. John Lenon Sena Rosa stabbed a man until the knife broke off inside him — then finished the job with a piece of wood and a helmet, ICE says. Brazil had a murder warrant out for him. He'd slipped into the US illegally in 2022.
The Cambodian killer Massachusetts let walk. Oeun Lam shot a 41-year-old mother of six dead in a Lynn home in 1991 in front of her husband and children. Sentenced to life without parole. Massachusetts paroled him anyway. ICE put him on a plane to Cambodia in March.
ICE Boston's April haul. Child rapists, murder fugitives, an MS-13 killer, and a man accused of suffocating a pregnant woman — all arrested in Massachusetts in a single month.
The Haitian with the pending sheet. ICE took him in on pending charges for rape, strangulation, beating a family member, and witness intimidation.
The Guatemalan child rapist. Seven counts of raping a child. Walking around a quiet Massachusetts town until ICE descended.
The Quincy ICE agent nearly killed on the job. A federal officer was almost crushed last month when a suspect allegedly rammed a vehicle during an arrest. The driver remains at large.

These are the operations Healey wants ICE running in vehicles a target can spot a block away.

The deadline

Shumate gave Massachusetts until Friday, May 22. The Justice Department has not said publicly what happens next if Healey doesn't fold.

Healey blocks ICE from getting undercover license plates as DOJ sends threat: 'you have until May 22'

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