Moulton’s mission: Abolish ICE

Editor’s Note: This is the first of two stories on the Democratic primary race for U.S. Senate.

NEW BEDFORD — U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton has always been a man of ambition, and the six-term congressman who represents the North Shore says now is his time. 

“I definitely don’t wait my turn, and I don’t think people should be waiting for their turn,” he said. “I think you should be serving the country as best you can.”

So Moulton is challenging U.S. Sen. Ed Markey in this September’s Democratic primary, trying to unseat the two-term incumbent and favorite of progressives. Moulton said he understands it’s an ambitious goal. 

For an Iraq War veteran with a bachelor’s in physics and master’s degrees in business administration and public policy — all from Harvard University — the adjective “ambitious” is certainly apt. It’s a side of Moulton that enabled him to run against incumbent Democrat John Tierney in his first race for 6th U.S. House District in 2014 — despite what he said were directives from the party apparatus to not challenge the incumbent.

The race for Markey’s U.S. Senate seat will be an uphill battle. Polls from the fall put Markey between 9 and 23 points ahead of Moulton. Nonetheless, Moulton told The Light he thinks he can win and that his main issue is to abolish ICE.

“We need to stop what’s going on. And that’s why I have been unafraid to take on the administration directly,” Moulton said in an interview last week at New Bedford Free Public Library. President Donaid Trump, he said, “is not just trying to terrorize the immigrant community. He’s trying to terrorize blue cities, and he’s ripping apart communities all across America with what he’s doing.”

New Bedford has been hit hard by immigration operations since the return of Trump to the White House in January 2025. The Light has confirmed an estimated 68 people have been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Greater New Bedford area since then.

Many of them, such as Emerson Garcia DosSantos, Juan Francisco Méndez, and Yury Melissa Aguiriano-Romero, have spent significant time at the ICE Boston Field Office in Burlington — a site in Moulton’s district meant for processing and hourslong stays. Some of them have told The Light about stays in Burlington that actually lasted several days, under conditions that included being confined to windowless rooms for 24 hours a day, limited food and drink, days without access to water for washing, and pressure to sign deportation papers. 

Moulton visited the facility twice, once on June 5, shortly after agents detained Medford High School senior Marcelo Gomes DaSilva — whom he plans to bring as his guest to the State of the Union address on Feb. 24. The second time was on Dec. 1, when the congressman visited under new regulations implemented by the agency requiring 72 hours’ notice for congressional oversight visits.

“The practices that we’ve witnessed here in Burlington do not meet the standards that we would like to see,” he told a group of reporters after his December tour. “But they are far better than what we have seen in other facilities in other places that we have seen.”

The aggressive nature of the federal deportation campaign and subsequent civil rights abuses have led to more than 18,000 immigrants challenging their detentions through habeas corpus petitions nationwide, according to ProPublica, including over 920 in Massachusetts.

To Moulton, that is further evidence that his position on the agency is the right one.

“What spurred me to say ICE needs to be abolished is the reality that I’ve seen on the ground,” he said. 

In December, shortly after a shooting in Washington, D.C., spurred the Trump administration to stop the Special Immigrant Visa program for Afghans, Moulton spoke out against the decision. He called it a betrayal of U.S. allies who aided military operations over two-plus decades of occupation in Afghanistan and a representation of “the worst, most nativist undercurrents in our society.”

He said the issue strikes close to home for him, as a military veteran who facilitated evacuations in 2021 when NATO withdrew from the Central Asian nation.

“There are a lot of communities in Massachusetts and across America that are being attacked by this administration,” Moulton said. “They’re attacking these communities and so what we need to do is stand up and fight.”

Response to ICE in Massachusetts and beyond

In January, Gov. Maura Healey announced an executive order to restrict the federal use of state resources to carry out ICE operations and to strengthen protections for people in houses of worship, clinics, schools, and other sensitive locations. She also proposed legislation that would make permanent an immigrant legal defense fund, increase privacy protections, and help parents arrange for guardianship of children should they be caught up in deportation operations.

On Feb. 5, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu issued a municipal executive order that restricts access to municipal property and resources for immigration enforcement, makes public Boston police body cam footage showing violence and property damage by federal officers, and promises to investigate federal misconduct in the city.

Moulton said he backed the two executives’ initiatives but that he would like to see them go further.

“These are reasonable policies, but they’re not enough,” he said. “So there are things that we need to do at the municipal levels, things we need to do at the state level, and things we need to do at the federal level.”

In December, Moulton introduced the National Oversight and Enforcement of Misconduct (NOEM) Act to enable people to sue federal immigration authorities.

“We’ve all seen these videos on the internet of local law enforcement kind of just standing back while ICE does these terribly brutal things to people,” Moulton said. “Well, that’s because the local law enforcement knows that they can get sued for violating people’s civil rights. And yet the federal officials think with some degree of certainty that they have, essentially, immunity.”

He also said federal agents — in their aggression as exhibited in the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis — are making communities less safe. Moulton said that police chiefs across the commonwealth concur, saying people are now scared to report crimes.

“What [chiefs] think is so important is that they can actually maintain law and order in their community by having people feel comfortable reporting crimes and helping with investigations,” he said. “If you believe that by going to the police and sharing some information that could help catch a criminal … you’re going to get arrested just for showing up, then you’re not going to report that information, and that makes all of us less safe.”

Moulton said that his immigration agenda would aim to hold federal authorities accountable and turn down the temperature in a post-ICE world.

“Number one, prosecute ICE: You cannot enforce the law if you think you’re above it,” he said. “Number two: Create an immigration system that actually incentivizes people to come here legally and disincentivizes them to come here illegally.

“And number three,” he continued, “you have to have a viable pathway to citizenship for all the people who are here, who are contributing to our communities, who are paying taxes, who are part of the business community, whose families are integral to American society.”

Fishing issues

As Moulton makes his case for votes in New Bedford, the congressman notes that another major fishing port in the commonwealth, Gloucester, is a part of his current constituency. He has put forward several proposals to adjust the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. 

While some have said that Moulton’s moves have pushed for the inclusion of fishermen in governing decisions, many conservationists have argued that his proposals would harm fish stocks. Moulton told The Light he is aiming for balance between the two.

“After sitting down with both communities, what I realized is that the missing link was, there’s just not agreement on the science because environmentalists want to preserve fishing stocks,” Moulton said. “The fishermen don’t want to fish themselves out of existence, but there’s a lot of disagreement on the actual science. 

“If we could agree on how many fish are actually out there, then we can have a reasonable debate about what responsible limits should be.”

Moulton said the back and forth battle on offshore wind is harmful. The turbines have been a consistent target of the ire of New Bedford fishermen, a constituency that heavily favors Trump, largely due to his anti-offshore wind position.

Moulton said there needs to be policy consistency and an approach that is considerate of science and economic realities.

“I’m going to fight to bring back the [wind] funding to Massachusetts,” he said. “But I also very clearly hear the concerns, the legitimate concerns of the fishing industry, that they don’t want the fishing beds disrupted and that you’re industrializing the ocean when you put in these massive wind power generators.

“So when they say, ‘we just want to have studies that show that you can do this in a way that’s not going to disrupt the fishing industry, that’s not going to disrupt the basic ocean ecosystem upon which we all depend in a community like this,’ that’s a reasonable request,” he continued. “And that’s something that the environmentalists and proponents of the wind industry should welcome.”

The Senate race

Moulton said his move to vie for the Senate seat is about meeting the political moment.

“Senator Markey is a good man and we should praise him for his decades of public service,” Moulton said. “But there comes a time when it’s time to pass the torch to the next generation.” (Markey is 79; Moulton is 47.) “And we’ve got to admit that, as Democrats, the old playbook is failing.

“I mean, we’ve got a second term of Trump,” Moulton added. “He’s devastating people all across Massachusetts, all across America. So we just can’t keep doing the same old thing.”

And that is concerning to Moulton, who concedes it’s not easy to be a  proud American in the current moment. But even in these times, he said his pride in the U.S. is what pushes him forward.

“You know what I learned in Iraq?” he said. “Sometimes you need to fight hardest for your country when it lets you down.”

Kevin G. Andrade can be contacted at kandrade@newbedfordlight.org

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