This story was reported by MassLive and its news partner, El Planeta.
Read the story in Spanish at El Planeta.
Rumors whipped through Revere as police responded to a car crash on Shirley Avenue earlier this year.
Was the law enforcement presence an immigration enforcement raid, one woman asked as she stopped into Chocolaffee, a nearby cafe. Unsure and anxious, the woman detoured a mile in the opposite direction on her way to work that day, Diana Cardona, who owns the business with her sister Angelica, said.
The mood among immigrants in neighboring Chelsea is no less restless.
Children huddle after school in Tanairi Garcia‘s cafe, Aloe Natural, agonizing in hushed voices over rumors that immigration agents were spotted in neighborhoods where their parents work or live. Some duck into the bathroom and leave in tears, Garcia, a Chelsea city councilor, said.
Four months into the second Trump administration, fear pervades immigrant communities, shared alike by people without documentation and those with protected status, work or student visas, and other paperwork allowing them to reside in the United States.
While some cities, including Chelsea, have declared themselves “sanctuaries” for undocumented immigrants, pledging not to participate in federal immigration enforcement, such promises do not lift the dread of deportation from their residents’ shoulders.
“The fear does not end at the boundary of the city,” said state Sen. Sal DiDomenico, a Democrat representing Chelsea and nearby communities.
Nor are immigrants the only ones on edge.
Chelsea is one of several Massachusetts cities in the crosshairs of the federal government as it moves to pull any federal funding from “sanctuary jurisdictions,” cuts that would affect services and city projects benefiting citizens and immigrants alike.
For Chelsea, that penalty could be steep, according to a lawsuit the city filed to protect its funding stream.
The city received $14.5 million directly from the federal government last fiscal year and anticipates receiving $8.5 million this year, it said. The municipal budget is $245 million, more than half of which goes to the schools.
Read more: Somerville and Chelsea, 2 ‘sanctuary cities,’ sue Trump admin over funding threats
Of Chelsea‘s 38,000 residents, 45% are foreign-born — the largest portion of any city in Massachusetts — and 70% speak a language besides English at home. More than one in five residents lives below the poverty line. In the densely populated working-class community just north of Boston, every dollar matters.
Similar anxieties reverberate through Revere, Chelsea‘s neighbor to the northeast, where roughly 43% of its 58,000 residents were born outside the U.S.
Sisters Diana and Angelica Cardona, owners of Chocolaffee, a coffee shop in Revere, on May 7, 2025. (Will Katcher/MassLive)
Though not declared a sanctuary city nor under the direct microscope of the federal government, Revere still risks the loss of some federal dollars. And its undocumented residents have the same shadow hanging over their heads as President Donald Trump looks to cash in on a campaign pledge of nationwide mass deportations.
“It doesn’t matter the city, the fear is the same,” said Angelica Cardona, of Revere, who arrived in the United States undocumented in 1993, but today is an U.S. citizen.
‘A fragile financial position’
In Chelsea, authorities say the sanctuary policy allows all people to feel comfortable interacting with police and city officials in emergencies, health episodes and even mundane issues. If residents, undocumented immigrants included, feel that calling police and coming forward to provide information won’t lead to their deportation, that makes the city safer, advocates for sanctuary city policies argue.
Chelsea has a moral responsibility to protect and provide for all its residents, regardless of immigration status, Garcia says.
“Why should they fear to take their child to school?” she asked.
Still, she worries for her community if the sanctuary policy costs Chelsea its federal assistance.
Read more: Trump signs order to create list of sanctuary cities and states. How it could affect Mass., Boston and other cities
Some funding cuts will hit the Chelsea Police Department, which the city said in legal filings regularly receives federal money for equipment such as bulletproof vests. Other cuts will drain resources from programs for drug treatment and enforcement, or supporting crime victims and witnesses.
Tanairi Garcia, a Chelsea City Councilor, pictured at the East Boston location of her cafe, Aloe Natural, on May 8, 2025. (Will Katcher/MassLive)
A downtown revitalization project, the largest in decades, is at risk of losing a $2 million federal grant. More than $4 million from a federal program to inject funding into low-income school districts could disappear as well.
“We’re already an overcrowded city,” Garcia said. “Our classrooms will be more crowded and lose money.”
Read more: Boston prepares for fight after Trump signs order threatening sanctuary cities
Yet if asked to approve Chelsea‘s sanctuary city policy today, she would still vote in support, knowing what it could mean for the city’s future.
“Everything has a domino effect, good and bad,” she said, adding, “With or without the federal grants, I think as a community, we will make it work.”
Todd Taylor, a Chelsea city councilor, is not as confident. He thinks the city’s lawsuit against the federal government over funding cuts “paints a giant target” on Chelsea‘s back.
Taylor has long opposed the city’s sanctuary city designation. He sympathizes with immigrants, like his wife and mother, who arrived in the U.S. seeking freedom and opportunity, he said in a statement after the city filed the lawsuit. The country “has always needed immigration,” he said, but in “an orderly, measured system” that doesn’t risk “unprecedented costs for our state and city budgets.”
“We are already facing a fragile financial position,” Taylor said. “We should not risk our ability to protect our residents, pave our roads and educate our children just to make a political statement.”
No city is immune to funding cuts
Cities without sanctuary policies are also not immune from the vast cuts to federal spending.
Early last month, the Trump administration yanked $106 million in pandemic-era education funding from more than 20 Massachusetts school districts, Revere among them, that they had until next year to spend.
Revere risks losing more than $4.6 million, a hefty portion of which the city planned to spend on air quality improvements in school buildings, City Councilor Juan Pablo Jaramillo said.
A man walks past a mural on 5th Street in downtown Chelsea on May 7, 2025. (Will Katcher/MassLive)
There’s no reason that the city should be targeted, he said. “It’s not about immigrants, documented or otherwise.”
“That’s without us being even a sanctuary city,” he added.
The city could suffer in other ways as well. The Trump administration’s mass deportation push could upend years of work by city officials to build trust with undocumented residents, injecting a wariness of public institutions into the community that will be difficult to unroot, Jaramillo said.
“People will stop calling the police,” he fears. “Folks who may be sick and maybe need attention … may not go to the hospital.”
“There’s not going to be a single locality in this country that will not suffer in the services that they’ll provide because of the distrust that this administration, this federal administration, has placed on working-class communities like Revere,” he said.
In 2000, at age 7, Jaramillo came to the U.S. from Colombia with his parents, lacking legal status to live in the country.
Today, they are U.S. citizens. But once, while Jaramillo was growing up, he recalled, their home in Revere was robbed while the family was out. When they returned home to find the place ransacked, Jaramillo pressed his parents to call the police. He did not grasp at the time why they refused.
“The real fear came from feeling unsafe from the public safety apparatus,” he said. “Who do you go to when someone breaks into your house?”
If undocumented residents come to fear authorities, he worries what it could mean for any city, sanctuary or not. In five years, when the U.S. seeks an accurate count of people living in the country through the next Census, undocumented immigrants need to trust that speaking with a Census worker will not lead to their deportation, Jaramillo said.
If they don’t, cities could end up with far fewer firefighters, police officers and funding than their populations demand.
Revere Mayor Patrick Keefe Jr. declined an interview request for this story. So did Chelsea City Manager Fidel Maltez.
Long tradition of immigration
Both Chelsea and Revere have long histories as landing grounds for new immigrants seeking a better life in the United States.
Chris Giannino, a Revere city councilor and retired police officer, said his family arrived in the area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the time, Revere was welcoming a wave of Italian immigrants. Different ethnic groups arrived over the years — Irish, European Jews, Cambodians and Laotians, North Africans and Latinos, Giannino said.
Today, Revere remains a diverse city. When the holidays roll around, Giannino said his street comes alive with the different sights, sounds and tastes of his neighbors’ cultures.
Revere has “always been a gateway for different communities to come here,” he said.
So has Chelsea, said Gladys Vega, head of the Chelsea social services organization La Colaborativa and Garcia‘s aunt.
“Chelsea has always been a city that welcomed immigrants — Polish, Italian, German, Jewish — and now Latinos,” she said. “We’ve always been a small city that opened its doors to newcomers.”
La Colaborativa CEO and president Gladys Vega speaks at a press conference at La Colaborativa’s Survival Center in Chelsea on Oct. 16, 2024. (Photo by Andrew Burke-Stevenson/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
One of them is Lesly, a young mother who arrived in the U.S two years ago without documentation. To her, Chelsea certainly feels safer than Guatemala, where gang members threatened to kill her and her son over a conflict with the boy’s father, she said.
When Lesly, whose full name is being withheld to protect her identity, needed to call the Chelsea Police to report a threat to her safety, the officer she met spoke Spanish. He didn’t ask about her immigration status, but explained her rights as an immigrant and helped her file a report. When she felt afraid to leave home, the department offered to drive by and keep watch for trouble.
The trust with police provides residents protection, Lesly said in Spanish to a bilingual reporter, “no matter their immigration status.”
Lesly, a young mother who arrived in the U.S from Guatemala two years ago without documentation poses for a photo on May 19, 2025. Her last name is being withheld to protect her identity. (Will Katcher/MassLive)
The Chelsea Police Department focuses on developing partnerships and trust through community policing “that encourage all residents, regardless of status, to feel safe reporting crimes, seeking assistance, and engaging with our department,” Chelsea Police Chief Keith Houghton wrote in an emailed statement. “We are proud of the positive relationships we’ve built across our diverse community, which are rooted in trust, transparency and a shared commitment to public safety.”
Sanctuary or not, all cities bound by law
Sanctuary city or not, all towns and cities in Massachusetts are bound by legal precedent that prevents full coordination between local police and federal immigration authorities. The Supreme Judicial Court, the state’s high court, held in 2017 that police cannot detain someone based solely on a request of the federal government, absent a judicial warrant.
Like other sanctuary cities, Chelsea Police policy also bars officers from asking about a person’s immigration status. Unless there is a threat to public safety, the department does not concern itself with immigration issues.
Some people have a mistaken perception that in sanctuary cities, criminals can find safe harbor from prosecution, Vega said.
That’s a myth, she said.
La Colaborativa, a social services organization in Chelsea on May 7, 2025. (Will Katcher/MassLive)
Living in a sanctuary city does not provide a shield of immunity from the jurisdiction of the federal government, numerous ICE arrests in Chelsea, Somerville, Boston and other sanctuary communities show.
As in other sanctuary cities, the Chelsea Police do not interfere with immigration-related arrests carried out by the federal government. Nor does city policy prevent the department from collaborating with federal officials on pressing public safety matters, such as investigations into drug trafficking or violent crime.
“If there’s a criminal, we want them out of our community just like anyone else,” Vega said. “Sanctuary city never meant protecting those who break the law. We just want safe communities.”
In January, Fox News broadcast clips of a series of ICE raids that began outside a Chelsea Market Basket. The operation focused on people who posed a threat to public safety, an ICE spokesperson said. Yet while sweeping one apartment, agents happened upon a man whom they had not targeted, but who was in the U.S. illegally. They took him into custody as well.
The arrests cast a “severe chill” over Chelsea and neighboring communities, the city said in its lawsuit targeting the federal funding cuts, as everyday residents feared going to work, school, church — even the local Market Basket.
“It kind of makes me sad that they feel that way. They feel targeted,” Angelica Cardona said. Most undocumented immigrants “are just regular working people trying to make it day by day.”
