Could we have all the panelists for the first panel?

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

My name is Minyard Culpepper, District 7th City Councillor, and I'm chair of the Boston City Council Committee on Civil Rights, Racial Equity, and Immigrant Advancement.

Today is June 4th 2026, and the exact time is 2.14 p.m.

The hearing is being recorded.

It is also being live streamed at Boston.gov slash City Council TV.

Broadcast on Xfinity Channel 8, RCN Channel 82, BIOS Channel 964.

Interpretation will be available today in Spanish.

For those attending in person, interpretation headsets are available to the right near the podium.

Public testimony will be taken at the end of the hearing.

Individuals will be called in the order in which they have signed up and will have two minutes to testify.

Written comments may be sent to the committee email at ccc.civilrights at Boston.gov.

And we will be made part of the record and available to all counselors.

If you're interested in testifying in person, please add your name to the sign-up sheet near the entrance of the chamber.

If you're looking to testify virtually, please email our central staff liaison Megan Cavanaugh at Megan.cavernot at Boston.gov for the link and your name will be added to the list.

If you need interpretation services to testify, please sign up at the sign-up sheet by the front of the chamber and check the box for Spanish interpretation.

If you have any questions, please see the interpreter who will be near the signing sheet.

Today's hearing is on docket number 0409, order for a hearing on civil rights, constitutional, and legal implications of the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, otherwise known as BRIC, the Social Violence Information System, Avis, the Automated License Plate Readers, ALPR, and participation in the federal joint task forces.

This matter was sponsored by Councillor Julia Mahia, Henry Santana, Minyard Culpeper, and was referred to the committee on February 25th, 2026.

Before we begin, I'd like to remind my council colleagues and our panelists to please speak so that you can be heard and to ensure the interpreters can properly convey your remarks.

Today I'm joined by my colleagues in order of arrival, Counselor Flynn, Councillor Warrell, Counselor Santana, and Councillor Peppin.

Council just stepped out.

Good afternoon, everyone.

I want to thank my colleagues for being here, especially my vice chair, Councillor Mejia, who filed this hearing order, and for her work on these issues, as well as Councillor Santana for co-sponsoring this hearing order, and for his work on these issues.

I want to thank the panelists and members of the public for joining us for this important hearing.

The purpose of today's hearing is not to debate whether public safety matters.

Public safety absolutely does matter.

The question before us is how we balance legitimate public safety objectives with the constitutional rights, the civil liberties, and due process protections that every Boston resident is entitled to under the United States Constitution and the Massachusetts Constitution.

As technology has evolved, so too has the ability of government to collect, store, analyze, and share information.

Systems as a Boston Regional Intelligence Center, the associative violence information system, the automated license place readers, and information sharing partnerships with federal agencies, provide law enforcement with unprecedented access to data and surveillance capabilities.

But with those capabilities comes an equally important responsibility to ensure transparency, accountability, oversight, and respect for civil rights.

Today's discussion is ultimately about public trust.

Residents deserve to know how these systems operate, what protections exist against errors and abuse, and what mechanisms are in place to ensure that individuals are not improperly labeled, not improperly monitored, or subjected to government scrutiny without appropriate safeguards.

Counselor, you will have five minutes for open remarks.

And with that, Council Mahia, you have the floor.

Okay.

All right, so good afternoon, everyone.

And for the record, we don't usually get five minutes for an opening remark.

So I hope my colleagues don't think we're getting five minutes.

We're getting a minute to speak because we're here really to listen to people.

Just so you know.

All right.

I want to thank uh you, uh Counselor Culpepper, for hosting today's hearing on Docket 090 uh 0409, which has was filed by my office to examine civil rights and civil liberties implications of the Boston Intelligence and Surveillance Infrastructure.

As many people know, our office has been clear about our concerns regarding BRIC and the expansion of surveillance technologies.

We've worked alongside organizations including Digital Ford, the Muslim Justice League, the ACLU of Massachusetts, Old Dykes, and many others who have consistently raised concerns about transparency, accountability, and the impact these systems have had on our communities.

With the recent announcement of 13.47 million in UIC funding, the Metro for the Vetro Boston region, we know discussions about future investments in intelligence and surveillance infrastructure will continue.

While that funding has not yet formally uh come before the council, we want to hold this hearing now and lead with community voices and advocates, researchers, and those who are most impacted, so that we have a better understanding before the funding decisions are in front of us.

This hearing is an opportunity to better understand BRIC, its impact on our communities, and what oversight and accountability should look like moving forward.

I look forward to today's hearing um and learning from the experts who are living the realities and or doing the work, and I want to thank them for their expertise.

And I also just want to acknowledge that, you know, I've been one of the loudest voices here on the Boston City Council.

I've been talking about abolishing BRIC since the moment I stepped into this chamber.

And so I think it's important, and every time we've had any of the funding that I believe are harmful to communities, particularly um low-income, black and brown, you know, vulnerable communities.

I am always the first to say no.

And so I think it's important to have this hearing because we don't know what we don't know, and this gives us an opportunity to hear directly from folks who have been doing this work and living these realities to making sure that we are making informed decisions and data.

You can't deny the data.

The data will speak for itself.

Um, and my hope is that the lived experiences of those that are here to testify will open up your hearts and minds to the realities of what we're facing here today.

And lastly, I will just say, you know, um, I was raised um here in the city of Boston.

My mom was undocumented for a period of time, and so um we know that a lot of people are living in fear now, and people are utilizing tools um and technology to really put more fear um in in communities who are most vulnerable.

So um I just want you to know I haven't even seen the grant, and I'm already a hard no, so um just putting it on the record.

Uh so thank you, Council Culpepper, Counselor Santana.

Can you have five minutes for your opening statement?

I I don't think I'll need five minutes, but um good afternoon.

Um, tales a todos.

Um thank you, Chair Um Cole Pepper.

Um, thank you to the lead sponsor, Councillor Mejia, for bringing this forward.

Um, looking forward to the conversation and hearing from our panelists today.

Um I'm someone that um was born in the Medicine Republic, went through the immigration process here in the city of Boston, um, also grew up in public housing um and seeing um, I think a lot of different harms across um in my communities.

Um I think some of the questions that I'll have is that you know, think break as a chair of public safety.

I've been the one um um overseeing when the grant comes over um to our to the council last year.

Um the city of Boston I believe didn't apply um for the grant itself, so we didn't take a vote on it last year, but um the the grant as a whole covers a lot of different areas and I know that in the over the last two years as chair of public safety.

I know many of my colleagues have come and you know, um have asked me um of are there ways to be able to separate the grant, right?

To be able to pass um some of the things that we need, and I think um be able to uh talk more about um some of the areas where I think people have concerns.

Um it's my understanding from that research that I've been able to do is that uh it comes together for that same reason that uh you know it's um they they want the they want you to do all of it.

Um but those are the conversations that we've had um and in our committee.

Um looking forward again to um hearing from our panelists, and um I am gonna have to step out early.

Um, but um, really appreciate you all being here.

Um, also we just really appreciate I mean both hearings today.

Um the chamber has been packed.

Um really appreciate community being out here um on Thursday afternoon.

Um, uh so thank you so much for being here and being present.

Thank you, thank you, Councillor.

Councilor Flynn, you have five minutes.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair, and thank you for bringing us bringing us together today.

Thank you to uh Councillor Mejia and to Councillor Santana and Councillor Pepin as well for their important work in this field as well.

I know that there has been some debate recently on this federal grant, even going back several years when I was a city council president.

We actually received the grant from a democratic president that was sent to the state of Massachusetts and then to Boston.

Um I have visited the BRICS several times and want to encourage encourage city council colleagues to also visit if they haven't done so.

We passed the grant in 2025.

Um in December 2024, the city council accepted a grant for nearly 12 million dollars from the Department of Homeland Security for regional cooperation preparedness in high threat areas.

This also supports surrounding cities and towns as well.

It's about the cooperation uh Boston provides as a leader, but it's also supporting other cities and towns.

I believe we have a responsibility to put the public safety of our residents first, and and working closely, as I mentioned, with cities and towns throughout Greater Boston.

Well, I I understand concerns raised by my colleagues and community leaders as well about privacy.

I believe having accurate information is critical for every large city police department, especially as we prepare now for the World Cup and other major events.

Um, but I also know as my colleagues have highlighted that we have to factor in civil rights, transparency, accountability, civil rights, and I'm I'm willing to listen and to learn more from my colleagues and and from the public as well.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Councillor Flynn, Councillor Peppin, you have five minutes.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair, and thank you to the co-sponsors for bringing this to the chamber here today, and thank you to our panelists for being here and for providing your expertise and work on this related topic.

Um, I do have prepared remarks, I'll just read that.

The purpose of this hearing is not to undermine public safety, nor is it to diminish the important work of law enforcement officers perform every day to keep our community safe.

We can recognize that Boston, like many other major cities, faces real threats, and intelligence gathering can be an important tool in preventing violence, protecting critical infrastructure, and responding to emergencies.

However, at the same time, public safety and civil liberties are not competing values.

In fact, they are deeply connected.

The trust between residents and government institutions is one of the strongest foundations of a safe and thriving city.

Many residents have raised concerns about the BRIC, particularly regarding transparency, oversight, data collection, information sharing, and the potential for misuse.

These concerns are amplified, especially during a time when Americans are questioning how government at all levels are collected, stored, and utilized personal information.

People want assurance that those tools intend to keep them safe, they're not being used in ways that are infringed upon their privacy, chill free speech, or disproportionately impact sorting communities.

And I see that our responsibility as policymakers here in the city council is to strike the right balance.

We can support efforts to keep our city safe, while also demanding transparency, accountability, and respect for individual rights.

Boston should never be forced between security or liberty.

We must be committed to protecting both in the honor of our residents.

So with that, I look forward to listening to our panel and to the public testimonies that we hear from today.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Council Pepin.

Now I'd like to introduce today's first panel.

And panelists, you will have seven minutes for your opening statements.

First panelists is Brenda McQuaid, Fatima Ahmed, Heather Royal, and Maya Schaefer.

Brenda, we'll start with you.

Brenda's associate professor, author of Pacify in the Homeland, Intelligence Fusion, and Mass Supervision, and she's from the United University of Southern Maine.

You have seven minutes.

Good afternoon, everyone.

Thank you, counselors, uh, for this opportunity to uh speak with you all.

Um so I've researched fusion centers for 15 years, and I'm the author of the only academic book on the subject.

A report I co-authored on Maine's Fusion Center, helped pass a bill mandating audits by the state's attorney general.

And I've been working with the Muslim Justice League since the fall of 2022 on a comprehensive report on the BRIC.

So Bostonians hear a lot about the gang database.

Uh, it's important, but it's just one piece of a much larger police machine.

So the BRIC is one of 80 DHS recognized fusion centers, and it's among the largest and most well-funded.

It has 50 personnel, including sworn officers, civilian analysts, and embedded federal liaisons.

It receives between two and eight million annually through the urban area security initiative, plus hundreds of thousands more in state and DOG grants.

Its largest contract, 4 million with centra technology, is the biggest in the BPD's entire budget.

The BRIC was sold as a counterterrorism hub, but in our report, we call it a spy center.

We use that term because the BRICS purpose is political, using surveillance to manage marginalized populations, monitor dissent, and fabricate threats to justify perpetual security.

It's not about counterterrorism or crime control, it is about social control, using the police and the criminal legal system to govern, displacing more humane and equitable policy options.

So what does this look like?

A real-time crime center managing thousands of cameras, 1400 from BPD, at least 750 in the camera information management system, 2200 Boston Housing Authority cameras, 625 Boston Public Health Commission cameras, 45 automated license plate readers feeding data into flock securities for profit network.

Contracts with data brokers like Lexis Nexus Accurate, which provide access to expansive public records databases and mobile phone data sets that let police reconstruct your movements, your associations, and your private life without a warrant, bypassing the Fourth Amendment, by purchasing your data instead of proving probable cause to a judge.

All of this flows to Crimeview, where analysts map, sort, and flag individuals in real time.

The BRIC distributes intelligence products to over 1,500 registered users, police, private security, hospitals, universities, utility companies, and corporate partners.

The goal is not solving crimes.

It's rendering the social world legible and governable.

The foundational act of politics is naming the enemy, and the BRIC has fabricated a list of them.

So first, the spurious adversary, the criminal.

In 2022, my co-authors and I published an analysis of hacked BRIC intelligence products in a peer-reviewed academic journal.

We found that 84% of the BRICS documents were crime blotters, descriptive reports with no analysis, a catalog of the desperate violence of the powerless, property crime, drug use, interpersonal violence.

This is routine policing dressed up as intelligence, but I think it's better understood as social control, disguised as public safety.

This is criminalization crowding out care, a security solution to problems requiring housing, health care, and jobs.

Second, the illusory adversaries, the dissident and the terrorist.

The BRIC treats political dissent as a security risk.

It tracks and monitors protesters.

It frames organizing and political speech as potential terrorism.

So first, Occupy Wall Street.

The BRIC warned that the movement could, quote, attract individuals intent on committing acts of violence and domestic terrorism.

That never materialized.

What did was police and riot gear sweeping Dewey Square at midnight.

Second, Black Lives Matter.

After the 2020 uprisings, the BRIC produced a bulletin focusing on the alleged violence against police while erasing evidence of police misconduct.

Over 93% of BLM protests were peaceful.

In Boston, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets first.

The BRICS Bulletin did not reflect that reality.

It manufactured a narrative where protesters were a threat and the police were victims.

And finally, the Palestine Solidarity Movement.

After October 7, the BRIC warned that the conflict could quote, mobilize homegrown violent extremists while acknowledging that, quote, no specific or credit, acknowledging no specific or credible threats to the region.

So this is a pattern.

The BRIC regularly produces homeland security bulletins that report on violence abroad, such as a drone attack in Saudi Arabia, a knife attack in Paris, and then with no connection to Boston, end with the same refrain.

No evidence of a local threat, but remain vigilant.

So this is not intelligence.

This is what we call threat fabrication, the manufacturing of perpetual danger to justify surveillance and political speech.

So in the federal intelligence community, fusion centers do not have a good reputation.

They are known for low quality work.

Their products are often dismissed as intelligence spam, and this is the reason why, right?

This is not good intelligence analysis, this is fear mongering.

So the BRIC is not a crime-fighting tool in need of reform.

It is a social control apparatus that fabricates that operates in secret and fabricates threats.

Every dollar spent on the BRIC is a dollar not spent on housing, mental health, or youth programs.

Every reform short of abolition legitimizes a system that targets our most vulnerable neighbors.

The BRIC is a spy center and it should be closed.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to your questions.

Thank you.

I just want to start by saying, you know, that means you're seven minutes.

Okay, great.

Yeah.

We all thought we had five.

So seven is wonderful.

Great, thank you.

I want to start by saying that the issues that we're talking about today, which I know we've been talking about for many years now, have only grown.

The concerns have only grown over time, over 20 years of BRIC, to the point where Brookline is now the first town that is considering pulling out of BRIC.

And I let's don't take my time with clapping.

I am very sure that there will be additional cities and towns considering pulling out of BRIC in the near future.

And the UASI grant, which Boston did in fact apply for despite the new requirements from DHS to engage in border enforcement and election security, is one of the reasons that people are considering pulling out.

The grant is just severely delayed, and our colleague Ali will speak more about the grant later.

But there are just dozens of reasons that people are considering pulling out of BRIC, and why Boston should truly abolish BRIC.

We're going to start with the counterterrorism piece, which as Brendan laid out, the majority of BRIC, 30 of the 50 staff are focused on counterterrorism, but really what they are doing is reporting, surveilling and reporting on constitutionally protected activities, including that of my own organization, many other social justice organizations, and as we've said before, that included a report on former mayor Marty Walsh when he spoke at Occupy.

That included a social media post on Facebook from former counselor Tito Jackson when he talked about Black Lives Matter.

So we're talking about not just dozen, you know, many Boston residents, but people throughout the region who are swept up in BRICS surveillance under the guise of counterterrorism.

And we're not even talking about protests.

We're talking about social media posts.

We're talking about everything from vigils for ceasefire to film screenings.

It's regular events that are happening that are going out in reports that are also talking about violence around the world and then listing local events from Jewish groups, from Muslim groups, from everyone under the sun.

And these are going out as intelligence reports, not just to law enforcement, but to private agencies, nonprofits, hospitals.

Everyone is getting them.

You all might remember the scare around Snowport.

And that was because of BRIC intelligence going out and scaring people to think that something much bigger was gonna happen when it was just a protest.

Now, a new report just came out from the Brennan Center at NYU law, just within the past week.

So they're not here today, but I'm going to read some of their key findings.

The Brennan Center engaged in quite a long lawsuit with the Boston Police Department and BRIC about their social media surveillance.

So here are the key findings from the Brennan Center, this, you know, respected legal institution.

Analysts use online aliases to monitor social media, often without documentation.

An individual promoting an event online can be enough to draw police surveillance.

Monitoring of public events relies largely on analyst discretion.

As I said, that's vigils, you know, for ceasefires, film screenings.

The BRIC engaged in over collection and broad circulation of information with no clear public safety value.

Information sharing is widespread, but poorly tracked.

The Boston police department engaged in unregulated social media collection, targeting minors, their networks, and witnesses to violence.

And as you all know, BPDE and BRIC relied on quote unquote exigent circumstances to bypass your permission to procure social media monitoring, just within the past year.

I will say they also have lumped many databases, dozens of databases and technologies together in the surveillance report that you get annually, so that they're not actually telling you which apps and databases they're using.

It's not just the gang database.

There are many other databases that they engage in that are shared with other law enforcement.

This body did not have to approve BPD buying dozens of flock license plate readers putting them up, and now they've paused them, but if you don't know, that is part of a new BRIC license plate reader regional network that they are setting up that has not come before this body that includes Quincy, having I think about 60 licensed plate readers, Revere, Winthrop, and other cities within BRIC.

So they are doing all of that without coming to you all regularly because of how they've lumped all of this surveillance together.

The other part of this is the federal information sharing.

So I want to be clear, BRIC and all fusion centers were set up by the Department of Homeland Security, established by DHS for the express purpose of information sharing with federal law enforcement.

No one should be surprised that today that is still happening.

DHS's current agenda is to deport as many people as possible.

And they get to do that because they established this and they made us dependent on their money for real emergency management funding through the fusion center.

You can't get the UASI grant without funding BRIC, and that is intentional to make us dependent on it so that they can have our information.

You all know that a DHS agent and an FBI agent sit in BRIC.

So every time BRIC tells you those agents cannot access the gang database, they mean they don't have their own login.

But I hope we are not foolish enough to think those agents just sit there twiddling their thumbs every day.

And you know, and you will hear from multiple people that information keeps getting to ice.

I don't know how we can be surprised when those agents are sitting there.

In addition, there is overlap with other federal task forces.

Agent Andy Creed, who's a Boston police officer in BRIC, is also part of the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.

And through the MOUs that you all, I'm so glad that you subpoenaed that that you use 17F to get those MOUs, it says when you are deputized under the JTTF, the FBI, that agent, that officer, is acting as an FBI agent.

And he sits within BRIC.

That exponentially expands how much power and information he has.

And we're still part of an ICE HSI task force.

So there's some Boston police officer, I don't know which one, who is deputized as a border agent.

If you read the documents, the MOUs that you all just produced, it is clear that officer acts as part of border enforcement, as part of that task force.

So we know through that overlap and through BRIC, information sharing keeps happening.

The Brennan Center is telling you that all of these wonderful lawyers and immigrants who are directly impacted are gonna keep telling you information is getting out.

The only way to stop that from happening is to not collect the information to begin with and to abolish BRIC.

Thank you.

Thank you, Hepe Royal.

Thank you so much to the chair for having this hearing and having us here today, and also to Counselor Mejia for your leadership on this issue.

My name is Heather Perez Arroyo, and I'm a senior immigration attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute.

I am also a resident of Jamaica Plain.

My expertise is in removal defense, and I have represented individuals who are unjustly detained by ICE since the first Trump administration at the Pair Project and also as a professor at Boston College Law School.

Most recently, I also served as counsel in Siley Doe versus DHS, a nationwide class action, where we successfully challenge the unlawful dedocumentation of nearly one million immigrants from Venezuela, Haiti, and all over the world.

In my role at MLRI, I also coordinate a statewide immigration coalition made up of nonprofit legal services providers and community-based organizations who defend and represent low-income immigrants throughout New England.

I'm here to explain the legal landscape and environment in which we are doing our work as immigration attorneys.

Since taking office in 2025, the Trump administration has executed a mass deportation campaign that puts every non-citizen at risk of arrest.

Federal agencies have been refitted and repurposed for immigration enforcement.

USCIS, the very agency that is the entire purpose is to adjudicate benefits, immigration benefits, is now acting as an arm of immigration enforcement.

They're implementing a scheme to dedocument, delay and deny.

So the purpose is to strip individuals of the lawful status that they currently have, to never adjudicate an application for that status or to outright deny applications so that people are left vulnerable to arrest and detention.

They've forced agencies that have absolutely nothing to do with immigration to share information in order to locate non-citizens to arrest them, regardless of whether they actually have a basis, a lawful basis to make an arrest or not.

Once arrested, they disappear them and then lock these immigrants up indefinitely.

In late April of 2025, Mass Law Reform launched the habeas project, the first of its kind to help facilitate access to the federal courts to challenge those unlawful detentions.

Habeas cases are overwhelmingly successful in federal court.

It's because what the government is doing, what DHS is doing is blatantly unlawful.

So judge after judge is coming to the same conclusion that that is an unlawful detention, yet they still continue to arrest individuals without conducting any, you know, adjudicating as any purpose as to why that person could lawfully be arrested and detained.

It's gotten to the point that the government submits a form response, acknowledging that the court has already ruled on the issue in prior cases, and requests that the court decide the case with no oral argument.

The individual ends up getting released, but that's after they've been traumatized by the arrest, being shackled, being taken to an unknown location, jailed for sometimes weeks on end before a judge determines that they never had the right to do that.

Hundreds of judges across the nation, including appointments from every president since Ronald Reagan have ruled in favor of unlawfully detained immigrants, ordering their release, or that an immigration conduct a bond hearing.

Detained immigrants have filed over 46,000 habeas petitions since January of 2025, and which overwhelmingly have resulted in the release from illegal detention.

But ICE's rampant campaign of detain first and ask questions later continues.

They have not changed their behavior despite their behavior being deemed unlawful over and over again.

Instead, the lawless Department of Homeland Security is saying that they get to determine whether their own actions are unlawful or not.

Just two days ago, the Homeland Security Secretary, Mark Wayne Mullen, repeatedly refused to commit to following court orders.

From judges who rule that the Department of Homeland Security has acted illegally, he is suggesting that they get to decide if they're going to file that court order or not, depending on how they view that judge.

We cannot trust the Department of Homeland Security with the information that the BRIC collects.

The BRICT is directly fueling the mass deportation machine.

There's no check on the other end that would ensure that their constitutional rights are protected.

Most often, when someone is arrested and detained, they are quickly shackled, put in a transfer van, and driven out of the state to prevent them from being able to access counsel and to challenge their unlawful detention.

This is just one of the many tactics employed to interfere with due process.

And even when someone is able to get before a judge, those orders are not always followed, and their rights continue to be violated, when the entire Department of Homeland Security decides whether they they make themselves the decision maker and decide whether their behavior is constitutional or not.

We continue to see the information that the BRIC collects, like old juvenile records and FIOs being used against clients to facilitate their deportation.

Clients who have had incidents that are supposed to be confidential that never amount to charges are disseminated through BRIC to DHS.

In 2015, a client who had a single FIO from being in a public place with an alleged gang member was detained and only released on bond of $15,000.

No criminal history, and with significant positive equities, it still was determined that $15,000 was needed to ensure that that person uh showed up to court, right?

And so in that land in the landscape today, that individual may not have been even afforded the opportunity to seek a bond, and bond is regularly being denied despite a person posing no threat to the community or any flight of risk.

Even outside of immigration court, clients continue to face heightened scrutiny when they travel, consistently being pulled into secondary because of their BRIC profile, even though they have a lawful immigration status.

For these reasons of the lack of accountability or recourse, the city council should vote against the funding that supports the BRIC.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Mario, you have seven minutes.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm an award-winning investigative journalist, and I was targeted by BRIC and had my information shared in live time with law enforcement agencies, both local, regional, and federal.

So I was targeted because I was I am an expert in the transparency laws in Massachusetts and in governmental accountability.

This occurred in 2015, this particular surveillance with me.

And the Boston police knew exactly who they were surveilling.

In my time reporting on issues of transparency and accountability, the Boston police came up multiple times, and they were aware of my reporting.

Then Commissioner Evan was asked about it on a radio program where he denounced some of my reporting.

So they knew exactly who I was and exactly what I was doing.

And I went to the 2015 Boston Marathon and documented the checkpoints where they were doing warrantless searches of absolutely everyone, and the Boston police had put out a list of requested items that people not bring.

I went down to see if this was a request, which is the sort of uh legal gray zone fiction that they were creating, or if this was being enforced as if it was a law, not there was one backing it.

And what I found was, of course, that it was being enforced as if there was a law backing it.

Um what happened when I arrived at the first checkpoint was I was told that if I invoked my Fourth Amendment rights and refused to search and attempted to enter the area on a public street, I would be arrested.

They couldn't figure out what for.

At subsequent checkpoint, I was told I wouldn't be arrested, but I wouldn't make it down the street, which I can only assume means if they're not taking me into custody and I'm not making it down the street that they're going to shoot me.

At checkpoints after that, they escalated to using physical violence to remove me from the area.

Now, I didn't know at the time, but what had happened was the BRIC had been in live time reporting my actions, my activities, who I was, the uh name of the outlet that I worked for, and disseminating it to every law enforcement agency present.

That brings the scaling threats sort of into a new light where you can already see the negative um law enforcement ramifications of having your information passed around.

I've lived them.

I didn't know about this until months later, when the BRIC had given a presentation at DHS headquarters, and DHS had actually published it.

Another journalist found it and informed the ACLU who informed me.

Uh I had been named the only quote significant event, or SIG event, I assume significant, at the 2015 marathon at whatever time they had taken the picture of their heads-up display.

And they had given a presentation on how well they can track somebody in live time in a crowd on an actual map.

And it was me.

So for me, this is a very real chilling of First Amendment freedom of press and freedom of speech.

In the wake of this, I slowed down and then stopped my in-person reporting on issues of police misconduct.

And in subsequent Trump administrations, where I've seen, you know, the targeting of journalists like myself, trans people like myself, and critics of government policy like myself, I've had to decide whether or not my reporting was worth potentially losing my life over.

Because both federally or here in Massachusetts, these negative police interactions could lead to being arrested and being, you know, imprisoned.

And either either state or federal, they put me in a men's prison.

So for me, that is really not that much different than a death sentence.

So I've written more articles, but I haven't published it.

Um this is the impact of BRIC.

Now, I did try to seek redress through the complaint system that BRIC has.

They allegedly have a privacy council.

Um I say allegedly because when I made my complaint, for the next six years, my complaint sat open.

Uh, there was no records that showed that the privacy council existed or ever met, and my complaint was never taken up.

Somewhere between year six and year seven, my complaint was closed.

Um we were, I was never uh spoken with by anybody involved.

And um subsequent records requests found that the only real takeaway that the BRIC found, they said that it was unfortunate that their law enforcement partner had posted it and that the ACLU and others had picked it up.

That was their takeaway.

Nothing about targeting a critic or a journalist.

Um nothing about how that might impact community.

For instance, uh, for example, in that same time span, um, the UK voted for Brexit and managed to leave the EU, and it took longer for the BRIC to consider a single privacy complaint.

There is no redress.

And once they share your information, you're in the databases.

You're in all of them, everywhere.

They can't undo that.

So there is no oversight.

Information does not stay with the BRIC.

That's not what they were designed to do.

They're a war on terror apparatus, and they'll use it against anybody that they see fit.

Critics and others.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councillor Shu.

Now have five minutes for questions.

We'll begin with Council.

You couldn't hear him.

Council will now begin.

She has five minutes to raise questions, issues.

We have five minutes.

I'm gonna take seven because it's just me and you and the bang here now, so I'm gonna take more than that.

I got five minutes.

How many rounds of questions do we get?

All right.

We'll see.

I have a lot of questions.

Sure.

Alright, so let's just start off.

Uh so first of all, thank you.

Um, and I know that not all of my colleagues are here today, but I want for those who are here in in this chamber and also following along virtually is that these get recorded, and so just trust that at some point, whether it's their staff or my council colleagues, they will be um reviewing the tape or being encouraged to do so by you all.

Make sure you watch the tape.

So just that's just a little friendly reminder to give a little nudge.

Um, so uh I guess let me just start off.

I have five thousand questions, but I'm gonna start with one page at a time.

Fusion centers were created to address terrorism threats after 9-11.

I lived in New York when 9-11 happened, and that was a very traumatic time, and what I noticed instinctually, even at that time, that there was um it became all about patriotism, and being an immigrant felt really scary at that time because it felt like there was an underlying attack on us, and I felt that um, and and so I would I'm hoping that you can tell us a little bit about based on your research, how has BRICS mission evolved over time and how has that expansion occurred with enough public oversight and demographic and democratic accountability?

I'm also curious as to what evidence exists that BRIC improves public safety outcomes.

We hear that a lot.

It's you know, public safety.

Yes, I I do believe in public safety, but just curious if you could just talk to us about kind of what evidence exists that BRIC actually plays a role in public safety as we know it.

Um, and how should policymakers weigh those benefits against documented concerns regarding privacy, civil liberties, and mass surveillance?

Um I'm also curious if you could talk to us a little bit about what types of information are collected, um analyzed and retained and shared through BRIC, and what are the most significant transparency gaps preventing residents and elected officials from understanding those practices?

And two more.

How are emerging technologies, including AI and social media monitoring, change um the scope and risk of intelligence gathering compared to when BRIC was first established?

So I'm just curious if you could talk to us a little bit about that evolution.

And uh my fifth question because I only have five minutes.

If the city council were to establish a robust oversight framework for BRIC, what specific reporting um requirements, audits, and performance metrics and public disclosures would you recommend?

I know that's a lot, but I have to get rid of BRIC.

You already have plenty of oversight rules auditing that they are supposed to do.

We may need you to repeat some of them, but I will start with.

They collect all sorts of information, and we don't know, you know, they produce their annual surveillance report to you that claims, you know, here's what we're doing, but as the Brennan Center just found with their social media policies, they're not actually documenting their practices.

They're using aliases to engage in social media, surveillance without documentation.

If I did a public records request for my organization, Muslim Justice League, nothing would come up because in the 600 pages of reports they put out about Palestine events, they know not to say Muslim Justice League had this event.

It says a known organization is having this event.

This organization is known for doing X, Y, and Z.

They are getting around all of the rules that exist.

So I had to read through 600 pages and know all of the Palestine events that happened to be able to say, oh, those are my events.

Those are events from Jewish voice for peace.

It's only because I know and I have too much time to focus on BRIC that I could figure that out.

I don't know where the evidence is of their public safety.

You know, I think you all have heard from them many times, but we have so much evidence of their harms, and I just want to say, I just really want to highlight how important it is that Maya shared how she was directly impacted.

You all typically hear from other people talking about who was impacted because most people impacted are incarcerated or deported or too justifiably afraid to be here.

And I'm so grateful that Maya could be here, and I hope you all take seriously how many people are impacted and can't be in front of you to tell you that.

Thank you.

May I hop in on that?

We'll come back.

I will come back to you with a second round.

Let me move to Council Peppin.

I want to add something to that.

Um, thank you.

Uh the playing with records and and saying that they don't exist is something Burke's been doing at least uh as long as I've known them.

Um, uh, in response to finding out that they had surveilled me, the first thing I did was put in a public records request to which they said no records exist.

Uh regarding the question on the BRICS mission, um, like many fusion centers, brick uh the BRIC was created for counterterrorism, but the they quickly ran into a problem.

Uh political violence, right?

Terrorism is an exceedingly remote phenomena.

There isn't enough terrorism to justify this massive investment of resources.

So the mission became all crimes, all threats, all hazards.

So this is a nebulous mission.

This is everything under the sun, right?

Uh you know, I would ask the BRIC, uh BRIC command what their collection requirements are, right?

Why are why are they collecting information?

Right?

What we've seen.

What the Brennan Center report that Fatima documented, it's the discretion of the analysts.

It's discretionary.

There isn't a consistent, coherent um, you know, uh agenda for why they monitor what they monitor, right?

And what we see when we look at their reports is there's a clear, there's a clear uh bias, right?

There's a focus on, you know, you give police uh you give police fancy surveillance technologies and they're just gonna use it to do what they already do.

So what fusion centers have done more so than prevent terrorism is just supercharge the war on drugs and the war on crime and you know the war on public disorder, right?

Uh I think we can do better than you know police solutions to these social problems.

Uh, one quick thing also on effectiveness of uh like evidence of the BRICS that the BRIC improves public safety outcomes, right?

So let me tell you a secret that every criminologist knows and that the police knows.

We cannot connect police practice to changes in the in the crime rate, right?

So the what I tell my students in my intro to criminology class classroom, right?

We had a huge crime drop in the 1990s, right?

Crime peaked in the early 90s and it's been consistently trending downward.

Why has this happened, right?

Huge debate, many contending explanations.

Right?

Boston is sometimes held up the Boston miracle.

Boston had a huge reduction in crime with the original operation ceasefire that was, you know, essentially an early violence interruption program.

New York City also had a huge drop in crime at the same time but with totally different methods, right?

This was Comstat, this was public order policing, this was stop and frisk, right?

Two cities, similar drops in crime, totally different police practices, right?

So what does this tell us?

The police don't have a uh don't have a we can't have a we cannot scientifically connect um and show that police practice actually causes crime rates to drop right the social world is very complicated.

There's many factors that causes crime to rise and fall what police do is not prevent crime they intervene after the fact to you know maintain public order right so um you know I know we like to associate police with with um you know with with crime control but it isn't you know there the the social science isn't there right it doesn't it isn't backed up right and what we can say is when we look at other countries with much lower crime rates what do they have they have a much more robust you know social welfare system right so if you want to eliminate crime meet people's basic needs right that's what the social science shows thank you Mr.

Chair and I just want to say that just thank you so much for for your testimony for you providing that panel this um opening statements because it was really eye-opening to a lot of the things that I already knew was happening and just what's happening in our federal government the mistrust that I already have honestly with the Department of Homeland Security and everything that's happening with our presidential administration.

I in a different world once wanted to be an immigration attorney and I was very deep into the conversations of what we're having in today which is why even as a city counselor I do talk a lot about immigration rights and making sure we're protecting and setting up for our our residents which is why I've always been very I I've questioned the brick a lot of the practices in making sure that are we doing the right thing here and what I'm hearing is that the lack of trust has only increased obviously since Trump point one or Trump point too and now I think that we are at a place where I want to see a lot of I want to see the city of Boston not working with the DHS.

I want to see us not working with any collaborating with any Federal Bureau where we know that if they're not governing right themselves how can we make sure that they're not impacting our residents here in the city of Boston as well I don't really have a question for you all because I I know what people are going through based on stories that I'm hearing from residents in my own districts from coalitions that are are working like Rise Rosenholes for everyone making sure that immigrants feel protected and are not being impacted by stuff like actually counselor mean joined me for a working session on an evening about what was that two months ago now in Rosen now to have the to have a conversation like this about how we can protect our residents at a very hyper-local level at a time where nothing is certain especially with someone like Mark Mark Waynewick Mulling up there who God knows he has no moral backbone but um I Fatima you mentioned something that I am very passionate about, and it's you brought up the the plate scanners.

And the reason why I say I'm passionate about this, not the scanning of the plates.

It's about transportation enforcement.

And something that I keep hearing from my residents is that they're tired of seeing drivers violate the red sign the the red lights of of traffic, the traffic lights or people that violate the bus lanes.

This is something that I'm talking about with the ACOU about how do we find the middle ground of if we are going to use potentially camera enforcement like Providence, Rhode Island and other places do across across the country.

How do we do it in a way that doesn't violate people's rights?

Has have you or any of the organizations on this panel done any studies about this?

Because this is I'm trying to find the middle ground here where we can make sure people are not running red lights and not breaking laws that have unfortunately killed residents already, but um not in a way that it's stored and now they're being vigilized for everything.

Yeah, that's such a good question.

It would actually be helpful to have a hearing to get into it because the technology changes so quickly, like Flock as a license plate reader company has suddenly taken over and now has an office in Seaport because they've expanded so rapidly, right?

And with the rise of AI, I will say personally, it's hard for me to keep track of like which technologies we feel comfortable with, but I think part of this is about who has access to those cameras, right?

In the past, counselor Mejia probably remembers this, and maybe Counselor Braden.

Livable streets, Boston Cyclist Union, a bunch of transportation focused organizations have come here and said, abolish BRIC.

Everyone agrees that we have to abolish BRIC, and that we want to take traffic enforcement out of policing, because policing, the Vera Institute and many other respected institutes will tell you the number one way that black and brown people are racially profiled and come into contact with police is traffic stops.

And if we actually find other ways to handle that through like civil processes that are not locking people up and not putting them in front of someone with a gun, not arresting them.

This just happened in Brookline.

ICE just grabbed someone in Brookline when he came out of the police station, and he had been arrested on a traffic violation, an immigrant man.

So that is one of the biggest ways that black and brown people come into contact with policing and actually diverting that to other methods where a transportation department is handling that kind of enforcement would be really helpful.

Okay.

Thank you so much for that recommendation.

I know my time is up.

I just want to thank you for for all the for all of you for providing this information very helpful as a counselor to just have this at our disposal.

So thank you.

Thank you, I got a few questions in.

The first question that I have had to do with the uh knife attack in Paris.

Can you speak of project culture?

The knife attack in Paris.

Why would the BRIC be interested in a knife attack in Paris?

So this is one of the big um criticisms of fusion centers in general, right?

So uh intelligence, you know, analysis is supposed to be like to inform decision makers about emergent threats.

What people, you know, across inside the intelligence community, you know, in the you know, police professionalizers, civil libertarians, many people criticize fusion centers as not being real intelligence producers, they're information brokers.

So what they're doing is chasing headlines, right?

So there is a um, you know, there was knife attacks happening in Paris.

This was in the news, right?

So the BRIC puts that in their homeland security bulletin and sends it out to every cop in Boston, but there's no connection to Boston, right?

So you're the question why are they interested in that?

Yeah, they're interested in that because they have too many resources invested in a mission that doesn't warrant to them, right?

Political violence is an exceedingly remote phenomenon, right?

Like uh, so the BRIC has these 30 like threat analysts.

What are they doing?

They're monitoring social movement organizations, and then they're acting as like a third-rate news aggregator, right?

And they're sending uh local police summaries of political violence abroad and warning them to be vigilant while having their official disclaimer, we have no uh connection to, we have there's no local nexus.

We have no information about a local threat, but be aware of this, right?

The other thing I would add, you know, the most significant instance of political violence in this city, the Boston Marathon bombing, right?

When that happened, what was the consequence?

Or what was the fallout?

It was the FBI, the CIA, and BPD pointing fingers at each other.

You know, we had the security apparatus had information on the Cernayev brothers, but nobody acted on it.

Why is that, right?

Uh what was the BRIC doing at that time?

They were monitoring Occupy Boston, right?

So uh my answer to you would be you know, it's too much resources invested in so-called counterterrorism, and what these officers do is they're looking for threats, you know, to fill up their days and justify their jobs.

Thank you.

Could I add something specific?

Absolutely.

Um the other part of this that is clear from reading all of these reports, BRIC is not sending out reports to all the hospitals and universities here every time there's a fight in a South E bar.

That knife attack was a Muslim.

They think it's more important to send that out because of Islamophobia.

And that is very much what created BRIC.

That is what justifies what BRIC does every day.

So those reports about ceasefire events that were happening here, all of those reports start with Al Qaeda is saying this, ISIS is saying this, and then it will list events from Jewish Voice for Peace Boston, from Muslim Justice League, from students at Harvard who are demanding a ceasefire.

So they are actually pairing what they are seeing from these terrorist organizations, and they are using something called site, S-I-T-E, that gives them a feed of what happens with these organizations.

That organization site is known for being wildly Islamophobic.

And I really hope that you all, the next time the surveillance annual report comes up and they say that they're using the site database, like eliminating that would be greatly helpful.

But yes, they are, you know, they are always going to talk about anything that Muslim folks are doing or black and brown people are doing to justify um more policing and and scare everybody.

Maya, let me ask you a question with regard to your situation.

What kind of, if any, recourse did you have, or what kind of steps did you take, if any, to try and to try and make what happened to you.

And the final analysis equitable.

Let me try and use it from that perspective.

Sure.

Um, well, for me, what I did was I tried to engage the um internal complaint system that BRIC is supposed to have.

Um, and that included sort of documenting what I had and putting in the records request, trying to make sure that I had everything that they had, which they claimed not to have anything.

Um, and then putting together a complaint detailing everything that happened and um which parts of the BRICS policy it violated.

Um it gets into some nitty gritty stuff.

Like they're supposed to evaluate information before they share it, but if they're sharing it in lifetime, they're not evaluating it.

They're just disseminating it instantly.

Um their claim eventually that they had destroyed it immediately afterward, um, the data, despite there still clearly being pictures of it and whatnot, that they gave presentations about.

Um their reasoning for that was that it my data that they say wasn't valuable without looking at it, which is a violation of their policy.

My complaint went into several different things, including the basically false reply to my records requests.

And that's as far as an internal thing that I could do is I could make that complaint.

And like I said, for the next six years, it sat open and unaddressed because the privacy council was a fiction.

There was nobody assigned to it and no meetings that we could find.

And then it was just simply closed, having never spoken to me.

And their findings, their biggest finding, there was some records that we found.

It was I'll read it.

This is from their own synopsis of their looking into the event.

On August 4th, the BRIC presented at the National Geospatial Preparedness Summit in Washington, DC.

The presentation was intended to share GIS mapping related lessons learned by the BRIC over the last several years in our efforts to provide support to the BBD's special events and critical incidents.

Our development of a quote quote common operating picture, end quote COP for sharing operational information such as events, incidents in real time.

On October 19th, we were advised our presentation was posted on the internet by the hosts of the training conference.

We requested it that it be removed and destroyed.

Our request was honored.

Unfortunately, the ACLU and others picked up on it, found it controversial, and brought additional attention to it to Twitter.

That was their only takeaway.

And really, I had no further recourse.

I published about it, and I'm here to talk about it today because you know you are the folks that could potentially stop this.

This is DHS in your local police, and it's their agenda, not yours, not mine, not ours.

Thank you.

I want to acknowledge Councilor Braden.

Counselor Brain, I've given the counselor five minutes for questioning, but because you're a little late, I'll give you five minutes for your opening statement and your questions.

Thank you.

Mr.

Chair, I think uh one of our panelists had something to add to that your previous question.

Just to add that I and other attorneys have actually been successful in that complaint process and have had clients who have been removed from the gang database, and the harm continues, right?

Um the response that you get is that the client does not appear in the database, and that's it, right?

Like, so you this client is not in BRIC.

I've used that evidence in immigration court to say all that previous evidence that has been submitted has is has actually been removed.

He's no longer in that in that database, so you shouldn't rely on that evidence because this isn't reliable evidence.

They still use it against him.

And so the problem is once you're in, you're in.

There's actually no way to remove that past harm.

It becomes like a legacy, right?

That there's going to be continued access to the information that they use to make that determination, but also to the fact that you are in it at one point.

So even for people who have been successful in that process, the harm continues to be perpetuated against that individual.

Right, sorry.

I thought.

Meyer.

Thank you so much.

Um, yeah, in my initial few minutes, I tried to say that it's a fiction to say that they can pull this back from other places.

Once it's out, it's out.

Right.

What was the procedure you use when you did pursue information that you knew was there that they said wasn't there?

What did you then do?

Well, so for for many for our posture is a little bit different because we don't have to guess what's already in there, it's been presented in immigration court against our client, right?

So it's a little easier when you already have the information that they're relying on and you just can submit a complaint, and we're thankful that there is a process that exists, but the point of it is that unless you have access to all that information up front, it's hard to know what's even in there.

And second, when you go through the process that they've created, it still doesn't result in a r of remedy that's going to be effective.

What's that process?

What's that process?

It's essentially just filling out reaching out directly to the BRIC, um, and with a letter saying this is the information, and I'm challenging um the you know my client's inclusion in the BRIC.

And so did you at any point with any cases pursue it in court?

No, not a court procedure, just directly with the BRIC, yes.

Thank you, Counselor.

Council Braden.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Um good afternoon, everyone.

Thank you for being here.

Um I'm sorry for being late.

I I had another meeting.

Um I think the the concerns I have about the BRIC, because it's really about the potential for the federal government to access and like I would say steal the data um and using it uh in ways that can harm our immigrants, our black and brown communities, and then also increasingly concerns about um their surveillance of social movements and uh political activism, uh nonviolent political activism, and then also uh, you know, just just surveilling people who are exercising the First Amendment right to protest or gather.

So that's a big concern of mine.

Um I also worried that residents, that the very fact that there is this surveillance that residents will fear uh government mon monitoring and that we're going to have an increased uh sort of pullback from engage, you know, reporting of crime.

Um we have we've had these many, many conversations many times, uh, and that's why the the trust act is so important and how to be really disciplined about enforcing that and keeping the keeping the line between the that sort of firewall between uh our police department and and immigration is is really critically important.

I was just wondering what's the explicit legal authority under which BRIC operates and where is the authority defined?

Like who who who defines it, and then who provides independent oversight over their data practices and partnerships if there's any.

And once Boston shares information with federal partners, does the city retain any control over how that data may be used?

Those are just a few of my questions.

So the fusion centers operate, they're usually founded by a um executive order from the governor.

They operate under what is it, code of federal regulations part 23, which governs like uh federal law enforcement databases.

Um in terms of you know what allow the in terms of um like that does do local jurisdictions have any control over how their data is used, uh the answer is is no, right?

Like few the the problem from, you know, uh the way the problem was defined after 9-11 was that we had all this data on people, but we didn't connect the dots.

So to connect the dots, we need to integrate uh we need to create uh what they called an information sharing environment.

And we needed to make it so federal, I mean the real priority of fusion centers from you know DC's perspective is we need federal intel federal uh intelligence and law enforcement agencies, they need to have access to local law enforcement data.

And the way we're gonna do that is create these fusion centers which then become like fishing pools for federal agencies to access data, and they can access this data in many ways.

There's something called the Homeland Security Information Network, which links all 80 of these fusion centers and allows you know information to travel across fusion centers.

Then there is the embedded federal personnel in fusion centers.

And as Fatima mentioned, right, what what uh operators and defenders of fusion centers will say is well they don't have a a um a login to these databases, so they're they're protected.

But if you read, you know, if you read the um Homeland Security Trade Publications like Homeland Security Today or the Academic Journal Homeland Security Affairs, uh what they talk about is like the one of the big values of fusion centers is to get people in the same room and facilitate informal information sharing.

So it's like how does this information get to us from you know local law uh local local jurisdictions?

It gets, you know, from this off the books uh in-person information sharing, which is which is um uh you know, kind of impossible to regulate.

Yes, yes.

So uh the ACLU, like in 2008, put out one of the first big reports on fusion centers, and they kind of denounced them, they denounced this practice of policy shopping.

So when you have a task force and you have you have a state agency, local agency, federal agency, they're all operating under different rules, and they can pick and choose like who is gonna be the person to do the action who has the most permissive legal authority to get from point A to point B, right?

So this is why we say abolish the BRIC, it's beyond reform.

It's designed to evade accountability, it's designed to operate in the cracks between state, local, federal uh law.

Okay.

Council Mahia, we'll give you five more minutes.

And Council Braden, were you finished?

But did you need more time?

Because I want to.

If you have, if we know you're very generous.

I know you're I know I know he likes to give people more time.

He likes more time himself.

I have a couple more questions if if it's permissible, Mr.

Chair.

Or I can wait to Council Mejia's finished.

Uh I'm trying to take control.

No, you can't do that.

Council Mahia has five minutes.

Um, then we'll give you five more minutes.

Then we'll move to the second panel.

And we'll give you closing remarks, two minutes for your closing remarks, and then we'll move to the second panelist.

Council Mejia.

Okay.

I think that those folks who have been following me know probably why I'm trying to be silenced and censored in this in this debate here today.

I'm just teasing.

Um, yeah, uh, we'll review the tape too to see how much time you've given other people as opposed to me, but I'm teasing you.

Um, so I you know, it's budget season, y'all, right now, and we've been talking about where we can reallocate funds from.

And there's been some question around BRIC.

And I was like, well, let's put BRIC on the shopping block and let's take some of their money so that we can reallocate it to youth jobs and housing.

But then there was some question, well, is a grant is federal.

So can someone here on this panel tell me how much money does the Boston City Council approve for BRIC, if at all any?

Yes.

So BRIC doesn't tell you, and we have been researching it.

Our colleague Allie will talk about the grant more on the next panel.

BRIC claims that their budget, their annual budget for BRIC is about four million dollars.

But there are all of these technologies and other items BRIC uses that don't fall in BRIC's exact budget, like the license plate readers and so on.

And so we estimate, you know, what's connected to BRIC, that budget is much bigger, like shot spotter, camera, there's a regional camera network.

There's so many elements connected to BRIC that don't fall directly in its budget.

So it might be closer to like eight million if you can if you take into consideration all of that.

The DHS grant that comes in covers, and Allie will say this I think about half of the four million for BRIC, and then also covers some of those other technologies as well.

BRIC themselves told you all last year when we talked about this, they would be fine without the grant because the police budget is big enough to do whatever they want.

So they're fine.

Office of emergency management is dependent on that grant because I think may have actually been created because of the grant, even.

So we need to look at actually funding the emergency management side, making sure they're okay without that grant.

The police are always gonna be fine.

They have plenty of money.

So even if you said no to that grant, BPD you know is gonna find it elsewhere.

Um but we do need the city to take seriously.

How can we fund real emergency management services and not have it tied to DHS's requirements?

That grant says that BRIC and BPD have to do election security for this upcoming election under DHS's agenda.

You all know what Trump means by election security, right?

They're talking about policing immigrants and anyone who they don't want, you know, voting and participating in society here.

Um, so we do have to say no to federal money because there's strings attached.

And in the budget process, we should also be considering like why are we why did we not set up our own office of emergency management?

Why are we not making sure that they're funded regardless of what happens with brick and and policing and surveillance?

Yeah, and I'm glad that you I know we can talk a little bit further in the second panel, but I this is just a question that has come up, and since I've been a big uh you know, proponent of like abolishing BRIC and getting rid of the gang database.

I'm just trying to think about kind of what the narrative is and usually what people would say no to and because of why.

Um, and then you know, it it would be helpful for me to hear from folks who are doing the work living the realities every single day, um, because when these grants have come through the council, I've been one of the few voices to oppose and and so I'm just curious about the narrative around kind of what are we communicating to our constituents every single time we accept these grants, um, and we continue to fund things that could be harmful to black and brown people and immigrants.

So, kind of like what would you say to my colleagues?

Uh, and especially because the second there's gonna be another grant coming down the pipeline.

What would you say?

I'll I'll quote uh Brookline Town Meeting member Chi Chi Wu, who helped pass the resolution that will have Brookline investigate pulling out of BRIC.

She said, I don't want blood money.

I think that's you know, like that's how those folks feel about it.

They can see that the DHS strings are attached to that funding.

We know what DHS's agenda is, and we know what it's doing to our community members.

We have to stop selling our people out.

Yeah, no, I hear that.

And and I think.

Thank you, counselor.

Thank you, counselor.

I just want to play that relic back how many times you kept asking Heather questions, even though you are way past your time, but you are the chair, and I'm gonna respect you.

But I just want to know for the record that I will be doing a rewind, and you will be on my tea time Instagram video for this moment.

Just remember what Maxine Waters said.

Go ahead, take it.

Thank you so much.

Panelists who used to have two minutes to uh wrap up so we can move on to the next.

Oh, counselor, I almost forgot to.

I almost forgot to go take three minutes and then we'll give each panelist two minutes to to wrap up their time, and then we can move to the next panel.

Thank you.

Good, thank you.

Um, thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Um I was just wondering.

Um I thank you for your raising the issue about the emergency management center, because I think that's the that's a particular, as you say, the emergency management center is uh is coordinating emergency responses to natural disasters, uh, all sorts of airplane crashes, whatever.

Uh, and the fact that we're relying on BRIC, uh not the BRIC grant to fund something that's essential to our uh sort of public safety and security in the city and a more civilian level like across the board is sort of disturbing uh that that we're that we're and that the strings are attached to the BRIC grant that that make it problematic.

Um I'm just wondering how long does the BRIC retain data collected through the ALPRs and the social media monitoring and field intelligence reports.

Do we know how long those those those records are held and what's the sort of tail to it?

I think we don't we don't know for the ALPRs because they like bought or they didn't buy, they did a free pilot of the new flock ALPRs, and then took them down without coming to you all.

So we don't have anything from them.

I literally physically went around the street, like we found some of them, and then I had to go back out and check myself to see that they were taken down.

Yeah.

Um, so we don't know.

And I think on the social media, I mean, according to the Brennan Center, yeah, very little documentation of their practices and data retention.

So we, you know, they engaged in this lengthy lawsuit with them.

I know they had many conversations with BPD's lawyers, and they don't know either.

Um can data be collected for one purpose and then repurposed for intelligence analysis without the notice to the individual concerned.

Like they can look at something that seems perfect perfectly benign in one context, and they can they can apportion some question to it in another context.

Yeah, I mean, they we've received no notice that they were looking at our Instagram account for our organization and putting out all of these reports about our events.

It's only through our public records requests and just you know, community members coming forward with hey, are they are they surveilling me?

So it's our research that has uncovered that.

They're not, yeah, they don't tell anybody, um, and you know, they can look at our social media and not even document it and just say out loud to the person next to them, like, oh, you know, look at what MJL just posted.

So that's that informal communication that's very hard to track.

Yeah, yeah.

Very good.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Thank you, counselor.

Uh we'll give each panelist two minutes, and then we'll move on to uh some public testimony.

We've got one person on Zoom to testify, and then only four persons that are present.

We'll give them each two minutes after this panel.

We'll call up the next panel, and then we'll once again give some maybe five minutes.

Alice.

I can start.

I want to thank um Brendan and Maya for both driving long distances to be here and and thank the next panel and everyone who keeps showing up to city council to to talk about this.

And again, I think you're gonna hear from more and more cities that want to pull out of BRIC because of these concerns, but the power really lies within Boston to actually abolish BRIC.

It sits within the Boston Police Department.

Um, and I'm I'm grateful that the council keeps talking about this.

I wish more counselors were here.

Um, and we'd love to have follow-up conversations because the UASC grant vote will come at some point, and you'll have the surveillance tech reapproval at some point too, and you have the power to get rid of these things in the meantime, right?

Even without the DHS grant, we don't want BRIC to continue just without that funding and still looking at our social media and still um, you know, surveilling us for constitutionally protected activities.

So at the end of the day, we're gonna keep demanding that you abolish BRIC, and there's just more and more people joining our voices every time.

Uh well, thank you all for this opportunity to uh speak to you today.

Um I guess in closing, the one thing that I would want to emphasize is that you know, even though you are um, you know, city counselors in one particular city, like the stakes of this battle are quite high.

So when fusion centers uh when DHS was created, right?

This was right after the dot com uh boom went bust, right?

And what political economists had found have found is that this surge in security spending that uh accompanied the creation of DHS and fusion centers had had a you know was basically uh security Keynesianism.

It helped fund helped uh restore the economy.

So what I would the important thing here is that fusion centers are uh, you know, there's this whole complex of private interests, you know, security vendors that are driving and lobbying to expand uh surveillance, right?

Uh and the way these operate increasingly is as platforms, right?

So flock security is kind of like Uber for surveillance cameras, right?

Like if Boston has flock cameras, then data picked up on those cameras are accessible to anyone with a flock um flock login.

So what we're doing is actually increasing the value the the you know the data that local jurisdictions are giving is feeding into nation, you know, privatized nationwide surveillance systems, right?

So, you know, if you were to shut down the brick, you'd be doing something very valuable in that you'd be uh, you know, shrinking the market and reducing the power of these firms that are trying to make money in you know very cynical and anti-democratic ways, right?

That I think are trending towards you know a future where it's harder to exercise our basic constitutional rights.

Thank you.

Thank you again for the opportunity to be here today.

Um I really do appreciate it.

And what I heard today was that the Boston City Council doesn't want to support ICE, that the Boston City Council doesn't want to support DHS's mass deportation campaign, that the Boston City Council wants to protect our vulnerable immigrant neighbors.

As long as a brick exists, that goal could never be achieved.

The Trump administration is working extremely hard to access information that it doesn't have access to right now.

It's going after the IRS to provide information about immigrants.

It's it's using utilizing all of its agencies that have never shared information in the past, including TSA, USCIS.

You have ICE coming to the immigration courts when people are showing up for their hearings.

You have ICE going to appointments when people are showing up for their applications to go through that process because that's the information that they have.

So it is ridiculous to believe that they would not access the information through this fusion center.

They have direct access to it already.

So this they are using it.

It is the fuel to the mass deportation campaign, and as long as it exists, that's what the Boston City Council is doing.

It's giving a thumbs up to that campaign.

Thank you.

Mario.

Thank you so much for having me here today.

And this is really the first venue for serious redress of what happened to me.

Um more importantly, the BRIC is uh tender of DHS operating right here.

There is no firewall, there's not going to be because it was designed as a post-9-11 pass-through of information.

That is what its function has always been.

It's what it always will be, as long as it's allowed to exist.

And once you're sharing information, you can't pull it back.

So the brick has to go.

Thank you to all the panelists.

Thank you so much.

We'll now move to now move to a public testimony.

Council Mahir has to say something real quick.

That's right, real quick.

Um, I I want to note that we were super intentional about making this hearing uh a listening session for us to hear.

Normally we would have the administration here, so I just don't want you all to think that we did not invite the administration.

What we really want it is to have this hearing be focused on the research on the lived experience and how to create space for my council colleagues to hear a different perspective.

And so that's just wanted to just name that in case you all are wondering why the administration is not here.

For the public testimony.

Yes, I'm going to take these four public testimonies first, then we'll go to the panelists.

Thank you.

And Linda Flores.

You can step to the mic starting with Alex.

Hello.

Thank you.

Okay, the mic is two minutes.

Hi, my name is Alex Matthews.

I am the co-chair of Digital Forth.

We are a local volunteer civil liberties group that deals with privacy and surveillance issues.

We've been researching and advocating around the BRICS since 2013.

There are a couple of things I'd like to highlight regarding BRIC.

First, there is a lot of pressure on BRIC from the Feds.

And the Feds are very interested in identifying people who they perceive as being threatening along a number of axes that you may not be familiar with the federal government being interested in.

They have identified as targets, people who are in their eyes anti-Christian, anti-capitalist or critical of traditional gender binaries.

They are now targeting comments critical of AI or of data centers, and we just received word today that down in Pennsylvania, Fusion Center is cooperating with that.

New AI technologies enable any analyst to surface your entire online footprint to integrate it and to surface interpretations of how much you constitute a threat.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Susan fellow by Bernard Deck and then Linda Flores.

Hello, I'm Susan Moyer.

I'm here as a member of the old Dykes Against Billionaire Tech Bros.

Trying to get his attention.

Hi.

So I think I would say first of all, there are credible threats.

Very credible threats against our safety, quality of our lives against our communities.

And I would say that I think that environmental destruction and mass surveillance supporting authoritarianism, authoritarianism are bigger threats than domestic terrorism.

So we're in the wrong ballpark.

We're not going after the threats.

One of the things I want to mention is there are nine cities and towns in BRIC.

What are the resources of Brookline versus Chelsea?

Or Cambridge versus Winthrop.

How are these this massive amount of money spread around.

Is it even?

No, I would say probably lower resources in Chelsea and probably higher criminalization by the cops.

So you've heard all about the abuses.

You've heard the lies they tell.

You've heard the market strategy.

We're against the billionaire tech boroughs.

They are selling you products so that they can get richer and richer and spend the summer on their yachts or on Mars.

They can send one of them, send all of them.

So I think I want to say that I was a I'm a labor person.

So I know the power of the police unions.

I sat on the executive board of the AFL CIO for many years.

I was a member of the Greater Boston Labor Council.

Those people have kids too.

And our kids are not all right.

And our kids are not all right because of authoritarianism and environmental destruction.

Those are the credible threats to our lives.

One other thing that I think is going to get mentioned on the next panel before I get cut off.

What is the definition of domestic terrorism?

Well, they're threatened down in their annual blah blah blah blah.

In the last one that they put out that this administration put out, extreme trans ideology is defined as domestic terrorist terrorism.

I stand before you as a domestic terrorist and say we should concentrate on the environmental problems.

We should concentrate on stopping authoritarianism, and this whole thing we're talking about is a foundation for promoting a domestic uh authoritarianism.

And we should really think about how evenly resources are spread out in this region that is now called BRIC.

How about a regional improvement center for the citizens of all of this whole area?

Thank you very much.

And then Linda Flores.

Hi.

So I'm Bernadette Murphy.

I'm a resident of Rosalindale, and I'm a newly retired public school high school teacher.

Uh I taught social studies.

And one of the wonderful things about teaching social studies is you get to talk about civics and the importance of speaking out.

And of course, I did that with my students.

So when I learned about BRIC, I felt like I needed to come and talk to you.

I think that when I read the uh some of a summary of the Brennan report, and I'm most concerned with the uh broad monitoring of social media without specific policies or documentation.

And having been a high school teacher for a lot of years in a lot of different places, I just want to say that I am worried about students and young people who get pulled into the databases of BRIC, and then they get they get labeled, and we know that that happens to young people all the time, and especially, of course, uh young people uh of color.

And it's important to me that here, as a resident of the city, that we have this opportunity, you have this opportunity to get rid of BRIC.

And it's so very important.

Um, and also my work as an activist in my life.

I could get labeled a domestic terrorist, as Susan mentioned.

And this is this is crazy stuff.

This is big brother.

This is all the other things we've taught in schools.

Look out for, you know, in 1984.

What is happening right here in this country?

I also want to mention that the two most important things would be the threats to the credible threats to monitoring from the 2024 elections, right?

So there were no credible threats, but there was monitoring of the 2024 elections.

This is not helpful.

And then last, um, that they have these policies they haven't finished developing, and they've been developing them from 2022.

And let me end with if we give up freedom for security, we're in danger of losing both.

And that was Benjamin Franklin said that to us, right?

Okay, thanks.

Linda Flores.

Linda Flores.

I am Linda Flores, but I'm an interpreter.

Oh, you're an interpreter, yeah.

So I think um and you have no testimony.

I don't, but she is here, I believe.

We're gonna get right to the panelists.

So there's no more.

Requests from the public.

No more.

Well, let us move to the panelists now.

Two of our panelists are on.

Thank you.

Two of our panelists are virtue or virtual, Allie Finn and Sarah Stokes.

Our virtual.

And Sarah and Allie will give you seven minutes.

I want to bring up the other two panelists, Wendy Lazo, and Reverend Annie Gonzalez.

Thank you.

And uh Ali, you have seven minutes, and then we'll move on to Sarah Stokes.

Sarah.

You'll have seven minutes and then we'll move to our panelists.

Thank you.

Ali, you have the floor.

Wonderful.

Can you hear me okay?

Great.

Thank you so much for having me.

My name is Ali Finn.

I'm a researcher and a policy advocate focused on surveillance technology, the impacts of AI systems and infrastructure and technology policy.

I currently work as the director of community partnerships at the AI Now Institute.

I'm here testifying in personal capacity.

I've conducted research on the Homeland Security Grant Program, specifically the Urban Area Security Initiative or UASI since 2022, and research into BRIC and UASI over the past year and a half.

My testimony will focus on how DHS's UASI program functions as a Trojan horse and who it serves and does not serve in Boston.

So my first point is that UASI purports to support emergency response, but in reality diverts critically needed funding from actual emergency services and public health, trapping cities including Boston into increased spending on policing and surveillance and targeting of immigrants.

UASI enables the federal government to further impose its priorities onto Boston and other localities.

It looks like a multi-million dollar gift, but it's actually a mechanism for federal control and harm to communities.

So DHS requires that cities allocate 35% of the total grant for what's called law enforcement terrorism prevention activities.

In reality, this broadly correlates and is used to excuse surveillance and militarized policing equipment, training, and staffing that the city does not need.

This percentage requirement has increased over the last five years from 25 to 35% from 2021, reducing the amount of funding with available within the grant for actual emergency response.

And it's DHS, not the city of Boston that determines what these funds can be spent on.

As I believe the council knows, DHS also requires that all grant recipients use the funds for at least one project for their local or state fusion center.

And DHS also sets priorities for the UASI program overall, requiring that grantees allocate a percentage of the funds towards specific focus areas that it decides through determining national priority areas.

These also broadly correlate to information sharing with between local and federal authorities and surveillance and policing technologies, and the Trump administration has further weaponized these priorities, which I'll speak about in a moment.

Critically, cities including Boston cannot access the funds for actual emergency response projects like public health without meeting these spending priorities.

And alarmingly, our research shows that the city of Boston has not only followed these requirements but exceeded them.

So the City of Boston's spending on LETPA are consistently higher than DHS and FEMA requirements.

Over the last five years, in some years, exceeding 50% of the total uh grant allocations in the proposals.

Strings have always been attached to UASI funding since the foundation of the program, but the Trump administration is further instrumentalizing this to push its agenda onto Boston and other localities.

Based on the 2025 updates to the program, DHS now requires local and state governments to cooperate with ICE in order to access millions of UASI funding.

This prompted huge outcry last year.

So grant recipients are required to dedicate at least 10% of their awarded funds towards border crisis response and enforcement.

This would be 92.7 million across the country.

And this includes participation in 287G, cooperating with ICE detainers, and technology and information sharing.

The terms also state that by accepting funding, grantees certify, they won't use UASI to advance or promote DEI or operate any programs that benefits illegal immigrants or incentivizes illegal immigration.

I'm quoting there.

And there's also a minimum requirement spend, as Fatima mentioned for election security, which can similarly be weaponized.

DHS has threatened to withdraw all funding from grantees that don't meet this threshold.

This happened in Massachusetts, it's being challenged in court.

But the point here is not the reduction of funding, it's that this whole grant program is rotten at the core to begin with, and it is not worth it.

What does UASI actually fund in Boston?

In many cases, it's direct surveillance technology that city residents themselves have opposed.

Shot spotter, cameras, license plate readers, digital forensics tools that allow police to break into locked devices and put together these are tools for mass data collection and analysis on Boston residents in collaboration with BRIC on a scale more broad than the gang database that would allow agencies with access to this information to share with the federal government.

And I want to ask the council do you know exactly what UASI funds or how much DHS has access to the information that technologies collect?

My guess is no, and that is by the design of the grant and how these information sharing systems work.

So to conclude, I want to point out that UASI and its funding for the BRIC is a gift not to Boston residents but to a federal administration at the expense of Boston residents.

It's a gift to them of a controversial gang database that can further expand immigration detentions, a gift to the Trump administration of a fusion center that surveils and criminalizes both Muslim and Jewish communities.

It's a gift to the Trump administration of expanded police tech and immigration enforcement that Boston residents have consistently rejected.

And I urge you to strongly reconsider any continued participation in the program.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I want to move to uh Sarah Stokes.

Sarah, are you on?

Hi, good afternoon.

I apologize.

Um I had to rejoin.

Can everyone hear me?

You have seven minutes.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Um, thank you, Counselor Mejia, for your leadership, and thank you all for convening this hearing.

My name is Sarah Sherman Stokes.

I am a clinical professor of law at Boston University School of Law, where I teach immigration law and I am the associate director of the immigrants' rights clinic.

In this role, I have researched and written about the intersection of detention, deportation, immigrant surveillance, and enforcement.

Our clinic also represents people facing deportation across New England.

I'm here to tell you the story of one of those people, a young man named Orlando.

Orlando was a high school student, a part-time restaurant worker, a son and a brother, when a mundane disagreement in a Boston high school cafeteria led to his arrest, detention, and deportation.

When Orlando was a teenage student at East Boston High School, he had a verbal disagreement in the school cafeteria, basically a teenage right of passage.

But in Orlando's case, another teenager alleged incorrectly that Orlando was affiliated with a gang.

This information, based on the unsubstantiated rumor of a teenage boy, was entered into the BRIC gang database.

Shortly thereafter, ICE showed up at Orlando's family's home, arrested Orlando, held him in immigration detention for nearly two years.

During this time, Orlando struggled mightily as we tenaciously fought his case.

Sadly, Orlando became extremely depressed and then suicidal.

He could not tolerate prolonged separation from his father and two brothers and being confined with adult men, and the prospect of being deported to a place he had fled as a young toddler.

Ultimately, ICE deported Orlando to El Salvador, where he now lives in fear and poverty.

The only reason this happened, the only reason that Orlando was targeted, arrested, detained, and deported, is because of the BRIC.

The BRIC is a spy center.

It is a centralized site of massive information sharing between law enforcement agencies and an incredibly popular surveillance tool.

It is funded largely by DHS.

The origin stories story of this fusion center or of fusion centers in general, as others have said, is racist, it is Islamophobic and bigoted.

Fusion centers were created in the early 2000s in the wake of 9-11, and the racist anti-Muslim rhetoric that fueled the creation of fusion centers like the BRIC, continue to inspire the way that the BRIC operates.

The BRIC and other fusion centers consistently collect private First Amendment and constitutionally protected information about protesters, activists, and immigrant communities.

In Greater Boston, the BRIC has surveilled lawful political activity, been the basis of intelligence reports on anti-war groups and local activists like Howard Zinn, the National Lawyers Guild, and the ACLU.

BRIC has also surveilled the social media of Muslims as well as anyone using the Black Lives Matter hashtag.

The BRIC also houses the gang database.

98% of people in the BRICS gang database are people of color, and more than 75% of people in the database are black men or teenagers.

In 2022, the First Circuit Court of Appeals here in Boston expressed serious concerns about the BRICS gang database and the flawed system for determining who is included, including kids like Orlando.

The BRIC does not keep us safe.

There was a question earlier about whether the BRIC keeps us safe, and in fact, there's no evidence that fusion centers like the BRIC have actually provided any kind of meaningful improvements to public safety or the pursuit of counterterrorism, their initial stated purpose.

On the contrary, the unregulated and relentless sharing of sensitive information with little to no oversight or accountability has yielded massive privacy breaches.

For example, in a 2020 data breach, hackers exposed hundreds of thousands of sensitive records from more than 200 state, local, and federal agencies collected in these fusion centers.

And presently, as alluded to earlier, there is absolutely no mechanism to hold the BRIC accountable for errors or misconduct.

The BRIC and fusion centers like it have long produced significantly flawed analysis while also relentlessly targeting black and brown communities and lawful constitutionally protected political activity.

They've done so under the guise of counterterrorism and public safety, though the evidence that fusion centers have improved either is negligible at best.

The BRIC relies on unsubstantiated rumors and hearsay, terrorizes local communities, particularly individuals and families of color, and in doing so, the BRIC is absolutely integral to the deportation machine, as it was in Orlando's case.

Boston can take a critical step towards protecting our neighbors and community members by immediately withdrawing from the BRIC.

Thank you very much.

And I also have to sign off at 4:30, but I can welcome your questions until then.

Thank you, sir.

Now I have five minutes.

Thank you, Sarah, and thank you, Allie.

Can you hear me?

Um, so uh, you know, I'm curious a few months ago, maybe, actually no, maybe eight or nine months ago, um, our mayor stated that uh applying for the grant, given the new um regulations around border patrol and the water, I think it was with the the marines, not the marines, the I'm not sure what specifically it was.

It had something to do with um the border patrol um and the harbor, I believe.

Um, and what the mayor stated, and I'm gonna look it up and I'm gonna have somebody of my team is listening in, I would like to quote specifically what the mayor stated, but that we were gonna pursue it uh because there was a way to uh ensure that this that the city would not be uh uh corresponding or um engaging with um with DHS.

Is that is that true?

Is there a way for us to bypass that, Allie?

Could you restate the question?

I'm sorry, it was hard to hear.

I know it's also hard to explain what I'm trying to say.

So the mayor, I know I want to be nice, so I'm just trying to find all the right words, um, stated that we were going to be pursuing the grant uh because there is some this belief that we could bypass some of the um prerequisites, specifically around some of the border patrol.

And I don't know if I can confirm or deny that to be true or false, but are there ways for sit for us to be able to apply for this grant while also protecting our immigrant communities?

That's a great question.

Um my understanding is that uh the city said in in applying for the 2025 funds, said that BRIC itself meets the border enforcement requirement and allocated the whole required 10 percent under BRIC in the application.

To me, that says everything we need to know.

Um, that BRIC and fusion centers work in us in such a way that already aids immigration enforcement.

So, as the and to answer the second part of your question, as the requirements are written, because DHS controls this funding, sets the priorities, sets specifically what they can be spent on, not just the priorities itself, but has a approved list of equipment and expenditures.

There is no way to safely accept this grant and guarantee that immigrant communities or any other community targeted by the federal government is protected.

So I would highly strongly encourage the council and any city that receives UASI funding to look for other sources of funding for actual emergency response.

Okay.

Did that answer your question, Council?

Absolutely, and thank you for your patience as I was trying to formulate what I was trying to remember exactly what the words were in the um article that I read, but I couldn't articulate.

So thank you for understanding.

But you actually answered the question because I think it's important for my colleagues to know that while there is this belief, there is still um harm that we are creating by uh accepting this grant.

So thank you for for articulating that.

And now, Sarah, you know, I was a parent back in the day, working with uh some folks in East Boston, and I remember being at the East Boston Library in regards to Orlando's case, and at the time I did not know what we were getting into, and we were dealing with BPS, we were thinking that it was a case of discrimination, and we you know, we didn't know what we were getting into, and I cannot believe that this is the case that has um really set the stage for a lot of the work that I've done here on the Boston City Council because of the harm um that we continue to um cause so many of our Boston Public School students in particular.

So can you just talk to us a little bit about how BPS and BPD um there's allegedly they're no longer interacting with each other with ICE.

Have you heard of any other cases or anything that we should be mindful of in terms of especially what's happening right now in this climate with ice and Boston Public Schools and our police department?

What type of interaction, if any, can you uh speak to since the Orlando case?

If any.

Thank you, thank you so much, counselor.

Um, I think um, and I appreciate all of your advocacy and your work.

Um I think what's concerning is that we often don't know about these events until after they happen, right?

So although Orlando's case stands out as being particularly harrowing and particularly harmful, Orlando is not alone.

There certainly are other young people who have been targeted in racial profiling, disproportionately targeting Latina students and sharing their information with the BRIC and with ICE.

We know that the BRIC has shared hundreds of BPS school student information with the BRIC over the last 10 years or so.

And that should be deeply concerning to all of us.

So where while they may have officially stated that they're no longer working together, I think that there's every indication that information continues to be shared.

And we know that there have been incidents of ICE being at or near Boston public schools or staging activities near or at Boston public schools or in parking lots across the street from Boston Public Schools.

The climate of fear and terror that this creates for school children and their families is undeniable and you know incredibly pronounced.

So I unfortunately, even if cooperation does not happen at an official level, it does appear to continue.

Thank you.

And I'll just one more thing, counselor, is that recently there was a nail salon in High Park, and the police was there, the FBI, and I just so happened to be on a thread for rapid response and um to you know see if we if this is a real ICE raid or not.

And I went to this space and the FBI was there, the Boston police was there, and when I arrived on the scene, I was told that it had nothing to do with ICE, but the climate, because there was FBI there, a lot of the women that were inside the nail salon were afraid to open the door.

And the Boston I had to I had to speak to them.

They wouldn't open the door even though they knew it was Council Mejia, they were so afraid.

And I'm so glad because they learned not to open up the door regardless of who's on the other side.

So I just want to shout out to the know your rights that people are actually knowing what to do regardless of who's on the other side of the door.

But the Boston police department um was interacting with FBI, even though ICE was not there.

So when we're looking at how ICE right now, I from what I understand, they do have some relationships and some communication with the FBI.

Can Sarah, I'm not sure if that's beyond your grade level or whatever, but like, or Ellie, can you can either one of you just talk to us about the role that FBI, ICE agents, and BPD, how they all kind of sometimes are interacting and communicating with each other.

Does that exist?

Yes or no?

Like what?

Go ahead.

You can go ahead, Allie.

I defer to you to start if you want.

I think that would be for the first panel, but I'm just curious.

I just because I think what's gonna happen, Allie, the reason why I'm asking this question is because the BRIC will come here and try to defend their funds and the reason why they exist.

And I want to make sure that any holes that I can poke and any information that we can have will make our advocacy stronger.

And so there is uh there is a relationship that I have heard of between FBI, ICE, and Boston Police Department, and how dangerous that could be specifically to our undocumented loved ones.

So if you could just talk to me about what that looks like.

Yes, I can I can speak about that in broad strokes and and Brendan on the previous panel and Foxmar are really the experts here.

Um there are many, many ways the information sharing and collaboration and cooperation happen between local police, including BPD, and federal policing agents, including DHS, ICE, um, Homeland Security Investigations, and the FBI and many others.

Um I'll name a few of them.

Um, there's direct contracts, right?

A 287G, in the case of Boston, and many others, there are also task forces, right, that bring together um representatives of the different policing agencies across local, state, federal, sometimes even tribal levels.

Um, so for example, the joint terrorism task force, JTTF, is led by the FBI.

It is one of the federal task forces housed at the BRIC, and there's two BPD officers, in my understanding, who work from BIC BRIC who are part of that, right?

So they're sitting in a room or sitting on a call with FBI agents.

Also just the way that fusion centers, including BRIC are set up, right, is you have DHS agents from ICE as well as HSI sitting at a desk at BRIC with FBI agents, with BPD agents all together, and it's very hard to document, right?

And track how information sharing happens just in conversations.

Who has access to the other person's computer screen?

And then of course the very nature of the databases that are being used, the corporate surveillance technology products, platforms that Brendan mentioned.

Those are taking data from both private, public law enforcement sources, putting them together, profiling profiling people, telling stories about people, and spitting that back out to the many different policing agencies that use them.

These are just a few ways that that collaboration happens.

There are certainly others.

And uh let's move to our panelists, uh Wendy Lazo, and Reverend Annie Gonzalez, who each have seven minutes to make your opening statement.

Okay, I'm I'm just gonna clarify.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

I just want to clarify um with her just for the purpose because we're all going to be out loud.

Um I'm gonna ask her that we're gonna take this consecutively, um, interpreting consecutively.

Okay, don't forget.

Thank you.

Hi, good afternoon.

Uh, my name is Wendy Lazo.

So you're not leader community, so we will united for a very uh I am a leader in the community and I work for.

No, no, united for a very which is neighbors.

United for a very Boston, okay.

It's uh um uh organization that actually empowered the community, uh the rights uh in their defense.

I think it's probably and she can sit uh maybe stand here.

Yeah, I think but it's probably better.

Um, so um, let's see.

So the organization, Nube.

Um, uh, it empowers the community through the defense of um people's rights, um, development of leaders, um, civic action in East Boston and um its surroundings for uh better or just or more just uh community.

But immigrants come resident days Boston, you know, that travel in la communidad.

And uh we uh support um uh people of uh low-income people, immigrants, and as a resident of East Boston, and uh someone who works for the community, we are concerned about BRIC, the BRIC program.

Uh we do feel that we're in surveillance by a right.

Even though we are part of the development of the economy of the country.

And that is because they're asking about all the inform because they're asking all the information to the police and then they call us criminals.

So if BRIC is here since uh 2005 to work in our behalf, take care of us.

So why would they not able to prevent what happened in 2013?

So we are asking for you not to continue to fund or contribute um with money, right?

To a system that is um designed um to really uh come in uh take us away and return us to our country or deport us to our country.

Uh so the only wrong thing that we have done is um coming to this country in search of a better life, which is um due to the fact of the war in our own countries.

We don't need more surveillance.

We don't want to leave terrorized in our communities.

Um that they don't feel that they're being um terror and yeah, watch by others.

That they don't have to think that they're gonna be separated from their parents.

As a member of the community and as a mother, um I'm asking you that these funds that you want to invest in BRIC.

Maybe you want to invest them in uh work for the youth.

Yeah, they call them gang members, you know, criminals, so why don't we invest the money in the youth so that they're not on the streets trying to look for trouble?

That way we can have a strong youth.

And maybe they will see the mission of this country with a different perspective.

Reverend Gonzalez, you have seven minutes.

Thank you.

Um, yes, as you said, I'm Reverend Annie Gonzalez.

Um I live uh I you uh sorry, my phone thinks I'm trying to talk to it.

I'm not.

Okay.

Sorry about that.

Um I was a resident of Jamaica Plain from 2014 to 2022.

I now live in Malden and I serve a congregation in Bedford.

I have been part of the core team of volunteers with the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network, otherwise known as Bijan or Beyond, since we began in late 2017.

I'm also a Unitarian Universalist minister.

And one part of my job is to offer pastoral care, which is basically emotional support to people going through something hard.

So I want to tell you a story, and it's actually a story that sounds very similar to the story that Sarah told you, but it's not the same person.

Um, and it's a story about me offering some pastoral care on Mother's Day in 2019.

I met up with Maria, who is living in East Boston at a McDonald's near the Suffolk County jail.

And at that time, ICE had a contract with the Suffolk County jail, and her son was being held there by ICE.

And she wanted to visit him, but she was so upset she wanted some support before she went in to see her son.

And she told me how her son had been put on the gang database, and she didn't know what BRIC was.

She didn't know about how it operated, but what she told me was they said he was a gang member because of the color of shirt he was wearing.

And she said, I gave him that shirt.

I gave him that shirt for Christmas.

And she knew about what gang violence can do to a community because she had come from El Salvador to this country because her daughters couldn't go to school where they were living.

Because if they tried to go to school, they'd be raped on their way to school.

And she said, I don't know.

Was it a good idea that I came here?

Now my daughters are safer, but now they take my son away from me.

She had to flee that violence just to end up with more violence.

Her son was also deported, like Orlando.

And after he was deported, I remember talking to her on the phone, and she said he doesn't even leave the house because he's too scared.

He's too scared by the violence that he could face in El Salvador, and so he was just hiding in his relatives' home.

This is a kid who grew up in our community who went to Boston public schools.

And he had his whole future taken away from him because of the racism and fear mongering and a shirt that his mom bought him.

So this is the story that I know the most intimately about how Brick has hurt people in Bianca's community, but I know there are others.

And I don't know if it was Ermi who was picked up in Hyde Park in this past year, who's now deported away from his citizen partner.

I don't know if it was Edwin, who's from East Boston who got nabbed on his way to work, a young person deported away from his parents.

I don't know if it was Barnesell, who lives in Boston, who called the cops when his husband pulled a knife on him and ended up deported.

I don't know for sure what role Brick played in any of these specific arrests or in the other 97 cases that are in our current database that pertain to Boston residents.

Because in Beyond, our database is focused on notes about whether people have a lawyer, whether they have a bond order, if they need court accompaniment, if their wife is facing eviction.

We don't ask people to explain how they ended up in ICE, but we just try to help them.

So we don't actually know in each specific case whether the fusion center, whether the data sharing between DHS and local police and other law enforcement was a direct cause of each week for district court accompaniment.

This is someone who's worried that ICE might show up when they go to a district court hearing.

People are afraid to show up at these court dates that they want to attend because they don't trust the system and they know the information is being shared between local law enforcement and DHS.

And so they don't know what's going to happen.

They want to go clear up the traffic violation, the domestic dispute, the conflict with their neighbor, but they fear that they'll be arrested by ICE.

And all we can do is support them and go with them and try to mitigate that risk.

The people we accompany are up against so much.

They are people who fled their home country because they couldn't make enough money to survive, or because their loved ones were killed by gang members, or because they were gay and they couldn't be themselves, or because they were political organizers and they had threats on their life or were tortured by their governments.

They're up against high housing costs and inflation and language barriers and racism.

They do not need to be surveilled and put on gang databases.

So thank you for bringing all of that into the space because it is why we exist in this chamber.

It's not to forget who we're here to fight for.

So I want to say thank you for that.

And so with that, I'm just curious if you can just either, you know, whoever's still on, whether it's online or here, talk to us a little bit about some of the community uh concerns that you have heard from the broader community about data collection and information sharing.

Like what are other folks saying in in your congregation in the community?

What are some of the things that folks have been uh sharing with you all around the fear of data collection?

Um, I think we have the information, particularly in the community.

Principalmented employees, so indocumentada today.

So first person in this situation where I also work in the community, I say, even though I have no documentation and I support them.

So the community we are scared because we know that the police they are sharing information with ice.

That he came out in many uh places in the TV or communication places.

The neighbor called the police.

And the police officer he came and the first thing that he has was for his documents.

So he has Alejandro and he brought him to the department of the police officers here in Boston.

That happens around eight or nine in the morning.

November 20, 2025.

From Boston, they got hit to the core of East Boston around 11, 11:30 in the morning.

When Alejandro got to the core of East Boston, I was already there.

And in the same place, the people from ICE, they changed the handcuff from the police department and they put their own handcuffs.

And that's why our community is a scare.

That's right.

Thank you.

Because the name is.

Different folks to and from court.

So yes, that is that is one of the um initial things we were doing when we named ourselves.

Um you never know how the future will go, so we're I think you could now describe us better as the New England, you know, uh ICE jail support team or something like that.

But um at the time when we started, it was more focused on Boston and it was um more focused on um going with people to court dates and things like that, but we do accompany people to ice check-ins at the ICE office as well as district court accompaniment as well as um to their immigration hearings, whether in person or virtual online.

And uh most of the uh most of the clients are dealing with ice issues.

So yes, so I mean, we're pretty much we mostly um support people who are already detained because there's not a lot of organizations that support people who are already in ICE jail.

So we mostly support people in um immigration jail in New England or from Massachusetts, but we also do support community members who are not detained who might um for example, have a hearing.

Someone reached out to me recently, and she was like, my this is my friend, and his neighbor like took out some kind of complaint against him, and now he's supposed to go to court, but he's so scared because he's undocumented.

We do accompany people in those kind of situations as well.

And do you always work with them on obtaining counsel?

Um, if it's a criminal charge, obviously they have access to a public defender.

Um, if it's immigration court, it's very difficult to get an immigration lawyer.

Um, but we do have some ability to match people with some pro bono attorneys, and then for civil matters, I don't really know how counsel works to be honest with you.

Okay, thank you.

We've got one more virtual panelist, Nathan Phillips.

All right, we're gonna end this hearing at fine.

So we've got about 17 minutes.

Uh Nathan will give you two of that 17 minutes, and then we'll come back to uh council Mejia for final questions, and then we'll give our panelists two minutes to make your closing statements if I can call them that.

Thank you.

Nathan?

Yes, yes, can you hear me?

On the floor, yes, we can hear you, Nathan.

Okay, thank you, uh Council Cole Pepper, and I also want to thank uh Councillor Mehia for all of your work on this issue and protecting our immigrant community and all Bostonians.

I'm ironically not a resident of Boston, but I'd like to share my experience that connects some dots to the city of Boston, Chelsea, and across the agencies uh associated with BRIC, including the FBI.

I spend about a third of my life in Boston because I teach at Boston University, I'm a professor of ecology there.

And the experience I had just a little over a year ago was uh FBI agents, uh, two individuals showed up to my home while I was at work in Boston at Boston University and approached my house, uh, and my wife answered the door and they wanted to know where Tateman was, and uh I wasn't there, obviously, and my wife said um she's not here, and they said, Oh, he must be at work.

So they knew I was in Boston, and and uh it was a very disturbing and jaw-dropping experience to have that happen uh to me.

Uh I don't even know why.

It may be because I've been politically active, it may be because I have been active on social media in some of the ways that have been mentioned earlier.

Uh I have uh been involved in non-violent, peaceful civil disobedience before.

Um, and so it's it's puzzling.

Um, but uh I wanted to make the point, particularly for maybe some of the more privileged people.

Uh I shudder to think about how our immigrant community members, particularly uh people of color, uh have been treated as described earlier, but there may be people who carry some privilege like I do uh out in places like Newton who may buy the line that you know law enforcement is here to protect us all, and they're trying to do the best they can.

I'm here to say that my experience was that they were bad actors and not to be trusted.

And I'm saying that because when I heard them looking for me, I didn't know what to do, and uh my lawyer actually advised me against this later gently, but I called the FBI in their Chelsea field office, which I think they refer to as their Boston field office, even though it's in Chelsea, so one of the community uh communities there in the FBI, and I finally was able to get to an actual live human, and when I asked why, and if they were looking for me, they just hung up on me without telling me.

Um it's not clear to to us to this day whether the two individuals who showed up at my home were both FBI uh officers or it was some kind of collaborative effort between a state or local law enforcement plus the FBI.

So the whole thing is shrouded in mystery and secrecy, which they could answer.

Um, you know, I went to them to figure out well, what do you want from me?

And they're they operate in the shadows, um, they're not good actors, and they're not being upfront or truthful about what their intentions are.

Uh so for all of the people who may think that they have good intentions and that BRIC is uh serving the best interests of the city.

My personal experience is that that's not the case, and that they're not being honest and forthcoming.

So I appreciate all of your efforts to hold them to account and to really disengage and defund the BRIC.

So thank you so much for taking my testimony.

Thank you, Dr.

We've got 13 minutes left.

I'll give Council Mahia.

Three minutes.

I'll give you two panelists two minutes.

I'll take two minutes myself, and uh is Professor Phillips still there or is he gone?

Well, I guess you'll have no minutes.

Go on, Councilman here.

Um, so you know, I think this is the beginning of what I hope uh to be.

I think uh the beginning of a second conversation.

I think that we have an opportunity to unpack this a little bit further, maybe potentially with the administration and some folks from the BRIC, um, just to kind of what say you now what you've heard.

Um, and I'm not sure where the appetite may be for that.

But Fatima, I'll look to you to see if we can host a second hearing.

I think that there would be a nice exchange of conversation, um, with BRIC and the commissioner.

Um, so hopefully we can we can make that happen.

And I think that given the fact that the mayor um and the administration is moving forward with this application.

I think having Ali in that hearing would be really helpful to us.

I mean, to arm us with real data and real information about how we can you know really unpack what we're hearing, and so I would like to invite you all for a second hearing at some point before we it's time for us to take that vote.

And then I also would it's not so much I don't have any more questions, but I just want to utilize my time to state that you know, there's 13 city counselors that represent the city of Boston as a whole, and some of us um are district counselors and they represent very specific neighborhoods.

Um they may say, Oh, that really is not an issue that really impacts the district that I represent.

And this is what I've been saying to my colleagues is I don't care what district you represent because the votes that you take impact the city as a whole, and I think it's really important for you all to understand that narrative because we're going to have to make sure that all district counselors, regardless of the neighborhoods that they represent, that they understand the impact that they have on the votes that they're taking as it relates to this BRIC funding.

So I just want to name that as part of your advocacy, is that all city counselors should be put on notice that their votes impact the city as a whole.

So I'm sharing that with the organizers so that you can make sure that they all know that.

And then the last thing that I will say is that we are at a very interesting time in America.

Um, and I know that based on the budget hearings that we've been having in the budget fights that we've been having inside this chamber, is that people keep deferring to the threat that's happening on the federal level and how all eyes are on Boston as it relates to the Trump administration, and I want to just say is that we can chew gum and talk at the same time.

That's an American thing, that's what y'all say, right?

You can do two things at the same time.

We can remain vigilant about what's happening with Trump while also understanding that on the local level, we also have to protect our immigrant loved ones, and that includes looking at how we're utilizing our financial resources to support and empower the police to surveil our communities, and so that has to be a part of the narrative that I'm gonna share with you all because it should not be oh, Trump is looking at Boston, and we should give the administration a pass at everything.

No, but Trump is looking at Boston, and this is the reason why we need to be more vigilant on how we're utilizing our funding and then our resources.

So I just want to name that, and I want to thank Fatima and all of the organizations that have partnered with us since I've been a city councilor.

I know that you have my commitment in this work, and I remain um a resource here, and however I can be helpful.

So thank you for showing up the way that you did today.

That's it.

Thank you.

And then I'll close it out in one minute.

Thank you.

Thank you because you are the face of this, and especially this meeting, and I'm a shame all all the others that are supposed to be here and taking care of this meeting.

I know most of you guys because they've been part of the community for over 20 years.

So um it's not to because I don't want to say anything like type of discrimination, but you guys have a privilege that our community doesn't have.

So this is the thing where you uh sa leaders of our community, the faces that represent us to yourself, guys, and um fight for our community uh like heroes our uh family uh partners of us and doing the best for our community.

Responding a losing paga.

I want you to respond to the uh taxes that our community pays.

Thank you.

You have two, oh, Wendy.

Will you finish?

Yeah.

Reverend, you have two minutes.

Yes, thank you.

Um thank you, Councillors for being here, and thank you, Counselor Mejia for all your work on this subject.

I just wanted to actually respond to an earlier question about the fear in the community, and there is a lot of it, but one thing that also breaks my heart is when people trust law enforcement and then they end up in detention because that does happen as well.

Like one of the examples I cited, somebody called the cops because he was facing some violence in his home, thinking that would help him, he ended up being deported.

And so it's kind of you're either living in fear or you're too trusting, but then you get you know, then you're suffering.

So um I just think the solution is we gotta we gotta get rid of BRIC, we gotta do away with the surveillance and um information sharing, um, because either way, it's a bad situation.

Let me just say this.

Let me thank everyone, our panelists, our public, councilman here, Councillor Braden and Flynn and Pepin uh for coming to talk about issues that we don't talk about.

One of the things that I think if nothing else came out of this hearing is that Boston has to watch Boston.

And if Boston doesn't watch Boston, and we're so focused on Washington, the things that we're focused on in Washington will be happening in Boston.

So as a city councilor, I believe that Boston has to keep an eye on Boston.

Thank all of you for coming.

We'll do it again and have a great weekend.

Thank you to the Central Staff.

We couldn't do it without you.

Thank you so much.