As the country waits to see whether congressional leaders can hammer out a deal to avoid a government shutdown, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh says he stands behind his fellow Democrats in Washington, D.C., on their push to shield DACA recipients from deportation.
“I think that the DREAMers that are here … they’re legal,” Walsh said on Greater Boston. “They’re involved in our schools. They are involved in the work environment. They pay taxes. They are family people. They are an asset to our country. They are an asset to our state and our city, and I think that more mayors and more governors need to speak up here and to say that we need this.”
Relief for the DREAMers, he added, is something that should be a bipartisan issue.
"DACA has been supported by Democrats and Republicans alike," Walsh said. "I don’t understand why the can't get together on this issue. It’s a shame that we’re at the point where we have to shut the government down."
The mayor wasn't opposed to shutting down the government over the issue. "You get elected to make difficult decisions," he said. "You believe in this program [and whether] you’re a Republican or a Democrat, get up there and stand up and do what you got elected to do. Don’t play Donald Trump, and don’t play to the rhetoric that’s going on in the country by 20 percent of the population.”
Walsh also addressed questions he is facing back in Boston over plans to rebuild the Long Island bridge, which he announced during his second inaugural address. Long Island was previously home to a 450-bed homeless shelter, a drug treatment program and other social services. These services moved off the island when the city demolished the bridge in 2014.
The mayor was met with criticism for the proposal, described in a Boston Globe editorial as “big, but incomplete.”
“For four years, people criticized us for closing the bridge, and now we talk about rebuilding the bridge and we’re getting — which is fine — we’re getting criticism for rebuilding the bridge by certain people, not by all," Walsh said. “This really is an idea of building the bridge back out there. We have the infrastructure with the buildings, we have all the facilities out there that we can do something really special when it comes to recovery.”
The projected cost for the bridge is anywhere between $40 million and $100 million, depending on the structure of the bridge. Walsh maintained that funding would come from parking meter fines and a previously set aside $30 million in the capital budget.
The mayor also weighed in on a preliminary report on the efficacy of the Boston Police Department’s pilot body camera program published last week, which found the cameras “may generate small benefits” in police-civilian encounters.
Walsh reiterated that he remains unconvinced that the program should be widely instituted.
“No I’m not [convinced]," Walsh said. "‘We’re going to wait for the rest of the report to come out, but it is about building trust. It is about building relationships in the community, and if body cameras are a part of that [and the report] can prove that ... it does build trust and we can help it, then we’ll probably move forward .... Either way, I haven’t made my mind up on which way we should go.”
