U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is exploring a plan to lease 249 parking spaces in downtown Boston to stage the vehicles it uses in immigration operations, according to a federal notice, a move that would sharply expand the agency’s footprint in a city where it currently has no field office, and one that state and city leaders moved immediately to block.
The notice, first reported by the Boston Globe and issued last month, seeks a landlord who can provide contiguous parking within the city’s central business district under a proposed three- to five-year lease.
Boston is one of 14 cities named in the nationwide effort, and its request for 249 spaces is the second largest in the country, behind only Englewood, Colorado. The spaces, the notice says, would be located “in the vicinity of existing or planned ICE facilities.”
Proposals from property owners were due Friday.
What makes the Boston request stand out is that the agency has no field office inside the city.
As WBUR noted, there are no identified ICE facilities within Boston itself; the federal government operates an immigration court on New Sudbury Street and a Homeland Security Investigations office on Causeway Street, while ICE’s main regional field office sits in Burlington, several miles outside the city, and the notice does not include Burlington. That has left unanswered in the notice the question of whether the agency intends to open a new facility in or near downtown.
Federal officials have characterized the notice as preliminary.
According to the Globe, ICE said it was issued “solely for market research and information-gathering purposes,” not a finalized decision. Even so, if enough landlords respond, the agency could move to a formal request and a signed lease, with vehicles potentially filling the spaces early next year.
The Department of Homeland Security defended the broader staffing expansion.
In a statement, it tied the need for space to a surge in personnel: “Is it really news that when a federal agency hires more personnel that they need more space?” the department said, citing an additional 12,000 ICE officers and agents nationwide — what it called a 120 percent increase — and adding that it is “supercharging our efforts to fulfill President Trump and the American people’s mandate.”
The notice surfaced as Governor Maura Healey prepared to sign the PROTECT Act, the law restricting where ICE may operate in Massachusetts. She used the occasion to tell the agency to stay out of the city. The PROTECT Act was signed into law on Wednesday, August 5, 2026.
“We absolutely cannot allow ICE to have 250 parking spots in downtown Boston while they are engaging in these illegal tactics,” Healey said in a statement. “We cannot enable them to ramp up even further in Massachusetts.” Framing the parking request against the enforcement her new law targets, she added: “We see what ICE is doing to our communities every day. People are afraid to go to school, doctors’ appointments, court, or even church.”
Boston’s leaders were equally direct. Mayor Michelle Wu said the city “opposes any efforts to allow ICE to stage its lawless operations here,” and City Councilor at-Large Ruthzee Louijeune, the council’s first Haitian American member, who voted in February against allowing ICE enforcement on city property, called the effort “reprehensible.”
“We made it very clear in February that public spaces, public property is for the use of the city and will not be allowed to be used by ICE for any staging or any actions,” Louijeune said. “So with respect to the City of Boston property, that will not be permissible.”
Because the notice seeks private parking, however, the leverage of city officials is limited, which is why the response has centered on urging private landlords not to respond to the solicitation.
For the Haitian and other immigrant communities across Greater Boston, the timing draws a sharp line between two directions of travel.
On the same day the Commonwealth enacted some of the strongest limits in the country on where ICE can make arrests, the federal government signaled it may be preparing to stage hundreds of enforcement vehicles in the heart of the city.
The concern is not abstract. Advocates said earlier this year that more than 100 unregistered vehicles had already been delivered to a garage near the Burlington field office, which they read as a sign of a coming surge in operations. A downtown staging area of nearly 250 vehicles would represent a far larger and more visible expansion.
For now, the parking request remains, in the government’s own words, market research. Whether it becomes a lease may depend on whether any Boston landlord is willing to rent to the agency, a decision that state and city officials are publicly pressing them not to make.
https://ctninfo.com/ice-seeks-250-pa…w-to-push-it-out/
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This article was originally written in English. Other language versions are produced using AI translation software, and errors are possible — the English version is authoritative. CTN also uses AI to convert text into audio.
