Boston Mayor Stands By $650,000 Legal Bill To Prepare For Sanctuary City Congressional Hearing

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu stood by her decision to spend well over half a million taxpayer dollars to prepare for a congressional hearing on sanctuary city policies.

Earlier in March, the mayors of Boston, Chicago, Denver and New York City were called before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Accountability to answer questions on their respective sanctuary city laws and how those policies may have enabled illegal migrant-related crime. Shortly before the hearing began, Wu’s office revealed she had spent a whopping $650,000 of the city’s money in preparation for the hearing.

During an interview with GBH News, the Democrat mayor acknowledged those funds could’ve gone toward “much more important things,” but claimed the stakes were “too high” given the prospect of jail time and federal funding being on the line.

“When there were threats to put me in jail, to take away funding, I needed to make sure that I was doing everything possible to represent our city well, to represent the policies with complete accuracy and having legal representation was a necessary part of that,” Wu said.

While there is no official definition of a “sanctuary city,” the term generally applies to any jurisdiction that has laws or policies in place restricting cooperation and communication between local officials and 🛂Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Boston first enacted the Trust Act in 2014, restricting how the city’s law enforcement can interact with ICE agents or any other federal Immigration