BOSTON — Attorney General Andrea Campbell marked the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump’s second term by listening to reflections about disruptions to food aid benefits and biomedical research, as well as fears around continuing immigration activities by ICE.
“We are not celebrating this anniversary,” Campbell said at a roundtable discussion in her office. “We are speaking clearly, and I think with beautiful stories and courage around the real harm that this administration has caused and continue to cause our state. And we’ll continue to fight back as a collective because we will overcome this administration.”
The AG’s office has filed 47 lawsuits against the Trump administration, Campbell said. Her office said it’s protected $3.14 billion in funding out of a total of $3.3 billion threatened by the federal government.
Campbell expects the lawsuit tally to climb by the end of the month, though she declined to speculate on what the case mix could bring this year.
“You don’t know what you’re going to get, right?” Campbell said. “The chaos and confusion from this administration is absolutely concerning for everyone.”
At a White House press conference Tuesday afternoon, Trump touted his record over the past year, including reducing the trade deficit, ending Biden “stagflation,” fueling economic growth and brokering agreements with drug manufacturers to cut prices for patients. The United States is “booming,” Trump said, as he referenced “thousands of businesses being built” and “many of the biggest factories in the world” under construction here.
“It’s been an amazing period of time. We have a book that I’m not going to read to you, but these are the accomplishments of what we’ve produced,” Trump said, as he displayed a hefty binder. “I could stand here and read it for a week, and we wouldn’t be finished.”
Policy shifts at the National Institutes of Health — including halted grants and an updated approach to award funding based on geographic distribution, which can harm Massachusetts — are “unprecedented, inequitable and destabilizing,” said Dr. Beth McCormick of UMass Chan Medical School.
Beyond stalled research programs, McCormick said UMass Chan also had to reduce its Ph.D. and postdoctoral cohorts. Some individuals are leaving academia, and early career investigators are struggling to launch their own independent endeavors, she said.
“This is how the brain drain begins,” McCormick said. “The broader consequences for Massachusetts are that these disruptions delay or eliminate discoveries that can lead to new therapies, clinical trials and biotech startups. Entire areas of basic and translational research are at risk.”
Those disruptions “set us back decades,” McCormick added.
Khara Shearrion, Project Bread’s senior director of SNAP outreach, discussed the impact of the federal government shutdown and the pause on SNAP benefits. The organization, which partners with the Department of Transitional Assistance, runs a confidential resource hotline that received thousands of calls last fall.
Some of those calls came from homebound seniors who could not access local food pantries.
“We heard a lot from individuals who were living in areas where there weren’t food pantries close by. There were food pantries or meal programs that could not deliver food,” Shearrion said. “So to hear that, not just from seniors, but from single parents, folks that were furloughed employees during that time (with) absolutely no income, that was truly heartbreaking.”
Shearrion said federal actions have frayed trust among vulnerable communities, and Project Bread is now contending with Bay Staters who are hesitant to seek help accessing public benefits.
“It’s not just immigrant households. We’re talking about folks that are eligible for these programs — such as SNAP, such as WIC — but they’re afraid to actually reach out to a confidential hotline,” she said.
Federal immigration enforcement activity is also hamstringing local government operations in Chelsea, said City Manager Fidel Maltez. City officials are struggling to build trust and are finding it challenging to convince residents to contact the police when “something bad is happening” at home, he said.
“This building of trust that has taken decades to fortify (is) now being dismantled overnight,” Maltez said. “When a juvenile is removed from our police station by ICE, it causes ripple effects in our community. Our parents are now afraid to call law enforcement. Our schools are now afraid to use tools that before this administration were a matter of operational efficiency.”
Children are also internalizing the impact of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in their communities. Liz Hamilton, CEO of the Boys & Girls Club of Worcester, recalled recently walking into an afterschool program of five- and six-year-olds who were “playing ICE.”
“The kids were helping each other, saying, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to make sure they don’t get you,’ “ Hamilton said. “So kids try to make sense of their world by play, and that’s healthy. But it broke my heart.”
Trump defended federal immigration enforcement in a Truth Social post Tuesday.
“The Department of Homeland Security and ICE must start talking about the murderers and other criminals that they are capturing and taking out of the system,” the president said. “They are saving many innocent lives!”
Campbell’s office on Tuesday launched a federal accountability dashboard to keep the public informed about lawsuits against the Trump administration.
The office also created a storytelling portal for Bay Staters to share how they’ve been affected by federal actions. Stories around delayed SNAP benefits, tariffs impacting small business owners, and researchers dealing with terminated grants will “assist the AGO in identifying emerging trends and urgent needs across the Commonwealth and can inform its legal response to certain federal actions,” Campbell’s office said.
“Trump 2.0 is very different — it has been very different,” Campbell said. “The urgency, the pace, the fear, the aggressive posture of this administration, the retribution, the retaliation — all real.”