The Massachusetts public records law is already unacceptably weak. Now comes a new wrinkle: the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Office is refusing to release health-care records regarding the 507 detainees it is holding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), claiming that its agreement with the notoriously abusive federal agency prohibits the disclosure of such information.
Read about the 2026 New England Muzzle Awards, recognizing outrages against freedom of speech and expression from July 4, 2025, to July 4, 2026.
The ACLU of Massachusetts sued for the release of those records in February. On Tuesday, the issue came to a head, as the ACLU and the sheriff’s office squared off in Suffolk County Superior Court. Judge James Boudreau has not yet issued a ruling, but we have: Sheriff Joseph McDonald is receiving a New England Muzzle Award for failing to comply with state law.
Granted, there are some nuances. The sheriff’s agreement with ICE includes language banning the public disclosure of information about any detainees. Here’s how Kevin G. Andrade, reporting for The New Bedford Light, summarized what’s at stake:
The sheriff’s denial relied on arguments about state privacy laws and questions around federal preemption of state law.
“We have, I think, a pretty interesting issue here,” said Judge James Boudreau, who presided over the proceedings, at the hearing’s start. “The first question is whether or not the supremacy clause [of the U.S. Constitution] prohibits the production of the documents.”
Dan McFadden, managing attorney at the Massachusetts ACLU, argued that it does not.
“Plymouth has no authority to contract its way out of public records law,” McFadden told the judge in his arguments. “These are records we have good reason to believe they have because the contract with ICE says they produce them.”
As Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham points out (sub. req.), “the ACLU specifically asked that all records be anonymized,” which you would think is sufficient for protecting the detainees’ privacy rights. One way of reading the ICE regulation in question, though, is that it doesn’t matter — McDonald can’t release the names “or other information relating to” detainees. Yet given the wave of terror ICE has unleashed under Donald Trump, McDonald should have assured the public by releasing records about the detainees’ well-being without identifying anyone by name.
Moreover, there are reasons to believe that all is not well in Plymouth. Abraham writes:
The Plymouth County jail might not be “Alligator Alcatraz,” but advocates have good reason to worry about detainees there. Advocates have decried McDonald’s failure to provide detainees with timely access to lawyers and interpreters. For several years, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey have been calling on ICE to improve conditions in Plymouth, citing a DHS investigation in 2022 that reported rotten food, limited access to clean water, and delays in medical attention. In interviews, detainees have described a lack of timely access to health care and medications. And it’s getting worse, said Leah Hastings, staff attorney at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts.
The real failure by McDonald, a Republican, was to go into business with ICE in the first place; as it stands, he is the only sheriff in the state to hold detainees on behalf of ICE. In May, an investigation by The Washington Post revealed hellish conditions for ICE detainees across the country. The Post reported that on at least 780 occasions, staff members at ICE facilities “used physical force or chemical agents to control immigrant detainees during the first year of the Trump administration.”
As the Globe’s Abraham notes, McDonald has denied allegations of abuse at the jail he oversees, saying, “I am proud of the humane care and custody we provide in the Plymouth County Correctional Facility. We are … routinely audited by federal and state agencies, and routinely exceed all applicable standards.”
That may be true, but we shouldn’t have to take his word for it.
