Weekly Action: Stand Against ICE at Hanscom Field

The recent letter from Maura Healey demanding that ICE halt flights out of Hanscom and the Boston Globe article examining ICE flights from Hanscom Field was the result of months of organizing, research, and coalition-building by Lexington Alarm and allied groups across the region. Far from being a sudden media moment, the story reflected a growing public effort to bring transparency and accountability to the use of a Massachusetts state facility for immigration enforcement operations.

The issue first gained momentum after a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that Massport had knowledge of ICE-related charter flights at Hanscom but was not fully sharing that information with the Hanscom Field Advisory Commission. This lack of disclosure raised the possibility that Massport was deliberately keeping information about ICE flights from the Commission.

In response to the Commission’s request for this data and our desire to increase public scrutiny, Lexington Alarm and partner organizations launched a coordinated letter-writing campaign directed at Massport executives, the Massport Board of Directors, and Governor Maura Healey. To make participation easy and accessible, we developed an online tool that allows individuals to send letters directly to Massport and the Governor both electronically and via regular mail.

As of this week over six hundreds of letters and emails were sent. This response demonstrated that concern about ICE flights from Hanscom extended well beyond Lexington and involved residents across multiple communities.

We are escalating our pressure on the Massachusetts Port Authority with a direct letter-writing campaign to Massport Leadership and the Board of Directors. Over 2,000 residents have been forcibly removed from Hanscom Field , their due process rights recklessly disregarded by an authority that claims ignorance. We demand Massport stop hiding behind federal preemption and use its full regulatory power to protect our community.

A few days after the No Kings rally in Lexington, Lexington Alarm held a debrief session to gather reactions. There were several successes and a few things to change before our next event.

At a post-event debrief on Zoom, organizers, marshals, volunteers, and participants went through the rally piece by piece. The consensus: it was a success. Nearly 2,000 people attended, more signs were sold than at the 6,000-person October rally, and close to 100 new contacts signed up at the tables. The mood among volunteers was described repeatedly as “uplifting.” The table setup was the best yet — positioned closer to the crowd than in October, generating real conversations, sign sales, and genuine engagement with organizational literature.

Toby Sackton at First Parish Wayland: Why Movements Are Built on Trust, Not Leaders.

In a talk at First Parish in Wayland in March, Toby Sackton gave what might be the most complete account yet of why this moment demands something different from conventional politics and what Lexington Alarm has been building since Patriots Day 2025.

The talk, titled “Building Effective Resistance,” was part history, part organizing theory, part urgent call to action. Sackton began with the personal. “I have been an activist since the 1960s,” he told the room. “When the war in Ukraine started, I was glued to the news every day. Gaza was worse. When Trump was reelected, it was another shock. Truly, the world was coming apart. I doom scrolled. I read every atrocity from doge, the attack on science every firing, every attack on immigrants and Black people.”

What broke the spiral, he said, was not a policy win or an electoral outcome it was human connection. “When a group of us founded Lexington Alarm one year ago, for the first time since the Vietnam era, I felt part of this broad network of people, a movement, that had majority support, all working towards a rough common vision grounded in the ideas of equality and the promise of what America could be.”

Sackton started with a diagnosis. “Since the beginning of 2025, the laws and traditions that have shaped the last hundred years of our history have been violently attacked.

On Dec 16, modern day patriots will follow in the footsteps of the historic 1773 tea dumpers in a protest organized by MASS 50501. Gather at 7:15 p.m. at the Irish Famine Memorial Plaza across from the Old South Meeting House and march to Waterfront Plaza by the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum. There, the plan is to joyfully dump ICE into Boston Harbor …

Dec 10, 2025 – A new record of ICE flights from Hanscom Field, prepared by Human Rights First, suggests that over 6,000 individuals were flown out of Hanscom Field to U.S. prisons and/or unknown international destinations between January and November 2025.

There were 114 ICE flights out of Hanscom since January, and Massport has denied any knowledge of these flights to the Hanscom Field Advisory Commission in an obvious lie. This report documents every ICE deportation flight departing Hanscom and charts the number going to various destinations, as shown below. With an average passenger load of 54 per flight, total ICE operations at Hanscom have involved more than 6000 people.

The Batavia ICE facility in Buffalo, where the greatest number of flights are headed, has a capacity of 650 beds. Buffalo is also a transfer point to Moshannon, an ICE prison near Phillipsburg, PA. According to Investigative Post, a Buffalo-based nonprofit news organization, there are frequent reports of overcrowding and of detainees being forced to sleep on gymnasium floors