White House slams Wu in escalating fight over ICE arrests in Boston

The White House has joined the war of words between Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Leah Foley.

Foley took issue with Wu's comments about Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests during the mayor's appearance at the WBUR Festival.

"People are terrified for their lives and for their neighbors, folks getting snatched off the street by secret police who are wearing masks, who can offer no justification for why certain people are being taken and then detained," Wu said. "Every aspect of what's happening at the federal level is causing harm in our local communities."

That set off Foley, who took to social media to decry the mayor's remarks, saying all federal law enforcement actions are conducted "within in the bounds of the Constitution and our laws."

"Suggesting that federal law enforcement officers are 'snatching people' off the streets is also false," she said. "It's offensive to the men and women who risk their lives everyday to uphold the rule of law."

On Wednesday, Wu addressed Foley's complaints about her remarks, saying "the U.S. Attorney is attacking me for saying what Bostonians see with their own eyes."

"I don’t know of any police department that routinely wears masks,” she said while speaking with reporters. “We know that there are other groups that routinely wear masks; NSC-131 routinely wears masks."

NSC-131 is a New England-based white supremacist group. The Anti-Defamation League has identified the organization as a hate group, and Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell has filed a complaint in state court over allegations the group has targeted migrant communities in the state.

Foley said Wu was comparing ICE agents with neo-Nazis.

" I did not attack Mayor Wu and I did not attack the Boston Police Department," Foley said during an interview with WBUR Thursday morning. "I attacked the lies that she is spewing, which is that there was secret police and when she compared the work of federal law enforcement agents to that of a neo-Nazi organization, I was shocked and enraged by that statement."

By Thursday afternoon, the White House issued its own statement condemning Wu's comments, before cataloging a number of ICE arrests made in Massachusetts that agents claimed removed people with a history of violent offenses.

"If the mayor had any shame, she’d be embarrassed for fanning the flames of hate while ICE agents face unprecedented threats to themselves and their families — but that’d be asking too much in today’s Democrat Party," a White House spokesperson said in a press release issued Thursday.

The extended exchange comes the same week Foley and ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons touted the nearly 1,500 arrests the agency made in Massachusetts last month.

Wu is not the only Massachusetts politician who has compared the tactics used during ICE arrests to those employed by fascists. In April, U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton decried the arrest of Tufts doctoral student and Turkish national Rümeysa Öztürk in similarly stark terms.

"It's like the Gestapo. It's what the Gestapo was established to do," he said, referring to the secret police force established by Adolph Hitler.

In explaining his remarks, he said video of her arrest "looks like a video that should come from Iran, or North Korea, or be perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party."