President Trump unleashed his immigration crackdown on the country, and in Boston last June, Mayor Michelle Wu demanded answers as federal agents scoured her city. To get them, Wu called upon a right available to everyone, and requested public records on the tactics used by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“When there are direct requests for transparency, there should be a direct response,” Wu told reporters.
One of Wu’s constituents, Brian McCarter, agrees. But he said he wishes Wu held her administration to the same standard, after he said it stonewalled his own requests for information from Boston. About one month after Wu made her request of Trump administration documents, McCarter sued the city in Superior Court, alleging the city broke the state’s public records law.
“I’ve gotten nothing [that would] enable the transparency that is the point of the public records law,” McCarter said. “They don’t even pretend to comply, never mind do anything that would allow public oversight.”
McCarter is hardly alone in his frustrations.
For nearly two centuries, Massachusetts law has guaranteed government records are open and accessible. But a Globe review has found the state’s public records law has often proved to be a promise written in sand.
“Massachusetts is one of the more secretive states. The governments have learned to game the system, and the law has little enforcement,” said David Cuillier, the director of the Freedom of Information Project at the Brechner Center for the Advancement of the First Amendment at the University of Florida.
In Massachusetts, the state law’s deadlines for fulfilling records requests can be ignored, workers can conspire to overestimate costs, elected officials can spend years fighting requests in court, or not bother releasing records at all. No one tracks whether local governments like cities and school districts follow the law; state agencies self-report requests, but not the reasons why they refuse them.
The law carves out gaping exemptions for the governor, judiciary and lawmakers on Beacon Hill. The two state agencies that share responsibility of enforcing the law — the secretary of state and the attorney general’s office — are either hamstrung or disinclined to intervene.
Enforcement, in practice, falls to individual requesters. They must alert state overseers, since there is no independent statewide auditing of compliance with the law. Failing that, they must have the time and resources to sue local governments and state agencies in court.
“It’s among the worst states when it comes to public records access,” said Michael Morisy, chief executive of Muckrock, an online platform launched in Boston that allows users to file records requests.
Instead of addressing the state law’s failures and loopholes, many elected officials seem uninterested: more than three-quarters of the 200-member Legislature did not respond to a Globe survey last year about potential improvements to the state law.
“It’s not an issue I’m focused on,” Representative Jennifer Balinsky Armini, a Marblehead Democrat, told the Globe last year.
In McCarter’s case, the South End resident submitted numerous requests with City Hall under the state’s public records law last year, including for information on Wu’s trip to Washington to testify before Congress and on homeless encampments around Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard.
McCarter said his requests lingered for months unfilled by the city, which ignored state-imposed deadlines. Even after the supervisor of records told Boston to respond, it didn’t, he alleged in court filings.
(Boston, in court papers, said in one case, it did provide him with records related to housing for homeless families, but otherwise declined to respond to McCarter’s allegations.)
The city did not respond to Globe questions regarding McCarter’s lawsuit, nor whether the Trump administration responded to the June FOIA request announced by Wu.
The White House referred questions to ICE, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Advocates said public records laws are vital for democracy. They allow people to learn about their government and ask informed questions of those in charge, according to Erin K. Coyle, a professor of media law and the First Amendment at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
“It’s critical for people to be able to know what their government is — or isn’t — doing,” Coyle said.
And to be sure, not every request is blocked.
Adam Chapdelaine, head of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, which represents the state’s cities and towns, said problems with the law tend to be connected with outliers, such as when requesters seek large, complex sets of records.
Many communities don’t have dedicated staff to respond to requests, and fulfilling them can take employees away from other duties, he said.
“I think the law works quite well for most people that are just trying to get their hands on a document,” Chapdelaine said.
Still, many cases require extraordinary perseverance — and money.
The secretary of state’s office spent a decade — and shelled out more than $365,000 in legal fees — fighting Somerville after the city sued to block the release of data on parking permits requested by a Globe reporter in 2014.
In September, a state Appeals Court judge sided with the state, and ordered the records released. The city will comply with the order and release the records, city spokesperson Grace Munns said in a statement, but did not say how much Somerville spent fighting the request.
When the ACLU of Massachusetts sought records related to a license plate reader program used by nearly 90 police departments, many complied, but Taunton wanted to charge $1.8 million. The Massachusetts supervisor of records later allowed a fee of $560,000.
Taunton Police Chief Edward Walsh said the $560,000 is the cost to taxpayers for providing the records.
“If we were to waive the fee, the taxpayers would be paying for it. Would it be in the public interest for the city and its taxpayers to pay for this records request?” Walsh told the Globe.
But the ACLU’s Kade Crockford said the high fee means those records remain out of the public’s reach.
“The spirit of the law says public entities should be open and disclose public documents that belong to the people of Massachusetts — not the public agency that controls them,” Crockford said.
Secrecy can also risk rotting public confidence in government officials. In Lexington, Kyle York last year sought expense records from the town’s public schools.
When the records were provided, they included an e-mail — apparently inadvertently released — in which a Lexington employee tried to drive York away by asking a colleague to overestimate the cost of fulfilling the request.
“Hopefully, when I let [York] know the cost they will not want to do it,” the school district employee wrote to another in May. (The Lexington school superintendent apologized for the message, calling it “highly inappropriate.”)
York worried local officials don’t take the law seriously because of weak enforcement: “It feels like the state is actually letting the citizens down by not holding [accountable] the people who need to be held accountable,” he said.
Poor public records protections are hardly unique to Massachusetts.
In 2024, a review by the Associated Press and CNHI News found that fewer than one-third of states have offices that can resolve public records complaints by forcing agencies to turn over records.
In New Hampshire, for example, the state’s “Right to Know Ombudsman” position has been vacant since July, and no action is being taken on appeals, according to the state.
Across the country, state public records laws are weakening, according to researchers such as Amy Kristin Sanders, a professor of First Amendment studies at Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications.
The problem includes a lack of enforcement of existing laws, officials turning to encrypted communication apps allowing them to avoid releasing records, and cuts to staff that fulfill records requests, Sanders said.
“Overall, we’re seeing an increasing trend toward secrecy at all levels of government,” Sanders said.
In Massachusetts, there are signs of change. State Auditor Diana DiZoglio is leading a drive to place a ballot question before voters next fall that would add the governor and Legislature to the public records law.
“We are frequently ranked in Massachusetts as the least transparent state government in the entire nation,” said DiZoglio, a former state lawmaker.
Governor Maura Healey has signaled openness to applying the public records law to her office, and to making drivers’ records of motor vehicle crashes public, after a Boston Public Schools bus struck and killed a child last year.
But change isn’t happening fast, even as public demand for government records appears to have soared.
By just one partial measure alone, requests for state agency records almost doubled between 2017 to 2024, when more than 44,000 were recorded, according to a state database of requests reported by agencies.
That increase has not resulted in greater transparency: only half of requests to state agencies resulted in records being released in 2024, a dramatic decline from 2017, when around 9 in 10 requests were successful, state data shows.
Meanwhile, complaints filed by people alleging local governments and state agencies ignore the law also just about doubled during the same period, according to data released by the secretary of state’s office.
The office’s supervisor of records is supposed to resolve disputes, but doesn’t have the legal muscle to enforce its own orders, or the resources to ensure they are followed. The attorney general’s office can enforce it, but very rarely prosecutes cases.
Secretary of State William Galvin said his office stopped referring cases to the attorney general nearly three years ago. It could take months for the attorney general’s office to reach a decision — and sometimes ended up disagreeing with his own office’s findings, he said. (From 2017 to 2023, it referred 35 cases to the attorney general, according to Galvin’s office. Since Galvin spoke to the Globe in November, the Secretary of State’s office referred a case to the Attorney General in January.)
“In general, government agencies do not like the public records law, and they don’t have a predisposition to be terribly cooperative,” Galvin said. “There are exceptions to that, but many do not. So it’s been very much of a struggle to make sure that it’s enforced evenly.”
Galvin declined to make Manza Arthur, the supervisor of records, available for an interview.
Attorney General Andrea Campbell did not respond to an interview request. According to public records released by her office, the attorney general has prosecuted three public records cases since 2016, including one against the Mystic Valley Regional Charter School filed in 2023.
(By contrast, Campbell’s office has filed nearly 50 lawsuits opposing Trump administration actions since last year, she said at a breakfast honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in January.)
Mason Kortz, a Harvard Law lecturer, said the lack of enforcement leaves requesters with the option of walking away — or filing a lawsuit. But mounting a court fight poses its own challenges.
“A huge number of meritorious [public records] cases just go unbrought every year,” Kortz said. “If the agency decides to ignore the supervisor’s recommendation — with the attorney general essentially being absent in this — the only right of enforcement here is a private one. And that depends on time and money and effort.”
Such cases can take years. Kortz is working with an independent journalist in Framingham, Andrew Quemere, in suing the Bristol and Northwestern district attorneys for refusing to release unredacted records related to police misconduct cases.
The two district attorneys argued the public’s right to know was outweighed by the officers’ right to privacy, and by the Criminal Offender Record Law, according to court records and decision letters.
Quemere appealed to the supervisor of records, which ultimately sided with him, and ordered the names released. He then sued in 2023 after the district attorneys refused to comply with that order.
“The law doesn’t hold these agencies accountable,” Quemere said.
In December, a judge in the Northwestern case ruled in Quemere’s favor, ordering a release of unredacted records.
As of Feb. 18, the records had not yet been released. The Northwestern DA’s office is in the process of compiling and preparing the records for release, spokesperson Melissa Sippel said.
The case before Bristol County is pending, and the district attorney’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
The Globe has also sued public agencies numerous times to access public records, including one in 2018 for access to thousands of cases in which clerk magistrates had dismissed charges during private proceedings despite finding enough evidence to issue criminal charges.
In 2020, the Globe sued the State Police for failing to comply with the public records law. And last year, the Globe sued five police departments for records related to confidential informants.
In another, the Globe sued the City of Boston over its refusal to provide surveillance video of a deadly school bus crash that killed a Hyde Park kindergartner in April.
Moreover, Boston repeatedly failed to release other records to the Globe within the time frame dictated by state law. In 2025, the city responded more than a month late to 22 requests by the Globe, including 10 of which languished for 100 days or more before completing them. Some requests remain unfulfilled.
In another case, the Globe last year requested but was denied records of the city’s cost projections for the redevelopment of White Stadium in Franklin Park. Then, after the Globe notified City Hall it was preparing a story on the refusal, the Wu administration responded to all but one of the requests about an hour before publication.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Wu said information requests have tripled over the past five years and the city is taking steps to improve response times.
Boston said it received 10,790 requests last year, with an average response time of 14 days. In 2024, it received 9,121 requests, with an average response time of 35 days. The city has five full-time staff, plus four co-ops from Northeastern University, who review records requests.
Ultimately, there’s no way for anyone to know how often state agencies and local governments in Massachusetts ignore requests or fail to follow the law. Nor is there any way of knowing how many requesters are stymied by bureaucratic stonewalling, and simply give up.
“We are working in the dark,” said Justin Silverman of the New England First Amendment Center.
Niki Griswold of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
John Hilliard can be reached at john.hilliard@globe.com or on Signal at john_hilliard.70. Follow him on Bluesky at iamjohnhilliard.bsky.social.