BOSTON — As the state stares down an immigration-influenced labor shortage, senators moved to automate the process of sealing criminal records as a way to provide “meaningful help to a labor market that badly needs workers,” Sen. Cindy Friedman said.
A redrafted Friedman amendment (#511) adopted by the Senate Thursday to its sweeping economic development borrowing bill (S 3178) would turn “an underused legal right into real relief to hundreds of thousands of residents,” the Arlington Democrat said on the floor.
“Our labor shortage is compounding just as the state’s immigrant workforce, long a critical part of labor and construction and direct care, faces new pressure,” Friedman said. Nursing homes in particular are expected to lose at least 2,000 workers due to the end of temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitian immigrants, she noted. “On top of that, the state is falling far short of the immigrant population growth researchers say is needed to stabilize construction and other labor-dependent industries.”
Following a June U.S. Supreme Court decision, about 350,000 TPS recipients across the U.S. from Haiti and other countries are slated to lose their work permits on Monday, the New York Times reported. There are approximately 45,000 Haitian TPS holders in Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey wrote in a Monday letter to the U.S. Senate, urging it to pass legislation extending TPS.
“Across industries—from healthcare and long-term care to transportation, hospitality, and construction—these workers help keep our economy running,” Healey wrote. “The sudden loss of their legal status and work authorization would be devastating for our state.”
Roughly 672,000 Massachusetts residents are eligible to have their criminal records sealed, Friedman said, but only about 10% have actually done so and as a result many are “locked out of jobs” the state needs filled.
Many people don’t seal their records because it’s done manually in Massachusetts, Friedman explained, so they have to fill out a paper petition and mail it to the commissioner of probation, where it has to be processed individually. Those who face the largest barriers to manual sealing are those who are least likely to have “the time, resources or support to navigate a cumbersome sealing process,” Sen. Adam Gomez said.
Under existing law, Massachusetts residents can file a petition to seal a criminal record three years after being found guilty of a misdemeanor or seven years after a felony, without any new convictions, according to the Clean Slate Massachusetts advocacy coalition. The group launched a campaign in January 2025 to promote criminal record sealing reform legislation that had failed to clear the Judiciary Committee for years.
According to the amendment, the commissioner of probation “shall seal records subject to automated sealing…within 30 days of the time that the records became eligible for sealing.” National advocacy group Clean Slate Initiative says 14 states have passed automated record sealing laws across the country, with Missouri being the most recent.
“We do not have the number of staff we need within the courts to actually process these in an efficient way. People already must wait years before they can seal their records,” Friedman said, calling the system “burdensome, slow and inefficient.”
The main opposition to the policy change over the years came from the trial courts, “just in terms of whether they’re able to automate it,” Friedman said Monday. Along with giving the trial courts some funding for record sealing in a past budget, “we found a nonprofit company that helps do this kind of coding for states,” she added.
“The technology is getting better, and they’re re-doing their whole court system record stuff, so I think it’s become something that they now see, ‘Oh, okay. We have a pathway to automate this stuff,'” Friedman said. Her amendment doesn’t exactly mirror a bill (S 1114) she filed this session on the topic, but she said it includes “the major, basic fundamental pieces.”
Massachusetts Competitive Partnership CEO Jay Ash backed the concept last year during a briefing, which Greater Boston Legal Services said at the time would mark the most significant Criminal Offender Record Information change since the 2018 Criminal Justice Reform Act.
“Sealing records is access to employment. It is the single strongest predictor of successful reentry and economic stability. Sealing opens the door to housing, education and credit, all essential to escaping poverty and driving economic growth,” Friedman said. “Sealing reduces recidivism by removing barriers that push people back into the criminal legal system.”
Gomez said that the people impacted by automated records sealing in many cases are people whose cases were resolved, whose charges were dismissed or who were found not guilty, and “despite having done everything we asked of them, their old records continue to appear on background checks, costing them jobs, apartments and stability.”
People with out-of-state offenses, who have committed sex crimes, and some decriminalized offenses would still have to file paper petitions, Friedman said, “because automating the process for them is not technically feasible right now.”
The policy must survive House-Senate economic development bill negotiations in order to become law.
Ella Adams is a reporter for the State House News Service and State Affairs Massachusetts. Reach her at [email protected].
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