Warren chooses struggling mill city to announce run

LAWRENCE, Mass. — When Sen. Elizabeth Warren officially jumps into the race for president, it won’t be from her Cambridge hometown where Harvard and MIT reside, or nearby Boston, where presidential hopefuls have launched campaigns over the generations.

Instead, the 69-year-old Democrat is widely expected to kick off her campaign Saturday some 30 miles north in Lawrence, a faded mill city that’s one of New England’s poorest and most heavily Latino.

The struggling city, once a center of the American textile industry and where one of the nation’s most significant labor strikes occurred, provides a fitting backdrop for Warren’s economic message of fighting for workers in the face of powerful corporate interests and a growing wealth divide.

With a long tradition of welcoming immigrants, the nearly 80 percent Latino city is also a place where the fight over immigration deeply resonates.

“Lawrence is a microcosm of the story Democrats want to tell about where America has been and where it wants to be,” said John Cluverius, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts in nearby Lowell. “It’s an industrial city where American workers fought for fair wages and labor conditions. It’s also an immigrant city that’s grown from many of the policies that President Trump and Republicans now oppose, like family or chain migration.”

But what makes the city, where more than 80 percent of voters picked Hillary Clinton in 2016, ideal for Democrats also makes it a foil for Republicans.

President Trump and governors in neighboring Maine and New Hampshire have called out Lawrence for being a hub for the lethal heroin and fentanyl trade. They’ve taken aim at its sanctuary city policies limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement agencies.

“Ending sanctuary cities is crucial to stopping the drug addiction crisis,” Trump argued last March, citing a Dartmouth College study that found Lawrence was one of the primary sources of fentanyl in six New Hampshire counties.

Democratic Mayor Dan Rivera acknowledged his city’s reputation for crime and corruption has been difficult to shake, but he pointed to signs of progress. Trendy cafes are starting to take their place among the vacant storefronts, convenience stores and other modest businesses downtown.

“There was a time when politicians wouldn’t want to be seen in Lawrence,” Rivera said. “But Lawrence isn’t just the bad things in the past. There’s so much going here.”