Top Beacon Hill Democrats criticized President Donald Trump’s administration Monday for renewing a surge of immigration arrests in Boston over the weekend, with Gov. Maura Healey calling the actions “political theater” and “attempts to distract from Trump’s failing agenda.”

Immigration agents from across the country descended on Boston and other municipalities for an operation U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials dubbed “Patriot 2.0,” a reference to a previous uptick in action earlier this year that resulted in nearly 1,500 arrests.

Healey said federal immigration officials are arresting “construction workers and nannies and health care aides and agricultural workers.”

“I’m talking to a lot of people who are feeling the effects of tariffs. Capital is not being deployed in the United States. People don’t have access to capital in the United States for development, whether it’s for housing or other growth, and this is a real problem. And so a lot of this is about political theater to distract from his abject failure on the economy,” the first-term Democrat said outside her State House office.

Officials at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have said they are searching for individuals arrested by the Boston Police Department who are “actionable cases,” or people that agents have tried to take into custody or lodged detainers against.

Massachusetts has also been a routine target of Republican criticism because of a previous surge of migrants in the state-run shelter population and local rules that largely limit police or court officials from interacting with federal immigration agents.

Senate President Karen Spilka said constituents in her communities — Ashland, Framingham, Holliston, Hopkinton, Medway, and Natick — are concerned about the uptick in immigration action.

“People are concerned about going to work. They’re concerned about walking to go to their drug stores or their supermarkets. They’re concerned about being picked up. I support Governor Healey and everyone in Massachusetts who calls out the federal government, its overreach in all of our communities,” Spilka said at the State House.

House Speaker Ron Mariano said everyone who pays attention to the news “has some fear of what’s going on.”

“Quincy is a changing demographic. We have 40% minorities in the city now, and they live under this fear, even though we don’t have a specific incident,” Mariano said of his hometown.

Republicans running for governor next year criticized Healey for her response to the surge in immigration arrests.

“To be clear: there is nothing theatrical about the public’s outrage over multiple cases in Massachusetts where criminal illegal immigrants with ICE detainers have been arrested in Massachusetts by local authorities, only to be released back into the community, putting citizens directly at risk just because Maura Healey wants to thumb her nose to the federal government,” said Mike Kennealy, a former cabinet secretary under Gov. Charlie Baker.

Brian Shortsleeve, a venture capitalist and former MBTA official under Baker, said Healey is “refusing to take responsibility for the policies that she has put in place.”

“She can deny it as much as she wants, but every taxpayer knows she turned Massachusetts into a sanctuary state. As the next governor, I will reverse her reckless policies,” he said in a statement.

Healey has long pushed back on attempts to label Massachusetts a “sanctuary state,” and repeated that claim again during an interview aired Sunday on MSNBC.

“It’s just the fact. Nor is Boston a sanctuary city,” she said. “These are just terms that the Trump administration makes up, guys, that’s what’s going on, to fit into their narrative and to further this political theater.”

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