An online ad attacks Rep. Seth Moulton, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, for not being sufficiently progressive because of past policy positions. But it also misleadingly claims that Moulton, a critic of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “thanked ICE as they were terrorizing our communities and then killed citizens.”
The claim about ICE is based on Moulton’s vote for a June 2025 House resolution condemning a terrorist attack at a pro-Israel demonstration in Boulder, Colorado, that month. The last sentence of the resolution acknowledged law enforcement, including ICE officers, “for protecting the homeland.”
However, at the time of his vote, Moulton said in a statement that he supported the measure because its “overarching purpose” was to “condemn antisemitic terror.”
The ad also criticizes Moulton, who was first elected to the House in 2015, for finding fault with the Green New Deal, an environmental policy agenda that he has supported; for previously opposing a wealth tax on billionaires that he now supports; and for not completely embracing proposals for a Medicare-for-all health care system for the U.S., which Moulton has said should be optional for Americans rather than mandatory.
Commonwealth Together PAC released the 30-second ad, titled “Run,” on April 8. The super PAC is pushing for the reelection of Sen. Ed Markey, the longtime incumbent whom Moulton is challenging in the Democratic primary. The election is Sept. 1.
A spokesman for the super PAC told the Boston Globe that the ad cost “six figures” and will run on social media and streaming platforms for “several weeks.”
“Sorry, Seth. You can run for Senate, but you can’t run from your record,” the narrator says at the end of the ad. A reader asked us if the ad’s claims about Moulton are accurate.
Thanking ICE?
The ad starts with the narrator saying: “Now that Seth Moulton is running for Senate, he claims he’s a progressive. But Moulton voted with Republicans to thank ICE for protecting our homeland. He thanked ICE as they were terrorizing our communities and then killed citizens in broad daylight.”
The ad cites Moulton’s vote in June 2025 for a House resolution — introduced by Republican Rep. Gabe Evans of Colorado — that denounced Mohammed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian national, “and his antisemitic terrorist attack on peaceful demonstrators supporting the release of the hostages held by Hamas.” Federal prosecutors have charged Soliman, who is in the country on an expired tourist visa, with using Molotov cocktails and a homemade flamethrower to assault multiple demonstrators at that pro-Israel rally on June 1.
The last line of the roughly two-page resolution, which passed 280 to 113, with 75 Democrats joining 205 Republicans, said the House “expresses gratitude to law enforcement officers, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel, for protecting the homeland.”
But that acknowledgement of ICE is not why Moulton said he voted for the resolution, as the ad may lead viewers to believe.
In a June 11 statement responding to Democrats angered by his vote, Moulton said: “It is important to recognize that there rarely exists a bill or resolution that I vote for because I agree with every single word in it. At the end of the day, I cast my vote for H. Res 488 because I believe that it is critical to loudly condemn antisemitic terror, which was the overarching purpose of this resolution.”
And the congressman has criticized ICE several times since his vote last spring.
After Renee Good, a U.S. citizen, was shot and killed during a dispute with ICE agents in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, Moulton called for the Department of Homeland Security and then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to be held accountable “for aggressive and illicit tactics by ICE and other law enforcement agencies” that contributed to Good’s death. He said the killing of Good was an example of why he had introduced legislation in December “to make sure ICE officers can be prosecuted when they break the law.” That bill, the National Oversight and Enforcement of Misconduct Act, or NOEM Act, has not advanced.
In addition, after federal immigration officers in Minneapolis fatally shot Alex Pretti, another U.S. citizen, on Jan. 24, Moulton posted a social media video in which he called for ICE to be abolished. (A clip of the scuffle between Pretti and the officers is shown in the ad.)
“ICE is beyond repair,” Moulton said in his video post. “It obviously needs to be abolished, but even more urgently, its gang of criminal enforcers needs to be prosecuted. And then we can build a more comprehensive and humane immigration system that, No. 1, incentivizes people to come here legally, not illegally; two, provides a very clear pathway to citizenship; and three, is guarded by an enforcement system that, from judges to officers on the streets, reflects American values in every action and policy.”
That same month, Moulton co-authored a letter to the leaders of a congressional subcommittee on homeland security that said he would oppose any DHS appropriations bill “without firm statutory guardrails and meaningful reforms” for ICE.
“To suggest that a vote to condemn a horrific terrorist attack against Holocaust survivors was somehow an endorsement of ICE is the kind of intellectual dishonesty that makes people lose faith in politics,” Moulton’s campaign said in an April 8 statement responding to the ad attacking him.
Other Ad Claims
Immediately following the ICE claims, the ad’s narrator says, “Moulton opposes Medicare-for-all too.” A graphic on screen in the ad cites a May 8, 2019, article on boston.com that carried the headline “Here’s why Seth Moulton opposes Medicare-for-All.”
The article went on to say that Moulton, a former Marine with health coverage through the Veterans Administration, had reservations about “forcing everyone onto a government one-size-fits-all program” like the VA system because of his own health care experiences.
“I can tell you plenty of stories about how my health care at the VA, with this socialized government system, is not great,” the article quoted him as telling CNN.
But the boston.com article also said that Moulton was fine with giving people the option to choose Medicare-style health insurance. Medicare “should be an option that Americans have. But it shouldn’t be the only way to go,” the article quoted him as saying on the “Pod Save America” podcast in April 2019, during his brief run for president.
As he suggested during that podcast interview, Moulton’s current health care platform on his campaign website calls for creating a “National Public Option health care plan that competes directly with private insurers and lowers premiums for everyone.”
The ad attacking Moulton also says, “He criticized the Green New Deal, and he said Sen. Warren’s tax on billionaires punished the rich.”
The 2019 Los Angeles Times article cited in the ad quoted Moulton talking about being one of the earliest supporters of the Green New Deal – a nonbinding resolution outlining ways to address climate change – when it was in its early stages in 2018. What he later criticized were additions to that environmental policy agenda that he did not believe were about climate change. He said those add-ons could cause the proposal to lose support.
“I was one of the first people to sign onto the Green New Deal, and I signed on so early that it was just an open framework,” Moulton said, according to the L.A. Times article. “But then when some of the proponents of the deal or some of the sponsors of it started adding things like a jobs guarantee, a bunch of socialist programs, I think that’s a huge mistake because I think it’s gonna result in the baby being thrown out with the bathwater because it’s not addressing climate change specifically.”
However, in a statement sent to us, Taylor Hebble, communications director for the Moulton campaign, noted that the congressman “has been a cosponsor of every Green New Deal Resolution introduced in the House.” But none has passed. (Markey has sponsored Senate versions of the Green New Deal that also have not passed.)
As for the tax on billionaires that Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent, proposed in 2019, Moulton did tell Reuters in an April interview that year that he thought their tax plans were a form of economic punishment.
“While he agreed the wealthy ought to pay their share of taxes, Sanders and Warren wanted to ‘punish the rich,’ Moulton said, which he called un-American,” Reuters reported.
But Hebble raised the fact that Moulton went on to co-sponsor the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax Act in 2022, supported the 2022 state Massachusetts Fair Share Amendment that levied an extra 4% tax on taxable income exceeding $1,000,000, and backed the Social Security 2100 Act introduced in 2023 to apply Social Security payroll taxes to earnings above $400,000.
Fast forward to 2026, and Moulton has proposed his own wealth tax as part of his “affordability agenda” for housing, health care and education. “The plan is fully paid for through a national wealth tax on mega-millionaires and by closing tax loopholes exploited by corporations and the ultra-wealthy,” Moulton’s campaign said in a December press release about his proposal.
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