Congressman Neal Talks With Reid Middle School Students
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — U.S. Rep. Richard Neal answered questions from an eighth-grade class at Reid Middle School on Thursday.
Students in Susan Mooney's class prepared questions related to their civics projects, ranging from government transparency and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to sports to mental health.
"Be discerning, be fact-driven, and you know what? As I say to my own children, resist emotional decision making," Neal told the class.
"You generally will come up with the wrong decision if it's very emotional, and the other part I can give you, an important part of my career: you're always going to give a better answer tomorrow."
In Massachusetts, eighth-grade students are required to complete a civics project focusing on community issues, research, and action.
Students focusing their project on ICE said they found that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is tasked with protecting citizens. They asked Neal why ICE is controlling DHS when agents "do the opposite."
"ICE needs to be reformed and restrained, but a lot of it has much to do with the president's position on it," he said, adding that the fundamental job of the federal government is to protect its people.
"We just need to know who's in the country for a variety of reasons. When the president says he's rooting out the criminals, nobody disagrees with that, but that's not what's happening, is it? It's now people that are just showing up in the courthouse to do what we call 'regularizing their status' that are being apprehended."
Two citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, were shot and killed by federal agents in January during ICE's Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, which began in December 2025. Neal said, "There is no excuse for what happened in Minneapolis."
He reported that about 15 percent of America is now foreign-born, and said there needs to be a path to citizenship for law-abiding people that the country needs.
"We want people that want to be Americans, right? Who want to be an American," he said.
To the group of students doing a project on mental health, Neal said he is one of the authors of the Affordable Care Act, and that there was a decent amount of money put into it for mental health.
He said America, for a long time, had not discussed mental health issues, and that many people fight depression and paranoia.
"I think that mental-health issues are very important, and I'm not a clinical physician, but I don't think social media has helped. I think you need to engage with your classmates and your teachers, and social media creates this sort of echo chamber," Neal told the students.
Neal, interim Superintendent Latifah Phillips, Mayor Peter Marchetti, and state Rep. Tricia Farley-Bouvier also went to Pittsfield High School to speak to students.
The congressman was also in the city to highlight Berkshire Community College's nearly $1 million federal allocation for a Trades Academy.
BCC will dip its toe into the skilled trades with its first HVAC training program, for which it received $1.2 million from the state. The $995,000 that Neal was able to obtain will go toward creating the academy in a building located on the main campus and the HVAC Heat Pump training program, funded by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, will be the college's first skilled trade program.
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