WORCESTER — A 26-year-old man charged with allegedly raping a 15-year-old girl at a Rockland hotel sheltering migrant families entered the country “through a federal program,” Governor Maura Healey said Friday.
Cory B. Alvarez pleaded not guilty to a charge of child rape during an arraignment in Hingham District Court on Thursday. He was ordered held without bail, to surrender his passport, and to have no contact with the girl, Plymouth District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz’s office said.
Healey said at an unrelated event in Worcester on Friday that “this person was in the country under the federal program,” but she didn’t specify whether it was through the Biden administration’s “CHNV” program, which allows certain immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to come to the United States for two years to live and work lawfully under what is known as “humanitarian parole.”
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Those immigrants must have a sponsor in the United States and pass a background check.
Healey said Alvarez was vetted by a state background check as well as an additional check “that we do for all entries to our shelter,” she said. A state spokesperson said a sex offender registry check on Alvarez did not show any past offenses.
“Again, we don’t know the specifics of this case, but we take all allegations of sexual assault most seriously,” Healey said. “My heart goes out to the victim, the alleged victim in this case, and her family. We need to let the criminal justice system do its work.”
The victim, who is from Haiti, identified Alvarez as the perpetrator of the alleged attack at the Comfort Inn on Hingham Street, where police responded around 7 p.m. Wednesday to a report of a sexual assault, prosecutors said.
Alvarez’s arrest quickly intensified the debate over the state’s policy of housing migrant families in hotels and motels, and the safety measures in place to protect them.
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Republican legislators and party leaders expressed sympathy for the victim, but also said Thursday that the incident pointed to flaws in the state’s emergency shelter system. State Representative David DeCoste, a Norwell Republican whose district includes Rockland, said the state had “failed this young girl.”
Healey on Friday defended the state program, saying that state officials are “deploying all that we can in terms of vetting individuals.”
Asked if the incident would prompt changes in security at the Rockland hotel or others currently housing homeless and migrant families, Healey said the state already has “security and systems in place.”
The Rockland site was already among the hotels where the state had deployed National Guard members. A spokesperson for the state’s Executive Office of Housing did not immediately have details on how many hours a day Guard members are deployed to the site, but the hotel is required to provide “24/7 front desk staffing.”
According to the spokesperson, “illegal activities, harassment, sexual harassment, and violent behavior are explicitly prohibited.”
“We have the right systems in place,” Healey said. “It is unfortunate that from time to time, things will happen . . . not just in shelter, but anywhere.”
As of Thursday, the state was housing 7,531 families in its emergency shelter system, including nearly 3,900 in hotels or motels throughout the state. Roughly half of the families in the system — not counting hundreds more who are on a state’s wait-list for shelter — entered the United States as migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers, according to state data.
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State Senator Peter Durant, a Spencer Republican, said in a statement Friday that the allegations were “indicative of systemic failures” in the shelter program, noting there was a fire at a Sutton hotel housing migrant families last fall, cases of chickenpox reported at a Roxbury shelter, and “murderers” in the system. His office later said that Durant was referring to the arrest of a fugitive who was previously convicted of homicide in Venezuela and was living at an emergency shelter at Joint Base Cape Cod in Bourne.
“It is imperative to stop the flow [of migrants] into the state,” Durant said.
Healey declined to respond to Republicans’ criticisms, saying, “I don’t want to play politics with this,” she said.
But she said the incident “speaks somewhat to the issue that states are having to deal with now in terms of the mass numbers coming across the borders and into our states.”
Samantha J. Gross can be reached at samantha.gross@globe.com. Follow her @samanthajgross. Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him @mattpstout.