The mayor of Lawrence, Massachusetts spent years telling voters he was one of them. On Friday morning, federal agents told a different story — and when reporters finally got him in front of a camera to answer for $1.5 million in allegedly stolen pandemic relief, his lawyer stepped in front of him and said the mayor doesn’t speak English.
Brian DePeña, 61, was arrested and charged with wire fraud over the alleged misuse of more than $1.5 million in Economic Injury Disaster Loans, the Small Business Administration program created under the CARES Act to keep struggling businesses alive during COVID, Fox News reported. Prosecutors say DePeña applied for the money on behalf of Tenares Tire Services Inc., his tire shop in Lawrence, then spent it on his own mayoral campaign and his personal debts. If convicted, he faces up to 30 years in prison.
Then came the clip. Pressed by reporters after the arraignment, DePeña’s attorney, Carlos Apostle, delivered nine words that detonated across social media: “He doesn’t speak English. No comment.” The mayor himself just smiled and repeated “God bless you” to the cameras. Shortly afterward, video appeared to show the car DePeña left in crashing into a parked vehicle on the way out.
The reaction was immediate and merciless. “OMG,” the account LibsofTikTok wrote in a post viewed more than a million times. “How is this real.” Radio host Mike Gallagher was blunter: “‘He doesn’t speak English, no comment’ says the assistant of the mayor of an American city. Our melting pot has completely melted.” Journalist Miranda Devine added the line half the country was already thinking: “English fluency should be a basic prerequisite for holding public office.”
DePeña was born in the Dominican Republic and has openly acknowledged that he arrived in the United States “without papers” as an undocumented immigrant before becoming a citizen. He won the Lawrence mayor’s office in November 2021 after five years on the city council, and won re-election as recently as November 2025. Let that sink in — voters handed him a second term while the loans he is now charged over were already on the books.
Federal prosecutors are not treating this as a paperwork error. “Mayor DePeña was elected to be a leader for the City of Lawrence,” U.S. Attorney Leah B. Foley said. “He was looked up to and trusted by his constituents, but he betrayed that trust through his alleged corruption and lies. Today’s arrest is just another example of our determination to root out fraud by anyone, even public officials, and hold elected officials accountable.” Fox News Digital reached out to DePeña’s office and to Apostle for comment.
This is a window into what happens when a political machine stops asking basic questions about the people it elevates. Nobody in Lawrence apparently wondered how a tire-shop owner was funding a campaign, because wondering out loud would have been rude — or worse, in the modern Democratic vocabulary, disqualifying. So the questions went unasked until the FBI asked them. The residents of Lawrence deserved a mayor who could stand in front of them and answer for himself. Instead they got a lawyer, a smile, and a fender-bender on the way out of the courthouse.
Source: foxnews.com