They don't need a warrant
A federal kidnapping in Worcester
by Bill Shaner
(This piece will be sent out in the next edition of the newsletter tomorrow.)
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I'm driving five miles across the city to check out a tip that there's an ICE rendition ongoing. I've got the scanner on the car stereo as I'm about to pull onto the street in question. It’s a quiet neighborhood, small houses on small lots, people walking dogs, the mailman waving, the lawnmowers running, and I hear the dispatcher: "We have an ICE officer over there who's allegedly being surrounded."
"On our way," the officer responds.
As a local reporter for a decade now, I've learned that you can hear the cops at their most honest on the scanner. And as I'm hearing that “surrounded” comment I remember what the city's police chief told the city council in January:
"We do not do civil detention arrests," Police Chief Paul Saucier said at the time, reassuring them that they wouldn’t be party to the ICE assault Trump was about to unleash. The police, he said, "do not have the authority to affect a civil arrest."
What he didn't say is that if you try to stop the civil arrest, the police will stop you from stopping it.
This morning a few dozen of us here in Worcester Massachusetts got to see that unstated fine print in action firsthand. A woman was led by federal agents in cuffs away from her family, through a throng of community organizers trying to stop it, and into an unmarked car. The local police arrived to prevent the community from protecting their neighbor from an unlawful kidnapping. They succeeded, and in the process arrested two of the people who tried to stop it.
I park my car on the edge of the scene and all I can hear are the screams—the deafening desperate screams, from a mother, from her daughter, from the woman holding the daughter's baby. Wordless screams.
And then I see the mother, a young woman in a green shirt, wailing, crying, held on either side by menacing white men in tactical vests, black neck warmers pulled over their noses in the style du jour for our secret police forces.
Surrounding them are a few dozen community members who were tipped off about the ICE raid and got to it before the police did. Before I arrived, they demanded to see a warrant. The ICE agents refused to provide one, so they created a human chain, which the ICE officers eventually broke through.
I still don't know her name or where they've taken her. The federal officials provided no information to anyone at the scene. But apparently they called the local police for backup. They felt that they were surrounded. Black Hawk Down.
As they're marching this woman to the back door of the tan unmarked Ford SUV representing her nebulous fate, the community is swarming, surrounding, yelling at the ICE officers. City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj, a dear friend and a relentless advocate for her community, is following closest behind them. She's screaming. "You are cowards." She's jogging to keep pace as they march their jackbooted march to the SUV with New York plates. "This is an innocent woman."
An ICE agent opens the door and the woman's daughter shrieks—an unforgettable noise of agony. Her mother is about to disappear, into the purposefully vague bureaucratic world of forced removal. The opening of that door, to this shrieking girl... it must look like a life torn apart. Her family fractured. And for what? No one bothers to explain that to her. Perhaps they’re not allowed to. The rules.
The Worcester Police Department steps in at this crucial juncture, among us residents surrounding the car about to take one of our neighbors away. And they do so on behalf of the ICE agents, not us. A Worcester cop comes over, stepping between the open car door and the community, past the ICE agents stuffing the mother into the back seat, and he looks at a woman holding the shrieking daughter's baby. She’s also wailing in desperate anger and he says—to her—"Stop, stop, stop. They'll explain. They'll explain."
Of course they don't explain.
The woman's daughter then jumps on the hood of the car. A Worcester cop pulls her off.
The crowd chants "Don't take the mother!" over and over again as the daughter keeps trying to get back on the hood of the car. More Worcester cops arrive, all helping the ICE agents carry out their rotten senseless work.
When I say ICE, it's a catchall. These federal agents were wearing a myriad of badges and few of them had name tags. Most of them had "POLICE" written somewhere on their tactical vests. There were ICE insignias, but also Customs and Border Patrol, and one ATF.
A CBP agent, his face cover falling down slightly below his nose, pushes a woman away from the car in the manner of an offensive tackle—elbows out, knees bent, forearms thrusting. Others take the woman's place.
We're on a quiet residential street on a peaceful spring day, the sun beating down serenely, a light breeze. The sort of day you wait all year for. For this mother and her daughter and the little baby it was that sort of day before federal agents showed up, without saying why, intending to bring her to an undisclosed somewhere without even proving they had the legal right.
The crowd of community members, who these officers ostensibly protect and serve, continues to cheer "Don't take the mother, don't take the mother." The daughter is still shrieking.
"This is ICE. This is federal," one of the WPD officers explains, as if a suitable explanation. Case closed.
A woman says "They don't have a warrant." Another says "They're trying to kidnap someone."
As the local cops are clearing the road for ICE's unmarked SUV, community organizer Maydee Morales confronts them. "Worcester police are not supposed to be involved in this."
In the background, a Worcester police officer looks at the desperate woman holding her baby trying to stop the agents from taking her mother and says "Do you want to stay with your baby?" The tacit threat of separation for her protestation of another separation. Later he would complain "She's putting the baby in harm's way." A classic move: "harm" goes undefined because the harm is him.
Maydee, still confronting the officers, says "Where is the warrant?" Officer Lugo, according to his nameplate, says "Ma'am we are trying our best but they are federal."
Morales again asks for the warrant.
"They're federal."
"They still need a warrant."
Another officer, frustrated, says "They don't need a warrant." Finally, one of them tells the truth. Due process is not a matter they're concerned with. The deportation must proceed. Trying to stop it is the unlawful thing. At this point an ICE agent starts pushing me away, but not very hard. Lazy jabs, his mind elsewhere. Too many people, too much pushing to be done. I return to my pre-push position. I keep filming. I don't know what else to do.
A cop pulls his cruiser behind us—we're boxed in now—and from the intercom says "This is the Worcester Police Department. This is an unlawful assembly, I'm warning you to disperse right now or you will be subject to arrest."
On the other side of me, a crackle of the scanner from an officer's vest-mounted radio: "Do I have a car to escort the marshals out of here?"
They don't need a warrant but they do need an escort.
As the car pulls away, nudging into the thick crowd, the daughter shrieks another horrible horrible horrible shriek, communicating the non-communicable as the disappearers take another step toward disappearing her mother. As the car breaks from the crowd she runs after it. A Worcester police officer, his voice frothing with anger, shouts "Arrest her right now. You are under arrest." And then four cops swarm her, grab her, throw her to the ground. All the while she's crying crying crying. Her hair's caught in her mouth and matted to her face, wet with spit and tears. Four cops hold her pinned to the ground.
Then they march her away. Her and another member of the community who had tried to intervene. They take the pair away from the crowd. I follow. They have the daughter by both arms, same as the ICE agents had her mother. I still don't know either of their names. Next to me is a TV reporter from a Spanish language station and her cameraman. She yells out, "What's your name?" and the woman responds in Spanish. I can't make it out. She asks her age and this one I catch: “dieciséis.”
Not a woman—a girl. A 16-year-old girl. Now in custody for the crime of reacting in an unruly way to the sudden forceful disappearance of her mother.
I keep asking about the charges. The only cop who doesn't ignore me explains "I'm not the arresting officer." The arresting officers go on ignoring me.
We get to the spot where the wagon is set to arrive. I ask again. Eventually I get an answer, and it's the usual package job: disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, unlawful assembly. The charges they throw on anyone they want to arrest for the sake of arresting them, knowing they're unlikely to stick. But sticking isn't the goal. The officer who tells me this has a tactical K9 Unit vest on. He tells me the 16-year-old girl was interfering with police business. "Worcester police business?" I ask. What was the police business here exactly? He looks at me like I'm a smart ass. He doesn't say anything. I press him again: "Kind of a grey area, huh?"
“Not really,” he says.
Bill Shaner writes the newsletter Worcester Sucks and I Love It.
Shaner's most recent piece for Hell World was about Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey's Trumpian approach to addressing migrants and homelessness in the Commonwealth.
Luke O’Neil
Reduced to its essence, Healey has imposed a set of austerities, for the benefit of the “taxpayer,” and advertised them as efficiencies. She has presented a narrative in which incoming migrants are the chaos agent. She doesn’t call them rapists and murderers like Trump, doesn’t say they’re eating dogs and cats, but she still calls them the problem.
In doing so she’s allowed a pernicious myth to profligate: that immigrants are taking the services intended for our native residents. That they are to blame for the tents people see in the woods here in Worcester and elsewhere. She has not offered a meaningful alternative to this line of thought.
Shaner previously reported for Hell World on a No New Women’s Prisons anti-incarceration march, a strike by nurses at Saint Vincent Medical Center, the cruel displacement of the city's unhoused population, and the Department of Justice investigation into the police department of Worcester, MA.
It's me Luke again now.
As tensions are growing as they refer to it between India and Pakistan I think this interview on the street between a young man and a warmongering news reporter is well worth watching. Hate is in fact taught. It is not the natural state of human existence no matter how many times they try to convince us that it is. Dude even hit him with the mic drop fall back into the crowd of his boys move at the end. Kind of wish he hadn't said his name and where he was from though. Protect this boy.
Oh yeah nice one kid hook that hope for humanity right into my veins
— A Wet Owl (Pope) (@levisatyrane.bsky.social) 2025-05-08T16:55:19.676Z
Long live Pakistan?
Zindabad. [Long live]
Aren't you ashamed?
Why should I be ashamed?
Pakistan shouldn't be destroyed?
It shouldn't be.
Long live India, yes or no?
Yes.
Long live Pakistan, yes or no?
Yes. Long live everyone in their own space! You too. Long live in your place.
...
Aren't you even a little ashamed, that, despite living in India, you're supporting Pakistan? Why shouldn't Pakistan be destroyed?
Oh, so you're making the news? Aren't you ashamed about it? Aren't you ashamed making news and spreading it everywhere? About Hindus and Muslims? Why should we support India? ... There are people over there too. Here too. Muslims there too. Hindus there too. Hindus here too. Everyone is human. Then why kill everyone? Tell me! Tell me why it should be destroyed? Everyone has a right to live. Everyone has that right. Then why destroy them?
Do you support Pakistan?
... Yes I do.
You are not an Indian?
I am Indian. You are saying destroy that country, but everywhere people live.
I just want to know one small thing. Who taught you this?
Bro, I have a brain, man.
"We don't give a fuck. You need to get sober."
— Blaise Ulysse Bernard Collins 🔵 (@wittywebhandle.bsky.social) 2025-05-08T15:42:52.112Z
This video between journalist and YouTuber Matt Cullen and an adult performer known as Crush Daddy made me tear up too.
One of the first meetings I went to was a gay meeting. I walk in, I didn't know it was a gay meeting. And at the end of the meeting the secretary goes thank you for coming to the LGBTQ – whatever all the letters are – meeting at Jocelyn Park. And I was like, oh shit, I'm not supposed to be here. I get up, just dart for the door. This huge butch lesbian is sitting by the door. Her name is Shelly, I'll never forget her. She gets up, grabs me by the chest – I was only 145 lbs at the time – and throws me back into the room. She goes where are you going kid? And I'm like, I'm straight, I'm not supposed to be here. And she goes, we don't give a fuck, you need to get sober. That group of gay men, lesbians, trans women, they helped me get my life together. I learned so much from the gay community – and the gay community has been through such a harder time than a lot of the straight community – that I learned more how to be a man, a grown man, from gay men, than I ever did from any straight man I ever met.
Shout out to not giving a fuck what kind of person a person is and just wanting to help them. Or at the very least not wanting to see them massacred.
Oh wait one more thing that made me tear up was listening to the latest Maron on the treadmill today. It's an interview with the Oklahoma-based Native American musician Samantha Crain. She is great in her own right – listen to one of my favorites by her called Bloomsday. They also did a big chunk about Jason Molina and how much of an influence he was on her and how much Marc loved him too and you can probably guess that that got my ass pretty good. She also references a song of hers that is about Molina called For the Miner.
Did you get used to it
Or are you still up with the demons all night
Did you get used to it
Or do you still feel like the world is unkind
Holding back, slipping down
Don’t go now
Well we might as well keep with the theme here of things that made me cry today. Replace the 100 with 101 from this post though.
I have written about my beloved grandmother Shirley so many times and probably will never stop doing so but most recently in this piece which will be in the next book and is one of my favorite things I've written in a year or two.
The Editors
The last time we were all there together my own family and the extended family we left my grandmother to float away into the water. It went smoothly. The throwing of her ashes. These sorts of things are more difficult than you think to get right.
Some of my nieces wrote letters to her in bottles and threw them out.
If I had written one I would have said I love you so much and I think about you almost every day but you fucked us all up so badly.
I swear to god she did but we love her all the same. Perhaps even more for it. We are all so sick.
It was also the anniversary of my father's passing over the weekend and you know I've written about that 100 times too.
Luke O’Neil
There's a reason why we still run obituaries in newspapers, for even the most average among us, because to note the ending of a life is to remind us all of the most important thing that binds us together as people, as communities, as a civilization. To point out that someone died is to point out that they lived at all.
More tomorrow. Thanks for reading.