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Worcester, Massachusetts tornado from the Flint-Worcester Outbreak, 1953

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On the scene of a brutal ICE arrest in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Bill Shaner at Mother Jones (05.10.2025):

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. [...] 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. [...] 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.” [...]

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.

This is yet another reason to support the abolishment of ICE.

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