Opinion: Worcester Protesters Show How to Respond to ICE Raids
Collage by Jason Pramas using materials and video in the public domain.
by Jason Pramas
Brave, nonviolent family members, democracy activists, and politicians managed to slow up the warrantless arrest of an immigrant mother of three, until reactionary local cops piled on.
The following article “Worcester Protesters Show How to Respond to ICE Raids“ by Jason Pramas appeared originally in horizonmass.news on May 15, 2025. It is reposted here courtesy of MassWire, a web-based news service covering the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and a project of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
Read more on recent ICE activities in Massachusetts:”
ICE Takes Two into Custody Wednesday Morning in Amherst (Daily Hampshire Gazette)
Immigrants Fear Possible Collaboration Between ICE and Police in Mass. Communities (NBC Boston)
Twelve Year Old Boy Left Alone on Sidwalk During ICE Raid in Massachusetts (CBS News)
AG Campbell Puts out Guidance on What Immigrants and Mass. Communities Should Know About ICE (Boston Globe)
In Massachusetts’Island Communities, Sudden ICE Arrests Rattle Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard (Boston Globe)
ICE’s Brazen Arrests are Undermining Communities (Boston Globe)
Since wondering aloud in an early April column if nonviolent activists might be able to slow or even stop US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement snatch squads from grabbing undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, or even naturalized citizens off the streets at will, I do believe I saw some progress along such lines last week during a particularly ugly ICE raid in Worcester.
The situation on the ground during the chaotic Wormtown bust has been reported in great detail by my colleague Bill Shaner of Worcester Sucks and I Love It; so I encourage you to read his eyewitness account of that shocking circus.
But I don’t want to focus on the details of the arrest and its aftermath in this installment—that ground being heavily covered with varying degrees of empathy or spite elsewhere. I want to look at the community response to said arrest.
Because the way the affected immigrant family managed to turn out sympathetic politicians and local nonviolent pro-democracy activists and make things difficult for ICE before the warrantless bust got fully underway was very much like what I imagined in my first outing on this topic.
Essentially, dozens of people showed up and actually surrounded the car that 40-year old Brazilian immigrant Rosane Ferreira De Oliveira, a mother of three, had just been forced into—causing ICE to call the Worcester Police Department to send officers to disperse the crowd. The same local cops who despite having recently assured the public that they would not assist ICE arrests, proceeded to do just that by breaking up the protest and arresting Ferreira De Oliveira’s 16-year old daughter, and Worcester School Committee candidate Ashley Spring in the process.
Video courtesy of the LUCE Immigrant Justice Network of Massachusetts
Now imagine what the situation would have been like if the WPD had stood down like it had pledged to? Already ICE looks to be responding to public pressure. When Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk was arrested on March 25, ICE agents wore civilian clothing and kept their faces covered—a move that properly led to comparisons to standard secret police operating procedure in dictatorships the world over. During the Worcester arrest, amateur video shot at the scene shows that the heavies from ICE and other agencies wore clearly marked vests and did not consistently conceal their faces.
Therefore if the Worcester cops hadn’t stepped in, the feds would have had to break up the protestors themselves … a bad look on top of the bad look of arresting Ferreira De Oliveira to begin with.
There’s no question that they have the power to do so. Yet I suspect ICE leadership is finding themselves stuck between the desire of the Trump administration to continue the series of almost entirely random show arrests that it needs to look like it is keeping the president’s campaign promise to deport “over 10 million” undocumented immigrants or whatever nonsensical number His Nibs likes to bandy about and the increasingly negative publicity the immigration enforcement agency is receiving. Negative publicity that could very well cause political trouble for ICE leaders—and perhaps even individual field agents—in the not-too-distant future.
And this is what I was getting at in my April column: the more nonviolent activists and just plain folks can find ways to slow down ICE raids, the more likely it is that the raids will stop.
Most Americans, be they citizens or recent immigrants, don’t support jack-booted thugs jumping people outside their homes and disappearing them, whatever the reason. It goes against the foundational idea of the US as “the land of the free.” The more ICE raids happen and the worse federal agents behave during those raids, the more Americans will clamor for political change. Thus if protests keep materializing at raids, bringing journalists and sympathetic politicians in their wake, public opinion could turn ever more solidly against ICE—and the political regime deploying it.
So, good for the extended Ferreira De Oliveira family and Worcester activists supporting them. I know their resistance isn’t going to undo the very real damage the ICE raid has done. But it’s a positive sign for the future of American democracy that it happened at all. Let’s see if this kind of incident turns into a trend.
Apparent Horizon—an award-winning political column—is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
Jason Pramas is HorizonMass editor-in-chief. A longtime photojournalist with an MFA in Visual Arts, he is also executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and writes the award-winning column Apparent Horizon. Pramas is a Boston native.
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