"The Federal Government Will Find You"
Visa revocations and Brownshirt Amazon Prime
Hello hello. Coming to you a little late this week, I know. It’s been a ”hell of a week” for what feels like the hundredth week in a row. This one, though—this is something different. One hell of a “one hell of a week.” This is the “one hell of a week” she tells you, a normal week, not to worry about.
Trump administration policies have come home to roost here in Worcester in brand new and especially cruel ways… the many-fronted witch trials of the moment hitting the city seemingly all at once. Student visas revoked, cuts to HUD, spurious letters sent out to people of all kinds, begging them to self-deport...
Walter Benjamin apparently joked about how if he ever made it to America and away from Nazi Germany he’d be treated like a freak show. Hannah Arendt in the foreword of Illuminations relays:
Besides, nothing drew him to America, where, as he used to say, people would probably find no other use for him than to cart him up and down the country to exhibit him as the “last European.”
Imagine the last Americans, carted up and down the streets of Beijing... Certainly won’t be you or me haha.... Unless?
The year is 2049. I say “Dunkies” and the crowd cheers. An attendant hands me five $1 scratch tickets and a quarter. I perform for the audience the ancestral ritual of my people.
Right, so. We have much much much to get to. I’ve found it very difficult to put these news items to page. It’s about 9:30 p.m. Saturday as of my writing this part specifically and Lungfish’s “Shed The World” is on.
I walked along a public path
And I observed the birds taking a bath
They sung in code, but the message clear
"Don't shun the world. Shed it"
Some good advice I think... especially for those of you spending a lot of time on Worcester Facebook.
Staring at a lot of notes and very little written. We’ll see how it goes. This is the kind of radical honesty I get the big bucks for, by the way.
Let’s start with the week in review so as to be on the same general page...
Suckage Index
On Tuesday Councilor Haxhiaj sounded the alarm about HUD cuts making the already dire homelessness situation much worse. Councilor Mero-Carlson sounded the alarm about Cable Access Guy Mauro DePasquale’s paycheck. Charges against the Assumption students who partook in TikTok vigilantism were dropped. The Board of Health reaffirmed its support for vaccines. A woman admitted to starting the Gage Street in 2022 that killed four people. A former tenant, she was upset with her (objectively terrible) landlord. Sentence: life in prison. The shuttered Becker College donated $1.2 million to Worcester State. The Trump administration revoked four student visas at WPI Thursday then 12 at Clark University on Friday. In neither case were there any stated reasons or even formal notice. The Worcester Fire Department made Libs of TikTok for its DEI program. A new survey found business confidence in the area is the lowest it has been in five years. Burncoat pep band won a national championship. At least one Worcester resident received the mass notice that went out from the Department of Homeland Security saying “it’s time to leave the United States.” Almost certainly not the only one.
See? One hell of a “one hell of a week.” Nationally too: The liberation day mess only to be topped by a federal judge ruling Columbia student and legal resident Mahmoud Khalil deportable.
We desperately need to take action. So that’s where we’re starting today.
Oh and check it out I made little custom section dividers! One of the many procrastinatory tasks performed in the production of this recap of a dreadful week.
“The federal government will find you” — The War On Students — “There are folks who get dropped off here” — odds and ends
Stuff coming up
While I still have most of you… some upcoming actions and important meetings
Tuesday, April 15 — public safety subcommittee meeting about the DOJ report 5 p.m. and ShotSpotter renewal on the main council agenda at 6:30 p.m.
Also April 15 — HALO virtual meet up and planning session. Also
April 16 — Carpenters Local #336 Tax Fraud Day of Action, 446 Main Street.
April 19 - Indivisible Worcester1 No Kings, “We’re not going back!” Protest on Belmont Street (250th Anniversary of the American Revolution)
May 1 — May Day protest planned for city hall. Couldn’t find any more information about it but it’s organized by Worcester Indivisible, the same folks who put on the massive Hands Off demonstration. More as I have it.
Also there’s a new organization that Neighbor to Neighbor is involved with called the LUCE Hotline to monitor ICE activity. They’re looking for volunteers and donations. LUCE, I just learned, is the only reason we have any video of Rümeysa Öztürk’s arrest. From the Boston Review:
The video of the abduction obtained by LUCE proved invaluable far beyond Somerville. Released to the press, it became a major story, published, posted, and reposted around the world. Some who lived under authoritarian regimes saw a familiar tactic: a disappearance. No matter how long it takes to yield justice, witness must be borne, said Timpona: “Visibility is accountability.”
A great way to transition to the main story.
“The Federal Government Will Find You”
On Friday I got a heads up from someone at a local service provider for the unhoused that someone there received an email with the subject line “Notice of Termination of Parole” from the Department of Homeland Security. The first line “It is time for you to leave the United States.”
It continues:
You are currently here because the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) paroled you into the United States for a limited period. Pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1182(d)(5)(A) and 8 C.F.R. § 212.5(e), DHS is now exercising its discretion to terminate your parole. Unless it expires sooner, your parole will terminate 7 days from the date of this notice.
If you do not depart the United States immediately you will be subject to potential law enforcement actions that will result in your removal from the United States — unless you have otherwise obtained a lawful basis to remain here. Any benefits you receive in the United States connected with your parole - such as work authorization — will also terminate. You will be subject to potential criminal prosecution, civil fines, and penalties, and any other lawful options available to the federal government.
DHS encourages you to leave immediately on your own. You can use the CBP Home mobile app on your phone to make arrangements for your departure. If you are departing the United States via land, you should report your departure once outside the United States via that same app. If you are having trouble reporting your departure via land, visit https://i94.cbp.dhs.gov/home for more information about voluntarily reporting your departure.
And then the kicker line:
Again, DHS is terminating your parole. Do not attempt to remain in the United States - the federal government will find you. Please depart the United States immediately.
The email was one of almost a million sent out on Friday. They went, mostly, to asylum seekers who used the CBP One app to get this “parole” from the government to come here. Now, apparently, it’s null and void. Or is it? Many many uncertainties remain, most of all the legal question we’ve been made to ask so often this year: Can They Do That?
A Boston judge said she plans to file an injunction to stop this mass deportation of asylum seekers, which otherwise would go into effect on the 24th. We’re talking roughly 985,000 people here, many of them Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans seeking asylum from turmoil at home that the U.S. had varying degrees of complicity in inciting.
Though it smacks of a DOGE operation—even just in the way it’s written, with its inconsistent dashes and snarky tone—we don’t know for certain whether Crazy Uncle Elon was behind it. From Wired:
It’s also unclear whether the email is related to recent efforts by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In an April 10 post on X, DOGE claimed that “CBP identified a subset of 6.3k individuals paroled into the United States since 2023 on the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center watchlist or with criminal records. These paroles have since been terminated with immediate effect.”
Canceling 985,000 asylum claims to get at the 6,000 they actually want or have any reason for... talk about efficiency. Regardless, it’s a good example of a defining character emerging with this administration: just downright sloppiness.
There are now close to a million people who, like the Worcester resident, are already facing extreme hardship and precarity, and they now have to contend with a heap more of both, based on an email that came out of seemingly nowhere, and takes a lawyer to figure out, and may mean either everything or nothing at all to those reading it. Another bolt of shit lightning down from the shit sky.
We talked about this sloppy technocratic cruelty on the most recent Outdoor Cats, in the context of our next topic today but it applies here as well. From the transcript (did you know every episode has a transcript? You can read the podcast if you so choose):
It seems totally arbitrary and random and nobody's checking their work. I mean, that's just so classically, uh, American, right? Like we're doing Fourth Reich bullshit, but in just a lazy, sloppy, and embarrassing way with like no regard for principles or morals or even the convictions of their own stated cause.
War on student visas
Here are the basic facts: Four international student visas were revoked at WPI on Thursday. Then 12 were revoked at Clark University. Like the CBP One app, these revocations are also the result of tinkering and scraping a database: the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS.
Administrators at both colleges each said they were given no reasoning or even heads up about these revocations. They only knew because they monitor SEVIS daily for updates.
Now, these 16 Worcester students join more than 950 across the country, according to a database kept by Inside Higher Ed.
While Palestine activism is the stated target, it appears to be any police interaction, combined with having a student visa, triggers a revocation. At Dartmouth College, a student has no record at all. In Pennsylvania, another student had only a public drunkenness charge. Florida, a speeding ticket. All three have filed lawsuits.
The Trump administration is going after activists like Mahmoud Khalil and regular apolitical students alike. They make no distinction. This is what I’m talking about when I say they insult their own stated convictions.
If they truly saw pro-Palestine online activity or campus organizing as a threat to the social order, they would not be diluting it by picking up apolitical students on disorderly conduct arrests. They're just going for the headline numbers. An optics show. All about the numbers.
Little Marco aka Marco Rubio is the Trump acolyte heading up the endeavor. He makes it clear what he’s trying to do. Recently, he told reporters it’s about not “importing activists into the United States.”
"They're here to study. They're here to go to class. They're not here to lead activist movements that are disruptive and undermine the — our universities. I think it's lunacy to continue to allow that."
No contrition, on the other hand, for all the students caught up in the dragnet that are not activists of any kind. During the Red Scares, were they this sloppy? Or did they care a little bit more about the stated goal, you think? Did they make sure the communists were in fact communists?
Trump’s America is really just the 50s but lazy, run through an AI. The Ghiblification of the 50s. Hm. Probably something to that. But back to the matter...
These visa revocations are a step down the road to a prolonged stay at Louisiana detention facility. They put students in a state of precarity and fear. They can’t finish degrees, go home, or come back. And they get added to the insane bureaucratic engines of deportation headed up by ICE. Recently, the Acting Director of ICE spoke at a security industry conference in Phoenix about his vision for the future.
The leader of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that his dream for the agency is squads of trucks rounding up immigrants for deportation the same way that Amazon trucks crisscross American cities delivering packages.
“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said, explaining he wants to see a deportation process “like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings.”
Deportation Amazon. That’s not a threat, that’s a promise. “Border Czar” Tom Holman at the same conference called for more and more private sector involvement. “Let the badge and guns do the badge and gun stuff, everything else, let’s contract out.” ICE’s main database is a Palantir product. Palantir is owned by Peter Thiel. There’s a way of seeing all this as Peter Theil using the violent authority of the state to further his gunning for Jeff Bezos’ spot as King of the Tech Overlord Hill. Brownshirt Amazon taking Theil to numero uno. Not a threat but a promise.
Meanwhile totally unrelatedly the Israeli government is directing Meta to censor Facebook and Instagram, removing pro-Palestine content from both websites. No intermediary! One of our largest tech companies taking direct marching orders from the Israeli government. That’s fine. What could go wrong?
Mahmoud Khalil has been ruled deportable by a federal immigration judge. Rümeysa Öztürk is not being treated for her asthma. They are the first. The examples. But the 16 Worcester students are now being made to walk down the path. Hundreds across the country, their data freshly added to ICE databases by way of Brownshirt Amazon. The “free press” is not mounting a challenge. (A recent NPR story about Khalil describes the student deportations as a policy “aimed at eliminating antisemitism.”) The Democrats are not mounting a challenge. The courts are about to be tested in a way they may likely fail. (They’ve already granted Trump “wartime authority” for deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.)
It’s on us—the people, the public, the body politic. No one is coming to save the day. In that way, Khalil’s words in the courtroom Friday are hugely inspiring. Speaking to the judge, he said:
"I would like to quote what you said last time that there's nothing that's more important to this court than due process rights and fundamental fairness. Clearly what we witnessed today, neither of these principles were present today or in this whole process. This is exactly why the Trump administration has sent me to this court, 1,000 miles away from my family. I just hope that the urgency that you deemed fit for me are afforded to the hundreds of others who have been here without hearing for months."
Khalil will be able to challenge the judge’s ruling in US District Court. That’s a case we should be watching with the utmost attention.
“There are folks who get dropped off here”
City Manager Eric Batista repeated one of the most insidious claims available to townies...
“...there are people who are coming from other communities who come here. There are folks who get dropped off here, people who come to this community, but then people then find seek shelter here in our city.”
Ahhh The Myth of The Towns. I went long on the subject last February (“We use our garbage police to police homeless people”):
That myth of the “other towns” is pervasive—repeated by a good number of city councilors, Moe Bergman especially. There’s no data behind it. It’s anecdotal. Always, it’s invoked the way (Pam) Barnes does above: to demand we do less, become more cruel. Treat people like garbage getting illegally dumped at Kelley Square, as she puts it, thus necessitating the garbage police. No one uses “the towns” line to help solve homelessness. They use it to wash their hands of the idea we can do better.
This is what Pam Barnes said by the way:
“Here’s what I’d like to know. Will this be a magnet for more people coming into our city? Because I understand they’re already coming in from other towns and getting dropped off at Kelley Square.”
It should be disqualifying for Batista that he’s saying the same thing as a Facebook-pickled crank like Barnes whilst having the power to dictate the city’s homelessness policy. But alas, he is not disqualified...
No one ever gets disqualified in this city.
There are folks who get dropped off here.
He made that comment in response to a request for an emergency plan from Councilor Etel Haxhiaj. He offered little in the way of confidence he can put together such a plan.
It was the very end of the meeting Tuesday, and Haxhiaj sounded the alarm about a homelessness situation that could quickly spiral out of control.
“I do foresee that we are facing a very unprecedented situation that surpasses an emergency, surpasses a crisis. Those words feel completely inadequate to describe what I think and speaking to my former colleagues on the ground will be a situation that we will probably see a lot more folks in the street, but also in parks, in areas of public use.”
The HUD cuts are crazy: at the national level, an estimated shortfall of $150 to $200 million for homelessness funding, the loss of rental assistance for some 18,500 households. Fair housing grants slashed in half. Cuts to public housing vouchers that may well lead to mass evictions.
She called on the manager to put together an emergency plan for the next year and a half by May 8. We’ll see.
To my mind he’s more likely to come back with an anti-camping ordinance. In fact I’m surprised he hasn’t proposed it yet.
There are folks who get dropped off here.
In Brockton, where they have an anti-camping ordinance, we saw an escalation of the Myth of the Towns rhetoric the other day.
"We owe it to residents who live in downtown Brockton and the businesses who operate in downtown Brockton to provide them some sanctuary from this invasion that's happening downtown," said Ward 3 City Councilor Phil Griffin.
Someone should ask Eric if he’s willing to cosign that rhetoric as well.
You give a mouse a “dropped off,” they’re gonna want an “invasion.”
Before you know it the unhoused will be eating the cats and dogs too.
Odds and ends
One more pitch for paid subscriptions before you go!
Also there are long sleeves up in the merch store but the Bad Brains shirt is SOLD OUT. Thank you everyone who ordered!
WalkMassachusetts put out a report on fatal pedestrian crashes this week.
Of the 369 total traffic deaths reported in Massachusetts in 2024, 78 were pedestrians. More than one-third of those killed were age 65 or older, and nearly 70% of fatalities occurred in Environmental Justice neighborhoods. For the first time, the report also includes data on crash victims using wheelchairs—underscoring the urgent need to design streets for people of all abilities.
Whiskey on Main is closing, which means there are... no bars on Main Street at all? In the downtown area I mean.
This story shook me to my core: “He Was Held Captive in His Room for Decades. Then He Set It on Fire.”
Leah Foley, our U.S. Attorney, calls supervised injection sites flat out illegal. Not that Worcester was ever all that serious about it...
Jeff Raymond over in Millbury with a nice story on loneliness and municipal-owned public community spaces.
Lastly, came across Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and friends doing Lungfish covers. Wicked wicked wicked good. Been on heavy rotation all week.
Ok see you hopefully a little earlier next Sunday. Til then!
Originally had this as “Worcester Indivisible,” not “Indivisible Worcester.” They are two different groups, apparently. Still wrong in the emailed version. My bad!
And I just got some of that merch, can confirm it's great.