Real quick: the following column from Liz is a stellar example of sort of journalism by and for community we aim to do here. Paid subscribers allow us to do this kind of stuff!! The more we have, the more of it we can do.
In that way $5 a month is an investment in the community’s sense of itself as such. Make sense? That’s something alt weeklies used to provide, and the hedge funds currently stripping local journalism for parts could never. Anyway. Enjoy! —Bill
Dani Killay is a fierce advocate for progressive values (aka basic human decency), whether she’s testifying at city hall, supporting queer and trans youth, or loudly questioning the manhood of our local law enforcement. I’ve edited our conversation for length and clarity.
Liz: What brought you to Eureka Street on the day ICE showed up there?
Dani: So I had attended a training for the rapid response team and Eureka Street was actually the first time I had gone out to a notification, an alert that there was ICE activity in Worcester. I did the training to begin with because I just felt like, if I have the capacity to be doing anything to help, I wanted to be.
And what did it feel like to be there?
Wow, that's actually a harder question to answer than you would think. I guess probably because it felt like a lot of things. As a woman, I was furious. As a citizen, I was disgusted. And just as a human being, it was hard to watch. Yeah.
The reason that I wanted to help document what is going on is not just because of my views on immigration, but more importantly, I was raised that if you see something wrong, you say something at the very least and you do what you can. And I was also raised that no matter who is in the administration in this country, no matter what our military happens to be doing, any of the stuff that is out of our immediate control, regardless of that, you hold the country to the standard for the people. That you love the country because of the people in it and that it’s very fragile. And if we do not guard against abuse of power, we lose it. And we're just seeing the erosion of institutions, we're seeing the dismantling of the Constitution of the United States and I fear that people are not treating that with the weight that it deserves.
A lot of the rhetoric around Eureka Street has been talking about Rosane Ferreira-De Oliveira as a mother and a grandmother and caregiving for an infant–and those are sacred relationships that the government should not be manipulating or severing. But you showed up with a very different gender lens on the situation, talking about why women there had more balls than the guys in uniform. What brought that to your mind at that moment?
Honestly, I don't know if that thought is ever that far from my mind. I am constantly seeing people that are born into some sort of privilege, whether that privilege is that they're male in a patriarchal world or their skin color allows them to move through the world without the worries that other people with minority identities have to consider. But I'm looking around at the people I see doing the work, the people I see in the street, the people I see helping the community. And then I see the people that hold actual tangible power. They are sitting there decked out with equipment and guns and the power and authority to actually do something. And their answer is a robotic, blank, “can't help you, can't do anything.”
The group that showed up to Eureka Street before all the cops showed up, it was like three middle-aged moms and some retirees. The idea that some group of highly organized sleeper cell antifa showed up to Eureka Street to cause trouble… No, it is retired women from the Interfaith Network. It is moms. And we're the people that have that kind of availability during the day. So when people are like, don't you have jobs? And it's like, yeah, I'd love to have a job. But have you seen the cost of child care in this country? I'm just watching guys that are decked out in bulletproof gear and have training and pepper spray and zip tie cuffs and guns. And there are masked men in the street who will not identify themselves and are removing people and showing up with assault rifles on residential American streets to remove a grandmother. I'm pretty sure she was on her way to work to just clean houses.
To be facing all of that and to have been thrown around by these unidentified guys, to have them physically wrestling me in my pajamas. Because I had no idea, I literally dropped my son off at school and I went to the address for the alert literally in my pj's. I'm doing everything I possibly can and getting pushed around, told to shut up, being grabbed. I had my arm locked in with Roseanne's arm and one of the guys that showed up with a mask was grabbing my arm trying to wrench it off of her. And they were threatening to pepper spray us. And I took it as a complete deliberate threat when he said, “you know, it could break,” referring to my arm.
After having been through that, seeing my local police show up and immediately side with the men in masks kidnapping a mom off the street, after watching us be assaulted and then doing nothing about it—and then worse—lying about it. Immediately watching the city come out with a statement that was a lie.
What gave you the courage to be the person who locks arms, who is right in the thick of it, who's shouting back?
I know it's going to sound like a corny answer, but my parents. “Activist” is such a loaded word, but apparently it's what I am. I don't feel like I set out to do that. I feel like I was forced to do it because I don't feel like I have another option that I could live with. My father spent 20 years in the military and I was always taught that you don't know right and wrong from ordinances and laws. You know right and wrong from being a human being and that you stand up and you do what's right to the best of your ability.
What causes did you see your parents stand up for?
They were big on civil rights, civil liberties. And I was always raised that the absolute worst thing you could be in life is a racist. That was always a part of my education about our country and our world. My father grew up between Massachusetts and rural Louisiana during the 40s and 50s and he never specifically told stories about that time, but I have to imagine that it definitely shaped how he saw his priorities in this world. My father talked a lot about how these hate groups that we have in this country, how they organize.
My dad was a white guy, an all-American guy. So having that look and branding, he really had access to the inner thoughts of a lot of all-American guys. It’s never been a secret to me that these organizations exist, that they're highly organized, that they have been telling white nationalists in this country for decades to run for office, join the police force, join the military, legitimize yourself. And that it's our responsibility as white Americans to stop it. I hate to say it, but I have thought so many times in the last couple of years, I'm just like, thank God my father didn't live to see this. It would have absolutely broken his heart.
My mother always involved me in whatever charity or volunteering work she was doing, which for her mostly consisted of organizations that helped women, specifically women leaving abusive relationships.
I also have kids and I have both the desire to let them know how things really are in the world and to kind of protect them. And I try to fight that impulse because it comes from a good place, but a lot of kids don't ever get to live in ignorance about how this country works or about racism. How are you striking that balance? Have you told your kids about what it was like that day?
We don't really have the option of protecting our children from the realities of the world. I have four kids. My oldest two children are Hispanic. As Brown kids, they need honesty. And three of my children are disabled. My older two are disabled and Brown. And then I have another child who is disabled and transgender. So our house is on fire from many different directions. I've had to have conversations with my two oldest kids because I am afraid that they're going to be out in the world as visibly not white and something like this is going to happen to them and they also won't be able to communicate because they're Deaf. It's dangerous to be Deaf and policed and I can't tell you how many times I've seen news stories where a boy my son's age, looking like my son, has been shot by a cop for no reason. I'm terrified that he's going to either not hear that he's being spoken to or he will try to use the one and only way of communicating that he has– sign language–and that one of those two things will be grounds for him to get murdered in the street. And that the person who does it will have qualified immunity.
And then my 14-year-old daughter, she's Deaf and transgender and she's a tiny little nugget of a person. So it's also super terrifying on that front. And I have to toe a line of not scaring our eight-year-old, but also explaining the things that he overhears in the world.
I mean this on a really practical level: How do you manage your anxieties for the country and for your kids?
I think it's so funny when people use the word woke and they're like “oh these woke people” because I'm always like, what's the opposite of woke? We can't sleepwalk through life. Like yeah, I have seen a truth about my world. I cannot unsee it. I have to behave according to my core values as a person and it may mean being inconvenienced, it may mean losing relationships I thought were real and important and having to find out that they're actually quite superficial, and that's fine. Those people can move on with their lives. But for me, I have to be in community with people who also give a shit. And honestly, just having that community here in Worcester has been absolutely life changing for our entire family and we only moved here three years ago.
How did you build that community?
We decided to move from our rural town after 2020. My daughter came out and then all the shifts in the world. We just did not feel safe or comfortable where we were anymore. We felt very isolated and vulnerable, and so we decided to move to Worcester on the recommendation of a very good friend of mine who I'm going to name drop because she runs CASA Worcester, Julie Boditch. She introduced me to the organization Love Your Labels through the Queer AF fashion show. And it just snowballed from there. This is my third year helping to plan the Queer AF fashion show. I now work at Love Your Labels and it has been my gateway to communities throughout Worcester that are coming together, doing the work. I now have a network of people in my life that I know are rock solid. They show up for each other. They do what needs to be done. And I don't know that I've ever truly had that. I have thought that I've had it before.
Before I got involved with LUCE, I had been involved in the (trans) sanctuary city resolution in January and people don't always get the chance to actually live up to what they think they would do. So part of me is kind of grateful: myself and my network got system tested.
I recently read this New York Times article about a rural Missouri town where like 80% of people voted for Trump. And then ICE detained a woman from Hong Kong that people know there as Carol. And somebody in the article said, “I voted for Trump and so did practically everyone here, but no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs.” And this makes me feel insane because it's like, what did you think would happen? But something is going on where people think, “the immigrants that I know are fine. They're individuals to me. But I still want to see mass deportation.” Do you have any insight into what is going on there and what people can do to kind prevent this disconnect?
I totally understand what you mean. And do I see the disconnect? Absolutely. Can I in some kind of intangible way understand where they're coming from? Yeah, a little bit. We are being bombarded by a propaganda network from so many different angles and I think that it's really pleasant and it's easy and it's simple to believe the simplistic things that are being fed out over the general airwaves. Those people voted for Trump and for mass deportations because they've been made to believe that somehow that will improve their lives. I would like to hear any of them actually explain to me how that will result in a measurable improvement in their lives. But that is the carrot that's dangled out there. It's a playbook that's been used by authoritarian and fascist regimes and leaders over and over again. It feels like we have a country where half the people are saying there's nothing really that wrong and the other half are like, I can't believe this is what it's come to. But if you look at it, it's pretty easy to believe that this is where it's come to. The last 40 years have pretty much brought us on a straight trajectory here. We have had the middle class whittled down over decades and then we've told the white middle class that the reason you have been diminished is because these minorities got some of what you're supposed to have. And if we can just put them back where they belong, everything will be great again. We'll just go back. I don't know, was everything ever great? Like where is this great place that everyone wants to go back to? Was it the 20s and 30s when we had the Great Depression? Was it Jim Crow? Was that the perfect time? Was it when people with vaginas couldn't vote? When was the perfect time? Was it the 400 years of slavery and genocide against Native Americans and African Americans? America's always been great about lying about our history.
In January, you commented publicly on executive orders targeting trans people and the harassment of Councilor Nguyen. And you said you don't want the government dictating how you can parent your child. I would love to hear you explain the connection between cruelty toward immigrants and cruelty toward trans people.
Divide and conquer, right? If we're all in our little groups defined by these minority identities and then even more ideally, pitted against each other for time, attention, and money, we're just a bunch of little dominoes, all easy to knock down. We need to make ourselves a monolith because liberation, all liberation is intertwined. When I stand up for someone who maybe doesn't share a single identity marker with me, I'm still standing up for my kids. I'm still standing up for myself. We all have the right to the same, the same and equal treatment under the law. If that is not the most critical principle in America, if it is not that all men are created equal, that we all get the same treatment, we all have the same power, we all have the same say… [If] that’s what they want us to believe, I want to hold them to that for everyone because whether we're talking about the rights of trans kids and adults in this country or whether we're talking about immigrants, we're talking about how we allow human beings to be treated.
I think that it's incredibly dangerous for anyone to not realize that these are test groups. What you allow to be done to anyone else, you are allowing to be done to yourself in the future. It's just a fact. It's just a fact because if they can do it to them, they can do it to you. They found a reason to do it to them and if they want to, they'll find a reason to do it to you. You might think that you're so far up that ladder that you can't be affected by these things, but let me remind you, you can become a member of the disability community in a heartbeat. Then you're right down here with all of us fighting for the basics.
People ask a lot about how to get involved and literally the most important thing I want people to take away from this conversation is that you get involved by showing up and we are waiting there to accept you. No judgment, no gatekeeping. You do not need to credential yourself. You do not need to have experience. You do not need to bring skills to the table. If you feel alone in the world, come join us.
This interview is incredibly powerful. Dani’s testimony is raw, moral, deeply human. I’m grateful she shared it. Dani’s willingness to show up — literally in pajamas — to speak from lived fear, love for her children, and a sense of social conscience is something I hope Worcester takes seriously and honors.
Reflecting on this months later, I’m also struck by a sense of loss — the feeling that what happened on Eureka Street was a missed opportunity for our community to come together and learn. Several things can be true at once, and I don’t think we’ve done a good job of holding them together, yet.
The protesters acted unlawfully — blocking traffic, interfering with ICE, and physically confronting police — AND they also acted instinctively, from a place of moral outrage that was heartfelt and recognizably human. The police had a real obligation to keep the peace, even if doing so indirectly assisted ICE, and at the same time could have shown greater skill in de-escalation and public explanation. The situation was chaotic, emotionally charged, out of control. All of these truths matter.
What I wish we had seen next was a collective pause: city leaders, police, protesters, and residents acknowledging the fear, the outrage, the duty, and the limits of each role — including the fact that these circumstances were imposed on Worcester from outside — and then asking, together, how WE might do better next time. Because in the end, this is our community, our police, and our city leaders. Instead, we allowed ourselves to be divided into camps, each convinced the other was acting in bad faith.
Dani warns us against that division. She speaks powerfully in the language of resistance and solidarity, and that voice is necessary. But so is a language of civic repair — one that helps a city integrate moral action against injustice with institutional responsibility, the rule of law -- and its spirit of justice -- rather than letting these forces tear past one another. I worry that by not engaging in a shared reflection, Worcester lost a chance to deepen trust and civic maturity, solidarity. Perhaps there is still time for that reflection before the upcoming trials in February.
I appreciate Worcester Sucks for publishing conversations like this. This interview doesn’t just provoke; it asks whether we are capable, as a city, of holding complexity without breaking into camps.