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When Matthew Warwick was younger, police arrested him for something that is no longer a crime: marijuana possession. That criminal background did lasting damage to his life, he said, preventing him from joining the military and complicating his path to higher education. 

But now, Warwick works in the legal cannabis industry — a job he has held since the doors opened to the state’s first recreational dispensaries in 2018. He also has ambitions to do much more in the industry. He wants to be among the first to open a lounge in western Massachusetts where patrons can smoke or ingest cannabis legally. And thanks to the state’s “social equity program,” and brand-new regulations opening the possibility for “social consumption” businesses in Massachusetts, his past criminal charges might help him get a head start.

If he can raise the money and navigate the red tape, that is. 

Almost a decade after Massachusetts residents voted to allow recreational cannabis sales, the state’s Cannabis Control Commission approved rules last month that will allow businesses to open cafes and other similar venues for the consumption of cannabis on-site. 

Three separate license types will be created under the new regulations: “supplemental,” which will allow existing retailers to offer on-site consumption of their products; “hospitality,” which will allow applicants to open new businesses or expand non-cannabis businesses to sell cannabis for on-site consumption; and “event organizers,” which will be permitted to host temporary events like festivals and concerts where consumption will be permitted. All three new license categories allow for indoor smoking, outdoor patios, or non-smoking consumption areas. 

When voters legalized the sale of recreational-use marijuana through a ballot measure in 2016, they also approved the implementation of on-site consumption, but regulatory hurdles significantly delayed this aspect of the industry. The Cannabis Control Commission originally created regulations in 2019, but changes to state law were necessary in order to enable municipalities to opt in to hosting on-site consumption, and those didn’t pass until 2022.

The original 2017 legislation gave regulatory relief to people the state identified as targeted by the War on Drugs — disproportionately Black and Hispanic communities, according to state sentencing data. The Cannabis Control Commission established a social equity program, for example, that helped people who either had past drug convictions or live in parts of the state disproportionately impacted by drug prohibition move more quickly through the permitting process. 

For the first years of the commission’s existence, applicants to their social equity program were provided resources such as training and waived administrative fees. 

However, the state didn’t provide any of those applicants with capital. Because federal law limited growers and retailers access to traditional banking, the initial wave of cannabis businesses in Massachusetts was dominated by multi-state operators with private equity backing. Those businesses consolidated market share while social equity applicants remained stuck in provisional licensure.

Updates to the law in 2022 sought to remedy this by establishing a Social Equity Trust Fund, which channels 15% of cannabis tax revenue to grants and loans for people harmed by  prohibition.

After bureaucratic delay, the fund began awarding money in late 2024. It distributed $26.5 million to 181 businesses, with grants ranging from $50,000 emergency payments to $500,000 for expansion. From that, $3.5 million went to 10 cannabis businesses across Springfield, Holyoke, and Northampton, MassLive reported. 

The timing of the trust fund coincides with a stipulation on who can open social consumption establishments. For three years after the first lounge opens in each license category, only social equity participants, economic empowerment priority applicants, microbusinesses, and craft marijuana cooperatives can obtain licenses. Established cannabis businesses controlled by non-equity owners must wait.

The exclusivity window is meant to give a head start to applicants like Warwick, who qualifies for the social equity program because of his prior marijuana possession charges. 

An alumnus of western Massachusetts’ well-established metalcore music scene, Warwick has also worked as a studio engineer on tracks for hip hop acts such as Freeway and Jae Millz. He said he wants to open an intimate 420-friendly music venue. He hopes to do so in Chicopee or possibly Springfield.

“I feel Chicopee would be easier to deal with than Springfield,” he said.

And some think there is an appetite for those kinds of establishments.

Chicopee City Councilor Jessica Avery told The Shoestring that she believed residents of the city would be receptive to such businesses. Avery, who was a staffer for former state Rep. Frank Smizik, D-Norfolk, worked on legislation related to medical marijuana.

Avery said residents are favorable toward existing cannabis industry businesses in the city, and that she believed the “same energy would apply to social consumption lounges.” She added that she hoped to see “an open and robust conversation” on the subject in City Council in the future.

Warwick said his next step is finding real estate and then talking to the municipality where the building is located.

“I’d honestly love for anything with real instruments that’s original,” he said of the type of acts he’d want to book.

But there are many challenges that lay in the way of applicants like Warwick. For example, he said that he’s currently “in a fight” with the state over the fact that “nothing” has happened with his paperwork since November. State House News Service reported that commissioners believe it will take around 18 months for on-site cannabis consumption businesses to open. That estimate, the outlet reported, is based on the recent rollout of cannabis delivery licenses, which commissioners said took 11 months to process from application to operation.

Expensive and complex regulatory hurdles have prevented other social-equity applicants from opening their businesses, too, despite help from the state. 

There are also other requirements that businesses must meet that may make it complicated, and costly, to open a venue like Warwick has in mind. 

For indoor smoking venues, for example, the ventilation requirements are demanding: negative air pressure relative to adjacent spaces, 20 complete air changes per hour, and a high air filtration standard. These requirements exceed the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers specifications for isolating hospital patients with airborne infectious diseases.

The regulations also prohibit alcohol on premises — a significant moneymaker for such establishments — require ID scanning at entrances and mandate that staff have procedures for helping impaired customers get home safely.

Outdoor smoking areas are less stringent, allowing for a ceiling and two walls, as long as the rest of the area has unimpeded air flow from outside. 

For both inside and outside smoking areas, employees are required to have either an unobstructed view through a window into the area, or closed-circuit television monitoring. Businesses are required to supply personal protective equipment for employees entering smoking areas.

If the ventilation system fails, the smoking area is forced to shut down for a 48-hour period to allow for the dissipation of smoke while the social consumption establishment works to repair the system. Additionally, if police or first responders need to enter a smoking area for any reason, the business must cease all smoking activities if requested by such officials. 

Those regulations, though perhaps cumbersome, are designed to keep workers and others safe from the serious health hazards of secondhand smoke.

“I don’t think it should be treated differently to other jobs in terms of health risks,” said 

Drew Weisse, the organizing director for United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1459 — a union that represents cannabis workers across western Massachusetts. 

Weisse said he worries that while personal protective equipment might be an adequate solution initially, he is wary of the potential long-term effects of even tiny amounts of exposure over time. But he noted that on the cultivation and manufacturing side of the industry, occupational risks already exist.   

“I apply the same considerations [to jobs in the cannabis industry] as to any job,” Weisse said. “If workers have what they need to do their jobs, the risks are appropriately mitigated, and the job is a good job, that allows you to live a full, stable, and consistent life.” 

Despite the challenges, though, Warwick is undeterred. 

“With the way that they’re dragging out the regulations, we want to be ready so right when we get the green light we’re good to go,” he said. “We’re going to try to be the first one in the area, have a live event space. But it’s all on the commission and then how fast I can get my end ironed out.”

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Around 8 a.m. on Dec. 2, 2025, Glorisel Cordero was making scrambled eggs for her three children when she smelled something.

“Like a faint, sweet burning plastic,” she said. “Maybe a minute later, the alarms started going off in the hallways.”

A neighbor outside her family’s second-floor apartment at 733 High St. screamed that there was a fire.

“I opened the door, and it was very heavy, thick, blackish-gray smoke already coming up into the hallways,” she said. “I quickly slammed the door.”

Cordero grabbed her keys and herded her children out the back door, down the stairs, and across the street.

“I deal with anxiety, and I had to work really hard not to get a panic attack because I had my kids,” she said.

The three-alarm fire at 733 High St., connected to 27 Franklin St., broke out nearly 16 hours after a fire about a half-mile away at 131 Roberto Clemente St. Both four-story, early-1900s apartment buildings were left uninhabitable, according to Holyoke Fire Department Capt. David Rex.

Jeffrey Trask, the city’s emergency management director, said the two fires displaced between 120 and 130 people. About 36 to 40 apartments were affected. 

“While it is tragic that dozens lost their homes, we are thankful that no one was injured or lost a life,” Rex said.

He credited working alarm systems that warned residents in time to escape.

Neither building, however, had an automatic sprinkler system, according to fire department incident reports obtained through public records requests. Rex and Holyoke Building Commissioner Leslie Ward said Massachusetts law did not require sprinklers at either property. 

Rex said the same rules apply to many of the city’s older apartment buildings.

“It makes me angry,” Cordero said. “I feel like sprinklers should be a mandatory thing.”

After the fire, Virgilio Property Management, which manages Cordero’s former building, paid for her family’s hotel costs for more than a week until they found a new apartment a few blocks away.

“I don’t know if it’s something we’ll ever really be able to fix,” Cordero said in mid-December, describing lingering fear in her daughters, 14 and 10, and her 7-year-old son. “My son is scared to be alone, even in the daytime.”

***

Fire sprinklers are meant to control a blaze in its early stages and buy people time to get out. Research shows they sharply reduce fire deaths and limit how far flames spread. But they are not a guarantee. In Amherst, town officials said the Olympia Drive fire in November started at a nearby construction site and spread to an occupied apartment building. They said sprinklers were activated, but the system was designed to suppress fires that start inside the building and was not effective against a blaze of that size that began outside.

Investigators with the Massachusetts Department of Fire Services have not determined the exact cause of either Holyoke fire but expect to wrap up the investigations in the next few weeks, according to agency spokesperson Jake Wark. They said the blaze at 733 High St. and 27 Franklin St. began in a first-floor bedroom, where they found a power strip plugged into a multi-plug adapter amid numerous electrical wires. They said the other fire started in a second-floor apartment at 131 Roberto Clemente St., but clutter and damage made it difficult to pinpoint an exact origin.

“Investigators are looking at accidental causes in both, but they have multiple potential factors, and they are trying to narrow them down,” Wark wrote in a Jan. 7 email. Rex said arson had been ruled out, and investigators were also considering discarded smoking materials in the Clemente Street fire, though the damage made it difficult to be certain.

Harrison Bonner, who represents the ownership group tied to 131 Clemente St., said upgrades beyond what code requires, including sprinklers, can demand “substantial structural work and financing.”

At 733 High St. and 27 Franklin St., Greg Virgilio, an owner representative and president of Virgilio Property Management, said sprinklers were not installed because of cost.

“[It’s] prohibitively expensive,” he wrote in an email. “The people who live in these apartments … often fall behind in rent as it is. If the cost of sprinklers is added to the rent, most simply could not afford it.”

In 1996, Holyoke opted into a state law that requires sprinklers in residential buildings with four or more units if they are newly constructed or “substantially rehabilitated so as to constitute the equivalent of new construction.” However, neither of the properties in question has seen upgrades that would meet the standard, Ward wrote to The Shoestring.

“I went back to 1933 on 131 Clemente and 1959 on the 727-733 High Street property,” she wrote. “The improvements to the buildings have been on the level of a new roof, rebuilding the porches, the occasional refacing of the facade and some minor alterations to interior spaces.”

Rex said the same limits apply across much of Holyoke’s older housing stock, but neither he nor Ward could say precisely how many older buildings lack sprinklers.

“At this point, I would say we have a few dozen buildings that are in the same situation,” he explained in a Dec. 15 email.

Debate over the application of the sprinkler law in Holyoke even made it to the state’s Supreme Judicial Court in 2016. In that case, Robert MacLaurin, a property owner, sued the city after the fire chief ordered sprinklers during rehabilitation work on two vacant, abandoned apartment buildings.

The court sided with MacLaurin and said the state sprinkler law’s “equivalent of new construction” language sets a strict standard, requiring renovations “considerably more extensive” than “major alterations” before sprinklers can be required. It said the work must be so substantial that the building is “in essence as good as new.”

Michael Joanis, the chief operating officer of the National Fire Sprinkler Association, said most apartment renovations don’t meet that standard, leaving many older buildings without sprinklers.

“Right now, the threshold is really high,” he said. “I mean, you basically have to completely take that building apart, put it back together.”

National Fire Protection Association research found that the civilian fire death rate per 1,000 reported fires was about 90% lower in properties with automatic sprinkler systems than in those without. The association also found that when sprinklers are present, fire spread is confined to the room or object of origin in about 94% of reported structure fires, compared with about 70% without an automatic sprinkler system. 

Arguments over sprinkler requirements often come down to cost. The National Fire Sprinkler Association points to retrofit examples it says show that sprinkler installations can be added in occupied buildings, including a 180-unit high-rise in Philadelphia, where installation was estimated at about $2,866 per unit. But Joanis said retrofits can be “expensive” and “a huge mountain to climb” for many owners, with costs ranging from “$2 to $10 a square foot,” depending on factors like water supply and asbestos. The association’s guide also lists three low-rise, three-story projects at roughly $13,800 per unit.

“It’s cheaper than your granite countertops. It’s cheaper than going in and putting all new carpet in,” Joanis said. “But … it’s a significant investment.”

Doug Quattrochi, the executive director of MassLandlords, said adding sprinklers can keep some renovation projects from moving forward, especially for small landlords. He estimated a retrofit can cost $10,000 to $30,000 per project, including new water service lines and connections.

“It’s not that we’re flush with cash and we’re refusing to pay out,” Quattrochi said. “It’s not that people don’t want to have a nice modern apartment with all the latest safety features; it’s that we can’t.”

***

The fight also plays out at the State House, where real estate interests have resisted bills to require sprinklers. 

The state’s lobbying database, however, does not show exactly how much any group spent on a single bill. The filings report what groups paid in lobbyists’ salaries and fees during a year. Debra O’Malley, a spokesperson for the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, said lobbyists must disclose their activity and, when practicable, list bill numbers and positions. Many filings, she said, use broad topics that “can be very vague,” or cite large measures like the annual budget bill, making bill-by-bill searches incomplete.

One proposal, House bill 2289, would let cities and towns require sprinklers in new one- and two-family homes. The Massachusetts Association of Realtors, the Greater Boston Real Estate Board and the Home Builders and Remodelers Association of Massachusetts, which tagged the bill in state filings, reported paying about $447,000 in total lobbyist salaries and fees in 2023 and about $435,000 in 2024, state records show. Those totals are not bill-specific, and the disclosures do not make clear whether a group supported or opposed a bill, though the Home Builders and Remodelers Association of Massachusetts testified against H.2289.

Fire service and fire-safety groups reported about $233,000 in lobbying in 2023 and about $211,000 in 2024. Those totals are not tied to any single bill, and none of the groups tagged H.2289 in their filings. The Fire Chiefs Association of Massachusetts and local fire officials backed the measure in committee testimony.

After passing the House in June 2024, H.2289 was sent to the Senate Committee on Rules, where it saw no further action. Former Rep. Ruth Balser, a Newton Democrat, was one of the bill’s sponsors. She attributed the stalemate to politics. 

“As I understand it, the Senate president has consistently sided with the real estate industry, rather than with the fire professionals,” Balser said.

A spokesperson for Senate President Karen Spilka said the bill “did not receive enough broad support to advance past the Rules committee last session.” Asked whether the committee took a formal vote or recorded any tally, Spilka’s office and the office of Sen. Joan Lovely, the committee chair, did not provide details.

Campaign finance records compiled by OpenSecrets list real estate among the top donor industries to Spilka’s campaign committee. The industry ranked sixth in 2023 with $7,300 and fifth in 2024 with $7,700, according to the site. The donations do not show whether contributions affected the bill’s path, and Spilka’s office did not address the figures when asked for comment.

Cordero, meanwhile, said the fire cost her family nearly everything: clothes, books and keepsakes, including irreplaceable photos of her mother. She said her daughter’s school tablet was ruined, and for a while, she and her husband thought they had lost their cat, Binx. He was found alive two weeks after the fire, hiding in a closet.

“I really think that it shouldn’t matter how old the buildings are. You want the safety. These are people’s lives living there,” she said. “I understand it might bring up the cost of rent, but our cost of rent went up, and we didn’t see anything change because of it. So I don’t understand why they can’t just suck it up and just do it. In the long run, it might save the building, and it will cost them less when it comes to fixing the damages.”

Records Cordero provided show that on Aug. 1, 2025, the rent for her three-bedroom apartment increased from $1,195 to $1,245 a month. Asked about the increase, Virgilio pointed to rising operating costs, but did not provide specifics.

“The market rent for a 3 Br apartment with heat and hot water is $$1395 and up,” he wrote in an email. “Why didn’t she have renters insurance?”

Cordero confirmed her family didn’t have renters’ insurance before the fire but has it now for $30 a month.

Federal housing data shows higher rents in the area than Virgilio described. In Holyoke’s 01040 ZIP code, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development lists the fiscal 2026 small-area fair market rent for a three-bedroom apartment at $2,110 a month, a figure used to help set voucher payments.

Despite the fire, Cordero said her family’s new apartment does not have sprinklers, either, and she has rarely seen them in Holyoke unless a building is brand new. Asked whether she could prioritize fire suppression systems when searching for a new home, she was blunt.

“Unfortunately, we can’t,” she said. “We can’t be picky at all.”

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WESTFIELD — When in May 2021 a group of developers approached the city of Westfield with a big plan for a big data center, an early release of OpenAI’s GPT3 — a precursor model to what would become ChatGPT — was still six months away from opening to software developers for testing. Some at the time wondered if the data center would be used for mining cryptocurrencies and NFTs. 

Now five years later, AI companies’ demand for computing power and electricity has exploded. An August report from consulting firm McKinsey found that “to deliver the required data center infrastructure, the United States alone will need to more than triple its annual power capacity over the next five years.”

Amid that AI-infrastructure boom, Servistar Realties’ proposal to build a “state-of-the-art hyper-scale data center campus” in Westfield seems practically clairvoyant. Last November, The Boston Globe mused about which tech giant would set up shop at the new facility: “Will it be Amazon, Alphabet, or maybe Microsoft?”

To call it the largest data center in Massachusetts would have been an understatement. At the estimated loads, it would draw 10 times more power than the existing largest data center in the state — a 30-megawatt facility located in the heart of Boston’s financial district owned by the Markley Group. It would also eclipse the electricity draw of all existing data centers in the state combined. It would draw four to five times more power than the entire city of Westfield, which consumes 85 megawatts at its peak, according to Westfield Gas and Electric General Manager Tom Flaherty.

But years after the Westfield City Council approved big tax cuts for the project — and even following the state approving a sales and use tax exemption for large data centers last year — the project is not yet shovel ready. In fact, it appears to be abandoned, according to The Shoestring’s investigation of public records. 

Emails The Shoestring obtained through a public records request found that following the approval of Servistar’s special permit in October 2021, a mailed copy of the permit was returned to the city as “refused” delivery, and there has been no contact between the developers and the city of Westfield since. 

While it’s unclear why the permit was refused, a copy was later emailed to Servistar members, and it still remains active due to a two-year state extension on permitting because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, according to city planner Jay Vinskey, time is running out.  

“If they don’t at least pull a building permit by next October, they’d need to show cause or re-permit,” Vinskey said. 

Additional permitting required by the Massachusetts Environmental Protection Act was never filed either. Originally, Servistar told city officials it planned to file those permit applications in January 2022. Instead, that February it withdrew from a site study related to necessary grid improvements on the property, which has two high voltage power lines owned by Eversource running through it.

According to Flaherty, re-entering the queue for service with ISO New England to complete the grid study would itself take at least two years. 

None of these prerequisites can currently be addressed because, at the end of 2024, Servistar’s limited liability corporation was administratively dissolved by the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Office for failing to file annual reports two years in a row. While reinstatement is possible after such dissolutions, as things currently stand the company is only legally allowed to conduct business related to liquidating its assets and winding down its affairs. 

None of the three equal members of Servistar — Erik Bartone, Paul Corey, and Connecticut state Sen. John Fonfara — responded to multiple requests for comment from The Shoestring. In March, Fonfara told the news outlet CT Insider that the project had been dead for two years due to a lack of financing, and he was no longer involved. 

The men are all from Connecticut’s energy sector. Fonfara and Bartone had previously partnered on a separate venture. Wattifi was an electric supplier in Connecticut that collapsed in 2023 under $1.17 million in state fines. That scandal, which came to light last March while Fonfara was seeking to become chair of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Agency, lead some at that agency to recommend the company’s leadership “should not be permitted to engage with the electric supplier market or electric utility customers in any capacity in the future,” according to reporting by the Energy and Policy Institute.

***

The data-center project promised to be a big development for Westfield. Proponents noted that it would have made Servistar the city’s biggest tax payer “from day one.” 

It would have been set on a sprawling 156-acres assembled from 16 unrelated lots into a shape not dissimilar to the state of Texas. The land is bisected by two 115,000 volt Eversource transmission lines, on top of the Barnes Aquifer and marshy endangered turtle habitat, and next to the airport. 

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Planning documents show that the developers envisioned building 2.7 million square feet of slab-on-grade, steel framed, “modern” glass and wall panels for “data server space, office and conference room space, loading dock, high-efficiency and redundant heating, ventilating, cooling and plumbing systems” across a campus of 10 data center buildings. Each building would measure 86 feet tall from elevator penthouse to curb, flanked on one exterior wall by backup diesel generators and fuel tanks sized between 6,500 to 13,000 gallons. 

“I would guess it wouldn’t change per building,” Servistar Realties member Erik Bartone told the Westfield Planning Board in 2021, referring to the size of the fuel tanks. 

(Environmentalists have been critical of the recent data center boom, which has seen tech companies go to extreme measures to run the power-hungry facilities, largely using fossil fuels. In April, xAI was allegedly found to be operating double the number of natural gas turbines it was permitted for in order to power its “Colossus” super computer facility. xAI is the Elon Musk-owned company behind the Grok chatbot.)

Fencing and block walls would have surrounded a new electrical substation with a dedicated transmission interconnect to the two 115 kV high-voltage transmission lines, according to a project narrative submitted to the city of Westfield. 

“The substation would exclusively serve the project,” the documents say. “Onsite transformers will be used to step down the power to 34.5 kV voltage that will be supplied to each of the data center buildings through a loop system” supported by an additional 200,000 square feet of accessory buildings housing electrical load balancing equipment, battery storage, and 2N redundant natural gas generators.

The project seemed to be advancing smoothly at first. 

“As always, bicycle parking accommodation should be considered,” Vinskey, the city planner, noted in his 2021 review of Servistar’s special permit application. 

However, when The Shoestring contacted city officials recently, they said they were in the dark about the project’s future. 

“I don’t have any insight on the status of this,” is how Vinskey put it.

***

While little has been done in terms of progress towards building any data center, Servistar has shown they are skilled at negotiating favorable terms for these projects. 

Massachusetts law allows municipalities to exempt development projects on “blighted” or “decadent” land from standard property taxes in exchange for negotiated alternative payments, called “payment in lieu of taxes” or “PILOT” agreements. MGM Springfield, for example, negotiated a PILOT agreement for building its casino in an area damaged by a tornado in 2011. It provides tax certainty to the developer — often for 40 years — while guaranteeing revenue to the municipality on land that might otherwise sit vacant.

Servistar secured favorable tax breaks from the city of Westfield under a PILOT agreement after arguing that the wet and loose soil on the site, and the presence of the same high voltage power lines it needed to supply the vast amount of energy for its project, contributed to it being a “blighted open area.” In October 2021, the City Council conditionally approved a 40-year PILOT agreement. Under the deal, Servistar would pay $372 million over four decades, a small fraction of what a similarly sized project would otherwise owe in taxes. The agreement also exempted the project from personal property taxes on computer hardware.  

Westfield’s agreement with Servistar has no deadline requiring the developer to break ground. The 40-year clock on the tax exemption doesn’t start until the company receives a certificate of occupancy and begins commercial operations. 

This is not standard practice. For example, in Boston, under the same law, the city reserves the right to rescind approval if construction doesn’t begin within one year.

A representative for the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Office said that as long as a corporation is reinstated, an administrative dissolution would not inherently alter any municipal tax agreements. The state Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities confirmed that the agreement between Servistar Realties LLC and the city of Westfield is not currently in effect, because it has not received all required state, local, and federal approvals.

“We recommend reaching out to the municipality for more information,” a spokesperson said.

***

In 2024, the state legislature passed a sales tax exemption for qualified data centers lasting up to 20 years — a provision sponsored by state representatives Michael Finn, D-West Springfield, and Kelly Pease, R-Westfield, and state Sen. John Velis, D-Westfield. 

Servistar and Westmass Area Development Corporation, who served as consultants on the project, were both instrumental in the passage of this bill. In 2022, only Servistar and Westmass reported lobbying activities related to the bill to exempt data centers from sales and use tax. 

Both were represented on Beacon Hill by Boston’s busiest lobbying firm: Smith, Costello & Crawford. 

Between 2021 and 2024, Westmass, a quasi-public agency, spent $352,000 on lobbying, including payments to Smith, Costello & Crawford, according to state lobbying disclosure reports. Those reports show that Erik Bartone’s company DBS Energy spent $145,000 to have Smith, Costello & Crawford lobby the executive offices of Energy and Environmental Affairs, and Housing and Economic Development, the latter of which oversees PILOT agreements, “regarding proposed western MA project.” 

DBS Energy engaged in these activities despite the fact that The Shoestring could not locate any filing indicating that the company registered with Massachusetts as a foreign corporation. Debra O’Malley, the communications director for the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Office, told The Shoestring that any out-of-state corporation is required to register in Massachusetts if they are a lobbying client, but that the rule wasn’t being strictly enforced in 2021, in part due to disruptions caused by COVID. 

Starting in 2022, Bartone and associates’ lobbying switched to Servistar Realties LLC, which is registered in Massachusetts. Between 2022 and 2024, records show that Servistar spent an additional $180,000 to have Smith, Costello & Crawford lobby for their interests. Talking to The Boston Globe in 2024, Jeff Daley, the president of Westmass Area Development Corporation, estimated the exemption could save operators up to $30 million annually on equipment purchases. 

“None of this would have moved forward without these tax incentives,” Daley told the Globe. “They won’t even look at Massachusetts without that being on the books.”

At that time, Daley also told The Boston Globe that Servistar was in conversation with “several potential anchor tenants for the data center complex.” Then, in August 2025, NBC Boston quoted Daley saying that pre-development work could begin within six months. 

But when The Shoestring reached out to Daley in December, he declined an interview. 

“We were a consultant on the project and we are not under contract at the moment, so I have no comment on the project,” Daley said in an email. 

Westmass Vice President of Operations Dan Knapik, who in November was elected to an at-large seat on Westfield’s City Council, told The Shoestring “I’m not a city councilor yet” and declined to comment on the project. Knapik will take office in January. Knapik formerly served as mayor of Westfield between 2010 and 2015. 

Daley and Westmass played a significant role in securing the city’s approval of Servistar’s PILOT agreement in 2021. According to at-large City Councilor Kristen Mello, Daley served as the primary liaison between the developers and elected officials. 

“He’s the one who presented it to us,” Mello said. “All the questions we asked were answered by him.” 

Mello is one of three city councilors who voted against the project in 2021.

“This data center, as proposed, is an environmental nightmare,” she said at the time in an email to a constituent. “It is not in the best interest of the City to use the lungs of our residents as Amazon’s (or any other similar entity’s) toilet bowl.” 

Dave Flaherty — no relation to Tom Flaherty, the Westfield Gas and Electric general manager — was at the time a city councilor himself. He also voted against the project. 

In a recent interview with The Shoestring, Flaherty said the tax arrangement was “ridiculous — way more than any other business, in both dollars and percentage.” He criticized the city’s failure to negotiate, saying the developers and their lawyers presented the deal as “take it or leave it” and “really pushed their way around.” Flaherty noted that he had spoken with state officials at the time who confirmed the City Council had full authority to negotiate terms or reject the agreement outright. 

“Many communities, like Westfield, don’t have the expertise or gumption to negotiate,” he said. “The lawyers know this.” 

Flaherty added that some councilors suspected during the negotiations that Servistar was “using us as a tool to get better deals in other locations.” At that time, Connecticut had exempted data centers from state sales tax, but Massachusetts had not. 

Flaherty, who ran an IT business for years, was critical of the state tax break as well. He said it creates “unfair situations for smaller data centers or for companies like MassMutual who have their own on-premise data centers.” Only new data centers larger than 100,000 square feet that spend more than $10 million are eligible for the exemption. 

“Why should a million dollar device be charged no tax in one place and full tax if it’s located in another place? Same use, different tax burden,” he said.

In July 2024, following the passage of that bill, Adam Winstanley, noticing that Servistar had not made any progress on breaking ground, looked at building a data center at a different location in Westfield, according to email records obtained from Westfield. He didn’t proceed. 

In an interview with The Shoestring, Winstanley, a commercial real estate developer with 33 years of experience and roughly $1 billion in active projects with clients including Amazon, said that he abandoned the idea because he found that “a data center does not work in Westfield or anywhere in New England.”

While he is not opposed to them, he found that regional infrastructure constraints make them “impossible” to build. Electricity makes up a significant portion of a data center’s operating expenses, so operators want to run them in places with cheap power, typically between 5 and 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. According to Winstanley, New England’s average rate runs around 24 cents, and the grid cannot support the massive capacity of power the data centers draw. The substations date to 1975 and run at 90% capacity, he said. 

“It’s not a real estate project, it’s an energy project,” Winstanley said. Green energy projects replaced fossil fuel capacity but didn’t add net generation. Vermont Yankee was shuttered because it couldn’t sell capacity into the grid — now demand outpaces supply. “It’ll never happen in New England,” Winstanley concluded. “Too many factors working against you.”

In late December, President Donald Trump’s administration ordered a pause on nearly 6 gigawatts of offshore wind projects along the east coast, citing national security concerns including radar disruption. Among the paused energy projects were two in New England that are nearly complete. The order came just days after the baffling announcement of a $6 billion merger between Trump Media & Technology, the parent company to Truth Social, and the California-based nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies. 

***

Starting in 2022, Pease, the Westfield state representative, filed a series of bills proposing sales tax exemptions for data centers — legislation that would benefit projects like the one Servistar was trying to build in his district. 

The bills drew lobbying from Servistar and, by 2024, from Amazon. Pease’s campaigns have drawn support from the Massachusetts Majority Independent Expenditure PAC, which spent over $21,000 on his behalf in 2020. State campaign finance records show that the PAC’s donor rolls include: John Fish, whose Suffolk Construction runs a data center building division; Robert Hale of Granite Telecommunications, which owns data center infrastructure; and the Markley Group, New England’s largest data center operator.  

The PAC ran afoul of campaign finance law in 2021 when it accepted a $25,000 contribution via treasurer’s check — a payment method Massachusetts caps at $100. By the time the state’s Office of Campaign & Political Finance issued its ruling in January 2024, the PAC had dissolved with no money left. The chairperson cut a personal $25,000 check to an undisclosed charity to make the problem go away, state records say. 

Velis, the Westfield state senator, sponsored the Senate companion to Pease’s data center tax exemption bill, while Finn, the West Springfield Democrat whose district includes parts of Westfield, co-sponsored the House version. In July 2022, Finn and Pease issued a joint press release when the House passed legislation providing economic incentives for the Westfield data center.

“I was excited to cosponsor this important piece of legislation with Rep. Finn, and work with my Western Massachusetts colleagues to pass language that will allow for hyperscale data centers in Westfield,” Pease said. 

In a statement, a spokesperson for Pease told The Shoestring that “he was asked to cosponsor the bill by the city council, and he does support it.” 

“He said that we need to support data centers to stay relevant going forward, and it is good business to have in the state,” the statement said.

Finn did not respond to inquiries from The Shoestring for comment on this article. 

A spokesperson for Velis said he was unable to respond, because he was sent to the southwest border as a member of the Massachusetts National Guard.

Correction: This piece has been updated to correct the spelling of Dan Knapik’s name.

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Few political alliances in recent American history have seemed as solid as the one between Donald Trump and the country’s farmers. Through three elections, farmers stood by Trump even as tariffs, trade wars and labor shortages squeezed profits.

But Trump’s second term may be different.

A new round of administration policies now cuts deeper into farmers’ livelihoods – not just squeezing profits but reshaping how farms survive – through renewed tariffs on agricultural products, visa restrictions on farm workers, reduced farm subsidies and open favoritism toward South American agricultural competitors.

In the past, farmers’ loyalty to Trump has overridden economics. In our study of the 2018–19 trade war between the U.S. and China, we found that farmers in Trump-voting counties kept planting soybeans even though the trade war’s effects were clear: Their costs would rise and their profits would fall. Farmers in Democratic-leaning counties, by contrast, shifted acreage toward alternatives such as corn or wheat that were likely to be more profitable. For many pro-Trump farmers, political belief outweighed market logic – at least in the short term.

Today, the economic effects of policies affecting farmers are broader and deeper – and the resolve that carried farmers’ support for Trump through the first trade war may no longer be enough.

Tariffs: The familiar pain returns

The revived U.S.-China trade conflict has again placed soybeans at its center. In March 2025, Beijing suspended import licenses for several major U.S. soybean exporters following new U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods. Trump countered with a new round of reciprocal tariffs, broadening the list of Chinese imports hit and raising rates on already targeted goods.

An October 2025 deal promised China would buy 25 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans a year, but relief has proved mostly symbolic.

Before the 2018-19 trade war, China regularly imported 30 million to 36 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans annually — more than one-third of all American soybean exports. Now, Beijing has signed long-term contracts with Brazil and Argentina, leaving U.S. producers with shrinking overseas demand for their crops.

Prices remain roughly 40% to 50% below pre-2018 levels, and farmers are storing record volumes of unsold soybeans.

In 2019, the federal government cushioned those losses with over $23 billion in bailout payments to farmers. This time, Republican leaders show little appetite for another bailout. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s funds for farm relief are running low, leaving farmers with lower prices and less support.

Labor: Fewer hands, higher costs

Farms are also short of workers. Roughly 42% of U.S. crop workers lack legal status, according to the National Agricultural Workers Survey. Tougher immigration enforcement and slower visa processing have thinned the labor pool just as production costs are surging. Hired-labor expenses rose 14.4% from 2021 to 2022 and another 15.2% the following year, and costs such as fertilizer, equipment and parts climbed sharply.

Many growers are turning to the H-2A guest worker program – a legal pipeline for seasonal foreign labor that has quadrupled in size over the past decade. But it is expensive: Farms must pay the adverse effect wage rate, a federally set pay rate that is more than twice the regular federal minimum wage. And farms must provide every H-2A worker with free housing and free transportation to and from the U.S., as well as from their housing to the worksite. Large agribusinesses can absorb those costs; small family farms often cannot.

As exports collapsed in late September 2025, the head of the American Soybean Association wrote a public letter to the White House begging for help, saying, “We’ve had your back. We need you to have ours now.” The hard-line immigration policy approach that rallies rural voters is also pushing smaller farms to the brink – forcing them to ask what their loyalty still buys.

Subsidies and symbolism: The Argentina shock

The question of the value of farmers’ loyalty sharpened in the fall of 2025 when the U.S. Treasury approved a $20 billion currency-swap deal with Argentina – supporting the country’s president, Javier Milei, a political ally of Trump, while the country remains a direct agricultural competitor.

U.S. farmers, already frustrated by low prices and visa delays, took it as an insult. Argentina is among the world’s largest soybean exporters, and U.S. farm groups asked why the federal government would underwrite a competitor while trimming support for American producers at home.

The tension deepened when Trump floated the idea of buying Argentinian beef for U.S. markets – a remark one Kansas rancher called “an absolute betrayal.” The plan may be economically minor, but symbolically it pierced the “America First” narrative that had helped hold the farm vote together.

Clean energy: The new rural subsidy under threat

For decades, the farm vote relied on federally funded support programs – crop insurance, price guarantees and disaster assistance – which account for a significant share of net farm income. Over the past five years, a quieter lifeline has emerged: renewable energy.

Wind and solar projects have brought jobs, tax revenue and steady lease payments to rural counties that have been losing both population and farm income for decades. Iowa now gets about 63% of its electricity from wind, while Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas have seen significant growth.

That momentum has stalled. In August 2025, a U.S. Treasury Department policy change froze billions in rural investment in renewable energy projects. Industry trackers report that prolonged uncertainty has pushed many Midwestern renewable projects into limbo.

For farmers, this isn’t an abstract climate debate — it’s a lost income stream. Leasing land for turbines or solar panels brought in tens of thousands of dollars a year and kept many family farms afloat.

The freeze wipes out one of the few growth engines in rural America and highlights an irony at the heart of Trump’s message: The administration that promises to protect the heartland is dismantling the clean energy investments that were finally helping it diversify.

Politics: How deep does loyalty run?

As our research found, during the first trade war, Trump-voting counties absorbed heavy financial losses without changing course. That loyalty was propped up by subsidies – and by hope. This time, neither cushion is secure.

Many farmers still share Trump’s skepticism of Washington and global elites. But shrinking federal backing, tighter labor and a competitor’s bailout cut close to home. The question now is whether cultural identity can keep outweighing material loss – or whether the second trade war will signal a deeper political shift.

No sudden collapse of rural support for Trump is likely; cultural loyalty doesn’t fade overnight. But strain is visible. Farm groups are quietly pressing for pragmatic trade policy and visa reform, and several Republican governors now lobby for labor flexibility rather than tougher enforcement.

If the first Trump trade war tested farmers’ wallets, this one tests their faith – and faith, once shaken, is far harder to restore.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Editor’s note: The Shoestring has granted anonymity to several sources in this article.

It was a regular spring morning for J. and her family. That is, until one of her kids burst into the room in a panic. Masked immigration officers had just grabbed her husband right outside their home in western Massachusetts.

“Mom, hurry up,” J. recalled her child telling her. “They threw him to the ground and got on top of him.”

It was a possibility that J. and her family knew existed, given that her husband is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. Two days prior, they had talked about what they would do if Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested him. But she never thought that ICE would grab him off the street as he walked to the car with their son to take him to school. 

As she ran outside, J. saw officers surrounding her husband. She said the federal agents refused to identify themselves, telling her only that her husband would have the right to a phone call after he was processed at a detention center. They stuffed him into a car and drove away, leaving behind J. and her suddenly separated family.

“I was left so confused, so lost in that moment because I didn’t know what would happen,” J. recalled. “My only instinct in that situation was to yell to ask if anyone recorded anything and if they could help me.”

Eventually, she went back inside and, together with her kids, started to cry. 

Seven months into the administration of President Donald Trump, many immigrant families have experienced the same across Massachusetts. In May alone, ICE boasted that federal agents had arrested nearly 1,500 immigrants in the state. Videos and eyewitness accounts have emerged of officers following immigrants as they dropped off their kids at school, smashing windows to yank people out of their vehicles, and arresting others at previously off-limits locations like courthouses.

Often, federal agents are wearing military-style tactical gear and covering their faces. Their increased presence on the street has drawn the anxious attention of immigrants and citizens alike — people like bystander Matt Gagnon, who witnessed officers arrest two people working for a roofing company in Easthampton last month. Agents had pulled over the workers’ van.

“There was one moment where the driver looked over at me and I could see the fear in his face,” Gagnon told The Shoestring.

It’s all part of the promises Trump and fellow Republicans have made to carry out mass deportations at unprecedented levels. Previous presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, have set deportation records in recent years. In fiscal year 2024, for example, President Joe Biden’s administration deported 271,000 immigrants — more than any year over the previous decade. Most of those deportations came after arrests by border agents. But Trump is looking to further grow the country’s deportation machine in the U.S. interior, too. Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that 60,000 immigrants are now in immigration detention across the country, which represents a modern record.

Those detentions look likely to continue growing in number. Earlier this summer, Republicans passed a budget bill that will give the deportation agenda a massive infusion of funding: $170 billion to be spent, over four years, on hiring more immigration agents, building more detention facilities, and expanding the powers of ICE.

The result has been a pervasive sense of dread in immigrant communities in western Massachusetts, according to interviews The Shoestring has conducted with immigrants and their allies. But community members have also organized mutual aid networks to help each other survive under the new immigration regime.

“It’s a huge fear that we’re living with,” said P., an undocumented farmworker who left El Salvador more than 20 years ago to escape gang violence and to search for a better life in the United States. She has worked across the east coast, from chicken farms to tobacco fields, and now lives in western Massachusetts. She said she knows many people who have had a family member detained. “People are afraid to go to the store, to go wash their clothes.”

In particular, P. said that immigrant workers — who already lead difficult lives doing low-paid, essential jobs that keep society functioning — have no choice but to carry on with their lives. But now, she looks at every car on her street and can’t help but feel paralyzed with anxiety when one stops. She asks herself: “Is it ICE?” 

A single mother herself, P. said children in the immigrant community are particularly scared living under the threat of deportation. She’s had to talk with her own son, who is a citizen, about what would happen if she’s arrested while he’s at school. She’s left his documents with someone she trusts who could take him to school or the doctor, for example. Eventually, she’d have him sent back to her in El Salvador, despite the fact that the United States is the only country he has ever known.

“The kids are traumatized because they’re so worried,” she said.

***

That reality is perhaps most obvious in the region’s schools.

Javier Luengo-Garrido has been working to protect the rights of immigrants in Massachusetts for the better part of the last decade. As the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts’ deputy field director for regional engagement, he and his colleagues have put on more than 100 “know your rights” trainings since January for more than 3,000 immigrants statewide.

Luengo-Garrido said that educators are in a unique position to see the impacts that living under the shadow of ICE is having on children.

“What we’re hearing from teachers, from administrators, people who are really really close to families… is that many times they are seeing a drop in attendance for students,” he said. “Which is absolutely understandable.”

The superintendent of Berkshire Hills Regional School District told The Berkshire Eagle in April that school attendance had dipped amid fear from recent immigration arrests in the area.

“With schools starting soon, there’s a lot of fear in sending children back to school,” J. told The Shoestring.

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The Shoestring relies on reader support to make independent news for western Massachusetts possible. You can support this kind of labor-intensive reporting by visiting our donate page.

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A handful of local municipalities, from Northampton to Springfield, have passed different versions of ordinances in recent years affirming their status as a “welcoming community” or “safe city” for immigrants. They limit how police and other municipal agencies can interact with federal immigration authorities or whether they can ask a person’s immigration status. Luengo-Garrido explained that the idea is to ensure that immigrants feel comfortable reporting that they’re the victims of a crime to law enforcement, for example, or to report poor housing conditions.

“What’s happening now is people are really fearful to do those kinds of things,” he said. That means that survivors of domestic violence or sexual assault may be hesitant to report those crimes to a police department, fearing the department may be cooperating with ICE, he explained. “That’s highly concerning, and certainly this administration has made the immigrant community really fearful to engage.”

Luengo-Garrido said that the big differences between Trump and previous presidential administrations is the scale of deportations and the level of physical violence agents are using.

“The visibility and the way how this is happening in the middle of the day certainly generates fear among community members,” he said. “You can argue that a lot of the operations that are being done in the middle of the day are not only to make the detention effective but it may also be sending a message.”

As for the exact number of detentions that ICE has made in western Massachusetts, Luengo-Garrido said it’s hard to say.

But immigrants are also pushing back in their own ways, from legal-rights trainings to creating networks to alert each other that ICE is operating in a particular area.

In western Massachusetts, the Pioneer Valley Workers Center has been on the front lines of that work. As an immigrant-led collective, the center’s organizers began seeing a lot of misinformation early this year circulating on social media, and by word of mouth, about ICE’s actions. They saw this as part of immigration agents’ fear tactics, meant to encourage people to self deport and to divide the general public to keep them from organizing against deportations.

“We were really clear that we needed to combat misinformation and get people real facts,” said a representative from the workers center who requested anonymity for this article. “So that they could be making risk assessments about how to go about their lives based on that information as opposed to the misinformation that was being fed to all of us … People make decisions like not leaving their homes, wondering if they should send their kids to school, or whether to go to a medical appointment.”

So, together with other immigrant-led grassroots organizations, the Pioneer Valley Workers Center co-founded the LUCE Immigrant Justice Network of Massachusetts — an organization that operates a hotline people can call at 617-370-5023 to report ICE sightings. LUCE has also trained a team of verifiers who go out onto the street to confirm those sightings, meaning that anyone can get up-to-date information about the presence of immigration agents in their communities in as little as five or 10 minutes.

“This is not the time to fall into fear and complacency,” the workers center representative said. “It is by design that many of us are afraid, in some cases shocked, and want to stay small and quiet in these moments. This is not the time to do that.”

Groups like the Pioneer Valley Workers Center have also been organizing across the state to help directly impacted people in other ways, like holding know-your-rights trainings, assisting with “family preparedness” documents to prepare for the worst, and working with people to locate detained loved ones and then navigate the post-detention process. They’ve raised money for separated families and organized rides to people who need to get to an appointment.

***

Asked what message she had for Americans, P. said she wanted people to know that immigrants work hard — on farms, for example, doing jobs that citizens won’t do. She said she’s been to the Massachusetts Statehouse before to talk to lawmakers about protecting immigrant rights and changing the state law that allows bosses to deny farmworkers overtime pay.

“You feel awful when you go and they don’t pay attention to you,” she said “I want to tell them, ‘We work so that you have your fruit and vegetables fresh on your tables, so your kids and you can have organic produce … Where do you think that comes from? Who do you think harvested that?’”

Behind that plate of food, P. said, is a parent like her who had to leave their kids with someone else at 4 a.m. to go into a wet field, where they’ll work soaking for the entire day. They often don’t get home until 6 p.m., and even then they can’t enjoy spending time with their kids. They shower, cook, help them with a little homework and then put them to bed. They’ve got to wake up early the next day, after all, and do it all over again — sometimes six or seven days a week. During the summer, P. said she doesn’t often get the chance to take her son to the playground like other families.

“Take some time and read our stories,” she said. “We didn’t come here to be enemies. On the contrary.” 

P. said she hasn’t lived through family separation but knows plenty of people who have been taken away from their spouse or child. The result, she said, is devastating.

“You can’t go outside freely, go play in the park,” she said, because of the worry that ICE will be there. “And just because you’re Hispanic and they see your skin, they’ll say, ‘That’s the person I’m going to take because they’re doing something bad here.’”

As for J., when ICE detained her husband earlier this year, she remembers her parental instinct taking over while crying with her children. She decided it was time for action, and she had only one goal for that day: find out where they took her husband. So she went to the police, then to district court, then to the office of a lawmaker. She learned that immigration agents were taking him to several stops before his ultimate destination: a detention facility in Rhode Island.

“The best I way I can describe it, the first few weeks I was in survival mode,” she said. “I had lots of anxiety, lots of stress, I had lots of nightmares. In one, I dreamed that immigration was taking me and I was screaming, ‘My kids! My kids!’ I woke in a panic.”

Over the course of a month, she would regularly call her husband. But the day she didn’t call, he was suddenly transferred to Texas — a process she said left her husband with intense anxiety.

Eventually, her husband had his court date and was released back home. The family is now in the process of applying for a green card for him, which they had begun to do before his arrest. It has been a difficult endeavor, she said. But as a citizen herself who was born and raised in the United States, J. said she can’t imagine how hard it would be for someone who didn’t speak English.

And the nerves still remains.

“Although he’s not detained now, I’m always worried that they’re going to take him again — that immigration is going to arrive again,” she said. “You feel like you’re on their radar. They’re watching you and can show up whenever.”

“We still have a long road to travel.”

Shelby Lee contributed reporting to this story.

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Over 500 student dining workers at Smith College have won their first union contract a year and a half after announcing their intent to unionize.

The United Smith Student Workers announced in a press release that their contract includes wage increases, a pay scale, guaranteed breaks, paid training, and safety protections. According to the statement, the contract “is one of the largest and most comprehensive first contracts reached by undergraduate workers in the U.S.”

Raia Gutman is a rising senior at Smith College and works as a dishwasher in the dining halls. Workers started union organizing in their first year at the college and Gutman was part of the bargaining committee while the union negotiated the contract. Gutman said they began organizing because they came onto campus at a time of heavy union activity and organizing.

“For me it’s a way to make a difference, even if it’s a small difference,” Gutman said. “There’s so many reasons to feel really hopeless and depressed about the possibility of making any kind of change politically. But this process has shown me that my coworkers and I can take steps to change what we’re getting paid and the way we’re treated at work. It’s inspiring to see that change happen.”

Smith College dining workers announced their intent to unionize in November 2023 and, after school administrators declined to recognize their union, voted three months later in a National Labor Relations Board election to officially join the Office and Professional Employees International Union’s Local 153. The following month, the college’s library workers went public with their union drive and then voted unanimously to join the same local.

Student-workers in the school’s residence halls also voted to unionize in December 2023, deciding to join United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1459.

According to the union’s website, OPEIU was formed in 1945 and now has over 100,000 members. It covers workers in various different sectors, from nonprofit organizations and credit unions to colleges and universities like Smith.

Student-worker unionizing has been increasing the past few years — a “union boom” — with major wins on a national level occurring last year. For example, last year a bargaining unit of 20,000 California State University student assistants voted to unionize. And according to the National Education Association, just a little over a decade ago there were no undergraduate student workers unions. As of 2024, there were 19, including at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where the nation’s first undergraduate residential-advisor union formed in 2022, and at Mount Holyoke College, where housing workers unionized in 2022.

“This first contract sends a powerful message to student workers across the nation: organizing works, and with solidarity and skilled representation, lasting change is possible,” the United Smith Student Workers statement said.

The bargaining process took some time. Gutman said that the union had a lot of trouble getting the college administration to understand that the members needed higher wages. They said that the college was either proposing no raise or a very small one, which Gutman found “offensive” because of the high costs of living and tuition. In response, the union invited community members at the college to sit in on the bargaining process, which Gutman said the college’s administration didn’t like.

“It’s been really interesting to see how labor organizing is valued differently than other kinds of activism that Smith claims to value,” Gutman said.

They said that there was a large difference between the way that Smith reacts to feminist-oriented activism compared to when Smith’s own employees want more autonomy over their working conditions.

Though Gutman is excited and feels good about the contract, they said workers made proposals that didn’t make the final cut — for example, boycotting Israeli products produced in occupied Palestine or goods from companies that have unfair labor practices. To Gutman, this is only the beginning. ​​The union, they said, has a considerable amount of work to do in order to navigate the high turnover rate that comes with working in a college setting and to make sure the union has an even better contract in the years to come.

In response to questions from The Shoestring, Caroyln McDaniel, the college’s media relations director, said in a statement that Smith College abides by National Labor Relations Board protocols and “is satisfied with the contract agreed upon in good faith through collective bargaining and ratified by our student workers.”

Seth Goldstein, a lawyer who represents Smith’s dining workers and librarians, said that the college’s bargaining team came from different perspectives than the student workers but bargained in good faith.

Goldstein said that the students could’ve been doing anything else with their time at college, but were committed and passionate about organizing and “stood their ground.” He said that now that the contract is ratified, it’s up to the union to engage in collective action through showing solidarity with other groups.

“To defend labor rights [is to] to defend human rights,” Goldstein said.

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When the right-wing Zionist organization Betar tweeted on April 8, it directly targeted a Hampshire College student from Turkey. 

“We identify Efe Ercelik as one here on visa and we have submitted his name for deportation,” the tweet read. “There’s so many of these bastards nationwide he’s an egregious one in Massachusetts, a rotten state.”

The social media post appeared to have an immediate impact.

Just one day later, the federal government silently revoked Ercelik’s student visa, according to court documents — a decision a federal judge would later say was directly because of Betar’s influence. On April 16, federal agents showed up to Ercelik’s home in black, unmarked SUVs with tinted windows. One agent told Ercelik’s lawyer that they intended to arrest him so that they could deport him. Without a judicial warrant, however, they couldn’t enter his apartment, so he spent the next three weeks stuck inside, afraid to leave. 

Court documents would later show that even the administrative warrant Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents claimed allowed them to pursue Ercelik was not valid. That administrative warrant, dated April 10, was authorized based on allegations ICE made in a separate document first signed on April 25 — nine days after the feds first showed up at Ercelik’s apartment. 

“This cannot be true,” U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley would later find. “In brief, not only was there no charging document when Respondents attempted to detain Petitioner on April 16, agents then misrepresented the date of service, which is no earlier than May 7.” 

When the feds began stalking him, Ercelik was facing charges in Eastern Hampshire District Court, including one count of assault and battery with intent to intimidate — a felony hate crime. In November 2023, while he was a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he punched and kicked a Jewish student on campus, and destroyed a palm-sized Israeli flag with a kitchen knife, during a “bring them home” event in support of the hostages Hamas had taken the month prior. A witness also accused him of making antisemitic comments during the assault, according to the police report. 

That description of Ercelik as “antisemitic,” however, didn’t match how those who knew him described the young man. In letters sent to the court, supporters described him as a “gentle giant” and a “serious student whose concern for peace, social justice, and diversity have been clear.” His motivations, his lawyer said, were “in opposition to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.”

“I am Jewish, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and deeply committed to my Jewish family and community,” wrote one of those supporters, UMass faculty member Deborah Keisch. “Obviously, I am extremely sensitive to antisemitism and have been the target of it many times throughout my life. I have never experienced one iota of that sentiment while working with Efe, nor have I witnessed it happening with Jewish students in our classroom.”

Ultimately, prosecutors agreed to drop that hate-crime charge and others when Ercelik arrived in court on May 7. Ercelik, in turn, pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor assault charges. It was only then that plainclothes federal agents arrested him inside the courthouse in Belchertown. 

In its memo revoking his student visa, the Trump administration explained its reasoning. Ercelik’s “antisemitic activities, his hateful rhetoric against Jewish students, and his violent attack of Jewish student (sic) on campus may indicate support for a designated terrorist organization and undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish Students,” the memo claimed.

But in a ruling ordering Ercelik’s release the next day, Kelley said it was his First Amendment activity that proved to be “the substantial or motivating factor for ICE’s pursuit of his detention.”

What’s more, she said, ICE’s actions seemed to have been “almost exclusively triggered by Betar Worldwide.”

The federal government doesn’t appear to have ever confirmed working with Betar. But when reached by The Shoestring, a U.S. Department of State spokesperson wouldn’t deny that the agency acted at Betar’s request.

“Given our commitment to and responsibility for national security, the Department uses all available tools to receive and review concerning information when considering visa revocations about possible ineligibilities,” a spokesperson said in an email. 

While Betar and other pro-Israel advocacy groups targeted Ercelik because of his court case, other students have found themselves in these groups’ crosshairs for even less. The doxing website Canary Mission, for example, published a profile on Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk because of an op-ed she co-wrote — a profile that Betar boosted shortly before ICE detained her. And the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation has laid out what it calls “Project Esther, a broad plan to quash pro-Palestine activism in the United States that includes deportations of foreign students.

The intimidation campaign has reached UMass Amherst, too. There, violent threats from Betar’s supporters led activists to cancel a long-planned “People’s Tribunal” event this spring. Organizers told The Shoestring it’s part of a well-coordinated doxing and harassment effort from groups like Betar and Canary Mission, which have worked with UMass students to surveil pro-Palestine activists for at least a year and a half.

On June 4, the Council on American-Islamic Relations added UMass Amherst to its list of campuses it sees as “hostile” to Muslim students. 

“UMass Amherst administration has consistently failed to protect students from doxing, harassment, and widespread Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian hate, fostering a hostile environment where Muslim, Arab, and allied students fear for their safety when expressing their political and religious identities,” the group said in a press release.

In conversations with The Shoestring, student and staff activists detailed months-long efforts demanding that administrators act against the doxing campaign. They said university leaders largely ignored those requests — an allegation UMass Amherst has disputed.

One student doxed by Canary Mission, who requested anonymity due to fears of further harassment, said that university leadership fostered a “climate where criticizing Israel was absolutely not okay and absolutely dangerous, but going after Palestinian and Arab students was not a concern.”

In a statement, UMass Amherst spokesperson Emily Gest said that the university has provided support to students facing targeted harassment. She said that “regretfully, neither individuals nor private and public institutions such as universities have the mechanism or the power to prevent doxxing and/or online harassment.” 

“We encourage anyone with information regarding UMass students, faculty or staff who may have engaged in any form of harassment, including online, to come forward to the university and relevant law enforcement authorities so those allegations can be fully investigated and addressed,” Gets said. “If an investigation reveals that a member of the university community has engaged in any form of harassment, including doxxing, that individual would face appropriate disciplinary proceedings.”

***

Betar is a century-old group whose stated mission is “to cultivate a new generation of Jewish leaders who are unapologetically proud and prepared to defend the Jewish people — on campuses, in communities, in the media, and beyond.” Appearing first in Latvia in 1923, Betar was founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky as a Zionist paramilitary force.

Interest in the militant group has surged recently in the United States, where Betar incorporated as a nonprofit organization last year, according to its tax filing. In social media posts, the group says it has sent dossiers on student activists to contacts in the Trump White House and has claimed responsibility for the detentions of foreign pro-Palestine students. 

“Not enough. We demand blood in Gaza!” Betar wrote in a since-deleted tweet responding to a list of infants Israel’s military had killed in Gaza. In another deleted tweet, Betar offered a bounty of $1,800 to hand “a beeper” to the prominent Palestinian-American activist Nerdeen Kiswani  — a reference to Israeli intelligence agents’ indiscriminate use of explosive pagers to kill and injure Hezbollah members in Lebanon. 

Beyond its online rhetoric, the group does appear to have real influence.

Ross Glick, the former executive director of Betar, was pictured with U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, days before ICE detained Columbia University activist Mahmoud Kahlil. Glick told The Guardian that he had spoken to Cruz about deporting Kahlil.

The Anti-Defamation League, which praised the Trump administration’s detention of Kahlil and has sought to link pro-Palestinian rhetoric with antisemitic violence, has itself denounced Betar as an extremist hate group. The ADL cited the group’s history of harassing Muslims, its militant focus, association with the far-right Kahanist movement, and its efforts to report pro-Palestine protesters to federal immigration authorities.

In a response to a request for comment, a Betar spokesperson addressed a Shoestring reporter as “jihadi” and said the group “is very active at [the] UMass Amherst campus and throughout western Massachusetts with a network of faculty, community members and students supporting us and providing information.”

“We are Jews who fight back and will continue to be active on providing information and fighting back at UMass and nationwide,” the group said in an unsigned email. “We also confirm we receive information from our European and Israeli Betar branches, including specifically on Massachusetts students.”

In a follow-up email, the Betar spokesperson said that the group has ties to Israeli intelligence. The Shoestring could not independently verify that claim. 

***

Betar isn’t the only group targeting local students who say they’re protesting the Israeli government’s genocide of the Palestinian people. 

According to eight current and former UMass Amherst student and staff activists who spoke to The Shoestring, students opposed to pro-Palestinian activism on campus have engaged in violent threats, doxing, and stalking since October 2023. University leadership has done little to curtail that behavior, the activists alleged, leading to what organizers describe as an atmosphere of intimidation and fear.

For Rüya Hazeyen, a Palestinian-American student who led the UMass Students for Justice in Palestine chapter last year, it all began when she spoke at a Northampton rally in support of Palestinians on Oct. 9, 2023.

It was there that she and other UMass pro-Palestine activists first encountered Ben Goldstein, then a senior at UMass. According to two activists present at the rally, Goldstein shouted “kill all Arabs” and “level Gaza.” In the following weeks, Goldstein repeatedly appeared at rallies and other demonstrations hosted by UMass SJP, playing sounds of bombs dropping and allegedly attempting to ram protestors with his electric scooter, according to activists present at the rallies.

Around this time, one of the activists who spoke with The Shoestring contacted administrators to report Goldstein’s behavior. She said this was the beginning of a months-long series of email exchanges with administrators that seemed to go nowhere. Gest, the UMass Amherst spokesperson, declined to comment on specific student-conduct complaints. 

“Any active or completed investigations, and the outcome of those investigations, are confidential under federal law,” she said.

By November 2023, Hazeyen and several other activists associated with UMass SJP and the anti-militarism group UMass Dissenters had been profiled by Canary Mission, a shadowy online directory that bills itself as a list of “individuals and organizations that promote hatred of the USA, Israel, and Jews on North American college campuses and beyond.” 

“I’ve been a Palestinian my whole life,” Hazeyen said. “There was never a moment where I was like, ‘Oh shit, the stakes are really high.’ I’ve always known it. It was just a matter of time [before] I was going to get doxed.”

Critics say Canary Mission attempts to chill free speech by jeopardizing activists’ job prospects through associating them, often unfairly, with antisemitism and terrorism just for being critical of Israel’s government. Canary Mission’s own website says that it aims to prevent “today’s radicals from becoming tomorrow’s employees.”

The detailed profiles of UMass students on Canary Mission’s website — which include photos, students’ majors, and activism affiliations — quickly invited online harassment, including threats of physical and sexual violence, according to student activists.

“Once you’re on Canary Mission, suddenly the entirety of Twitter has access to you and your information and your privacy,” one activist, who requested anonymity due to fears of further harassment, told The Shoestring. “All of these horrifying messages start coming in on your LinkedIn, on your Instagram, on your Facebook. It was like every source where you could Google my name, someone had found it and [were] saying horrible, inflammatory, racist things.”

The students also had reason to believe that fellow UMass students had sent their information to Canary Mission. A November 2023 Instagram post by the account @umass_zionists invited UMass students to surveil pro-Palestine activists. “If you match a UMass name to a face at today’s protest that doesn’t condemn Hamas, then you get a feature, an award, and I will upload them to the Canary Mission database,” the post read. Goldstein ran the account, according to a criminal complaint obtained by The Shoestring. A later post from the account included a screenshot indicating that the account owner had sent information to Canary Mission.

After Canary Mission posted a video on its Instagram targeting one student activist, the @umass_zionists account sent it to the student via Instagram direct message. “Warned you,” an accompanying message said.

Neither Goldstein nor his lawyer responded to requests for comment.

***

After Jason Eaton shot three Palestinian students in Burlington, Vermont, on Nov. 25, 2023, students’ anxieties grew. Three UMass SJP organizers who lived together described the paranoia they felt after the shooting and after their names and addresses were publicly posted on UMPD’s online arrest logs following their arrest at a sit-in protest in October 2023.

“There were a couple times that cars would drive down our driveway that we didn’t recognize. And genuinely, we would all huddle by the window because we were like, ‘It’s happening,’” Emmanuelle Sussman, a former UMass SJP member, said. 

In the comment section of Canary Mission posts targeting them, student activists noticed people tagging ICE and other federal agencies, advocating for them to be deported, even though many of the students were U.S. citizens. To the activists, efforts to have students deported in 2023 were evidence of a well planned campaign that would eventually find success when President Donald Trump took office in January 2025.

Sussman said that one investigator from UMass Amherst’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Access was concerned for her and other student activists and expressed frustration with the lack of action from higher-ups. “We were talking to her and she was like, ‘I honestly don’t know why nothing has happened with this,’” Sussman said.

In a response to an inquiry from The Shoestring, Gest wrote in a statement that “UMass has — and continues to — unequivocally condemn harassment, including doxing, and investigates all reported incidents under the Code of Student Conduct.”

“Over the past two years, students who have requested support due to targeted incidents of harassment from individuals unaffiliated with the university have been offered support including, but not limited to, physical and electronic security, housing, and academic accommodations,” Gest said. “Any physical threats of violence are reported to law enforcement.”

The threats students faced were deemed credible enough that a UMPD detective investigating them advised one student to stop attending classes, they said. The student activist requested anonymity due to fears of further harassment. 

By the spring, after months of sharing their concerns with administrators, the university granted school-enforced mutual no-contact orders between some student activists and other students whom they say harassed them, including Goldstein. At least one student activist had a mutual no-contact order with Dylan Jacobs, the student Erecelik assaulted, according to documents obtained by The Shoestring.

Efforts to reach Jacobs were unsuccessful.

For some of the UMass SJP organizers who had been raising their concerns for months, the issuing of no-contact orders was “too little, too late,” Sussman said. On top of that, several activists said that the university didn’t enforce their no-contact policy, which the university has denied. This led to some students successfully obtaining separate, court-ordered harassment prevention orders against Goldstein, who was charged for violating one of them last fall, according to a criminal complaint in Eastern Hampshire District Court.

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On April 16, 2024, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights opened an investigation into UMass for allegations of anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism on campus after Palestine Legal, a non-profit legal aid organization, filed a complaint with the department.

“Had the University taken prompt and effective action in response to the onslaught of online harassment directed at [name redacted] and SJP in general, it is possible that the students who provided Canary Mission with such detailed information would have been deterred from doing so,” the complaint alleged.

The federal investigation into Palestine Legal’s complaint is still pending as of June 3, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s website. 

So, too, is a complaint that the Anti-Defamation League filed on behalf of Jacobs, the student Ercelik pleaded guilty to assaulting. It alleges that UMass “has failed to address the severe discrimination and harassment of Jewish and Israeli students, which fostered a hostile antisemitic environment.” 

“Amherst has permitted genocidal chants and rhetoric to permeate campus and allowed certain student groups to halt academic and social activity through their protests,” the complaint reads. 

Some of the allegations made in the complaint involve Ercelik’s 2023 assault of Jacobs. It is unclear how Jacobs and the ADL’s complaint will be handled, now that Ercelik has been cleared of hate crime charges in criminal court. 

The ADL has not responded to several requests for comment.  

***

By the fall of 2024, UMass’ Palestine-solidarity movement had suffered a “crisis in confidence,” in the words of one graduate student who The Shoesting granted anonymity because of their fears of retaliation.

The previous academic year had concluded with a violent police crackdown on an on-campus encampment protest. Senior UMass SJP leadership said they graduated with the feeling that their alma mater hadn’t done enough to protect them from doxing and harassment on top of having them arrested at the encampment. UMass police even pursued felony riot charges against the group’s co-presidents. The university dropped that effort amid backlash from the campus community. 

UMass SJP and UMass Dissenters, like many student activist groups across the country, saw a decline in momentum in the wake of mass arrests and a looming second Trump presidency. But activists began to pick up their work again in the spring. 

So did Betar.

On April 8, Betar posted about Ercelik on social media, and the next day a senior official in the U.S. Department of State, Stuart Wilson, approved a request from ICE to revoke Ercelik’s student visa.

On April 10, a coalition of campus and community activists announced a “People’s Tribunal,”  holding a protest and delivering a symbolic subpoena to UMass Chancellor Javier Reyes. The effort — a mock trial of sorts — was meant to pursue accountability for what they saw as the university’s repression of its peace movement and the school’s ties to weapons manufacturers.

“Pretty quickly after that, Betar seized upon it as their own temporary kind of pet project,” the graduate student told The Shoestring.

On April 12, Betar posted several videos of the event, writing in the caption that “UMass is a very dangerous school for Jews.”

“This week we have documented a number of people who are here on visas and we expect @ICEGOV will take action shortly,” the caption also said.

And take action they did. 

On April 16, federal immigration agents showed up to Ercelik’s apartment in at least four unmarked vehicles, according to court documents. Ercelik filed a petition that day to challenge his “constructive detention” inside his apartment; one of the agents, Daniel Yon, told Ercelik’s lawyer they intended to arrest him. In his petition, Ercelik’s lawyer explained that the agents had threatened to detain him “regardless of their lack of a warrant,” and that they would ensure Ercelik would “be charged with a federal hate crime and spend many years in federal prison.”

ICE agents were there daily for the next three weeks, according to court documents. The ICE Boston Field Office did not respond to a request for comment on this story. 

In the following weeks, Betar continued to focus on UMass, posting on Instagram nine more times with videos and photos from rallies on campus. Many comments on the posts tagged government agencies, calling for student activists to be deported. Some comments alluded to violence. On one Betar post targeting UMass activists, an anonymous account made a particularly menacing comment: “Live rounds solve this.”

As organizers became concerned about the safety of the People’s Tribunal, they held meetings with high-level administrators to inform them of the threats. Two sources present at the meetings said that administrators acknowledged the danger posed by Betar and its supporters. However, one of them, a staff member who The Shoestring granted anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the administrators “were very insistent that the only thing they can do as upper-level administration is go to UMPD” — a difficult ask to make of activists who didn’t trust the police department following its violent response to the encampment protest the previous year.

Activists also pointed out that the photos, videos, and other information being sent to Betar and Canary Mission were likely originating from people within the campus community, demanding that administrators investigate it. 

“They’ve made no commitment to try to find out who was submitting these photos and videos,” the staff activist said. At least one of the videos included grad students’ office door with their full names. 

UMass Amherst, for its part, says it investigates all reported incidents of conduct violations such as harassment and doxing.

In these meetings, activists said they put pressure on administrators to make a statement condemning Betar and its supporters’ threats. 

On April 17, Marsha McGriff, the school’s vice chancellor for equity and inclusion, and Shelly Perdomo-Ahmed, the vice chancellor for student affairs and campus life, sent an email to the UMass community.

“In recent weeks, we’ve received several deeply concerning and heartbreaking reports of community members — especially students — being harassed through social media accounts not affiliated with the university,” the message read. The administrators condemned the harassment and intimidation of students, but avoided specific references to Betar.

The email also sought to address what the school said were unsubstantiated rumors that ICE agents had been on campus. ICE agents, however, had just begun waiting for Ercelike outside his apartment in Sunderland.

Organizers were frustrated with the email, which they said obfuscated the role that fellow UMass students, staff, or faculty may have played in the targeted harassment and surveillance of activists, despite informing administrators of their suspicions.

As Betar increasingly attracted outside attention to UMass organizing, and violent threats increased, organizers opted to postpone the People’s Tribunal event, which the graduate student organizer described as “devastating.”

“If there’s any other kind of direct assault on or threat of violence against students on this campus, especially, for example, Jewish students, they would have unequivocally named and condemned that, but they didn’t do that for us,” the graduate student, who is Jewish, said.

While he and his fellow organizers were hesitant to give Betar a “win,” as he put it, they concluded that they had to take the threats seriously. Multiple activists expressed fears of a potential ICE presence on campus and a violent counter-protest. 

Just a few weeks later, ICE arrested Ercelik. 

On May 7, Ercelik had managed to narrowly avoid federal agents as he left his apartment building to go to his court date. He had reached a plea agreement, but his lawyer, Paul Rudof, had failed in his attempts to have Ercelik appear in court via Zoom to avoid ICE detention.

“The prosecutor objected because he did not want federal authorities to perceive him as interfering with them,” Rudof wrote in a court filing. “The judge denied my request with prejudice.”

The Northwestern District Attorney’s Office did not directly answer an inquiry made on May 6, the day before Ercelik’s court date, inquiring as to what precautions prosecutors — who had knowledge of Ercelik’s pending habeas corpus petition — had taken to prevent ICE from illegally detaining Ercelik.

The victims of the assault that Ercelik plead guilty to were able to address the court remotely.

“Efe attacked me just for being Jewish, and I was terrified to know that I was surrounded by large numbers of students and professors who supported targeted violence against Jewish people,” Jacobs said in his victim’s impact statement.

“In my opinion, Efe has not been held accountable for assaulting me,” he said.  

Ercelik also plead guilty to assaulting a second person on that day back in 2023: Leah Eve Nelson, a UMass Amherst Hillel staffer who broke up the scuffle between him and Jacobs. Speaking before the court over Zoom, she said the assault left her and others who witnessed it afraid of further violence. 

“A hate crime is a hate crime, even if the legal label is dropped for the sake of closing a case,” she said. 

For her, she said true justice would involve Ercelik sitting down with a leader in the Jewish community to learn, among other things. But she now felt stuck between wanting to empathize with Ercelik, who she had learned was afraid to leave home for fear of deportation even before his trial, and wanting to do what was best for her community “who have, for the last year and a half, been subjected to violations and abuses of a nature that only seems to be acceptable when the targets are Jews.” 

In an interview with The Shoestring, Nelson said that while she “cannot tolerate or stand” what Ercelik did, she would “defend to the death his rights to a hearing.” But because of ICE’s attempts to arrest him without a trial or hearing — something she described as “a great offense to the law” — she said she felt she had been denied her right to justice. 

“Rather than focusing on my needs, I felt it was my civic responsibility to defend his rights,” Nelson said. That’s exactly what she did during his hearing. “The idea that the federal government could, using my name, unlawfully remove and expel noncitizens from their homes without a trial or hearing is a violation of every tenet of civilized society,” she told those gathered in the court that day.

Immediately after the proceeding, at the exact moment he was no longer being charged with a hate crime, federal agents arrested Ercelik at the courthouse with the intent to deport him. Lawyers and advocates have long criticized the practice of making such arrests at courthouses because they can make immigrants fearful of taking part in the legal system, including when they’re seeking protection. But the Trump administration has reversed previous ICE policies barring the agency from arresting people at “sensitive locations” like schools and courts.

Ercelik had already purchased a ticket back to Turkey before his arrest — a fact that Kelley, the federal judge, noted in her order to release him from custody later that day.

“To me the process doesn’t make much sense, because you have someone who wants to leave the country, and ICE wants them to leave the country — and to leave as quickly as possible — but the argument seems to fly in the face of the process that’s been identified, which is the prolonging of his detention,” Kelley said, according to a transcript of Ercelik’s court hearing. She also noted that Ercelik was likely to succeed on the merits of his claims that ICE had violated his First- and Fifth-Amendment constitutional rights. 

Later that day, the federal government released Ercelik, who soon after boarded a plane home with his mother. After he had landed in Turkey, he declined an interview for this article on the advice of his lawyer. As the only condition of his probation in Massachusetts, he is required not to contact Nelson or Jacobs. His probation explicitly included no travel restrictions or requirements to check in with a probation officer.  

On May 27, Laurie Loisel, a spokesperson for the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office, told The Shoestring the DA’s office is “an independent state agency. The office neither assists nor interferes with the actions of ICE.” 

***

The postponement of the People’s Tribunal also coincided with Canary Mission and Betar targeting another student activist. Haley Ho, a UMass undergraduate student, said she had realized something was wrong when her X account was flooded by follow requests from accounts with Israeli flags in their handles.

Canary Mission had posted screenshots of some of Ho’s tweets. One included a joke about write-in voting for Yahya Sinwar, the former leader of Hamas, during the 2024 U.S. election. Another read: “my pronouns are ha/mas.”

When asked what she had to say to those offended by her remarks — one tweet included the phrase “death to Israel” — Ho said her statements were “never that serious.” She argued that “the bigger thing to be upset at is the fact that there is a genocide going on in Palestine, not some person’s Twitter profile [which had] like 50 followers.”

The online harassment included crude comments about her appearance and allegations that she was a Chinese agent, despite her not being Chinese, which Ho attributes to the “orientalism” of those targeting her online. But she said that as a pro-Palestine activist, she always knew she could become the target of groups like Canary Mission and Betar. Aside from keeping a low profile online and making sure to travel with a friend when walking on campus last semester, Ho said the effect of the doxing on her daily life has been minimal.

“Repression is a sign that something you’re doing is working,” she said.

What did unsettle Ho was an April 25 Instagram post from Betar that included a photo of her tabling for UMass SJP at an on-campus farmers market. 

“I didn’t know who took that photo, so that kind of actually, like, freaked me out a little bit,” she said. 

That’s a sentiment other organizers shared. They say fellow students or others are covertly photographing and recording them at protests. They fear that they’ll be the next face on Canary Mission’s directory or Betar’s social media accounts.

Ho said she hasn’t taken “strong initiative in getting UMass to protect [her], because [she’s] not really expecting anything,” but that she wishes the university would “take a more principled stance” against doxing groups.

Another student who Canary Mission doxed in the 2023-2024 academic year didn’t share Ho’s attitude, though.

“Once you’re doxed, you’re doxed,” said the student, who also requested anonymity for fear of further harassment. “I will never be able to escape that. I’ll never be able to apply for a job and not have to say that I’m not a terrorist supporter or sympathizer or all of these other ridiculous scapegoat ideas that people use to just silence Palestinian activism.”

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It’s a development that will hit colleges and universities with “the impact of an earthquake.”

After the Trump administration issued a whirlwind of executive orders slashing funding for scientific research and inquiry, the National Institute of Health is facing major cuts and increasing uncertainty. In the face of these cuts, a state like Massachusetts stands to lose significant economic activity and suffer setbacks to its ability to make contributions to everything from biomedical research to public health.

Many of these impacts will land close to home. Among Massachusetts’ top employers are academic research institutions that rely heavily on NIH grants. The University of Massachusetts Amherst, a top-tier “R1” research institution, has a research portfolio of approximately $260 million per academic year: around $180 million of this is federally sourced and $44.8 million comes from the NIH, according to a recent lawsuit filed against the NIH by 22 state attorneys general. According to the NIH RePORTER (Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools), Baystate Health, based in Springfield, receives $7.7 million in NIH funding as well. Some of their projects explore important regional issues such as combating opioid abuse.

According to a recent report from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, western Massachusetts stands to lose $48 million in economic activity should the proposal of a strict 15% cap on facilities and administrative costs take effect. The Trump administration has worked to cut those “indirect costs,” as they’re known, for both NIH and National Science Foundation grants.

“You can think about the impact the same way that you think about the impact of an earthquake,” said Edwin Boudreaux, a clinical psychologist and researcher at UMass Chan Medical School. “There’s going to be a lot of damage really close to the epicenter of that earthquake, and then as you move out from that earthquake, there’s less and less immediate and clear damage. But, depending upon the size of the earthquake, it could be that as you look further out from the epicenter, you still start to see major, major damage; aftershocks.”

Every dollar that enters the economy lives a lifetime: it is used by a carpenter to buy groceries from a farmer, it is used by the farmer to pay the mechanic for tractor repairs, the mechanic pays their rent, and so on. In western Massachusetts, universities and large medical research institutions play a vital economic role.

The 11 private colleges and universities operating in the region contribute over $3 billion to the economy annually and also support almost 20,000 jobs. Faculty, staff, and administrators are paid by their institutions and pour their money back into the local economy, keeping this cycle alive in the region.

Entering his second term, President Donald Trump has pursued what he has described as “America first” policies that purport to strengthen the U.S. economy by increasing economic activity within the country and eliminating what his administration has characterized as wasteful spending. The NIH is the single largest funder of public health research in the United States, making it a top target for Trump’s budget cuts.

However, NIH funding does not disappear into the void; it actively drives economic activity. Every dollar put into the NIH generates $2.56 in economic returns, according to a report from the organization United for Medical Research — a coalition of research institutions, health advocates groups, and private businesses. So as the NIH budget is cut, it is also cutting off the economic life cycle of this money. These losses are in addition to the personal impacts on scientists, researchers, administrators, and the patients they serve.

The role of the NIH in supporting the western Massachusetts economy 

In 2024, the NIH awarded approximately $3.46 billion to fund public health research in Massachusetts, according to agency records. These grants supported almost $8 billion in statewide economic activity as well as 30,000 jobs. Most of that money was granted to research institutions in Boston and surrounding Suffolk County, while $277 million was granted to researchers in western Massachusetts.

Despite the gap in actual funding between this region and the greater Boston area, the rate of NIH funding per dollar of GDP in Hampshire County is the second highest in the state, trailing Suffolk County, according to a Shoestring analysis.

The presence of NIH funded research in an otherwise rural region comes courtesy of researchers putting months or years of planning labor into grants that have always been far from guaranteed.

“Even before, it already felt risky, like it doesn’t always work out…so now the uncertainty is just overwhelming,” said one researcher at a large medical teaching institute in Boston who preferred to remain anonymous over fear of losing funding for her lab.

In her experience, obtaining funding within the first few years after graduate school is critical for establishing a successful academic career.

“Two out of the three grants that were delayed in my lab were led by early career professionals, people just starting out in academia,” she said. For such professionals, the delay of grant reviews is not just an inconvenience, it is career-threatening.

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The Shoestring relies on reader support to make independent news for western Massachusetts possible. You can support this kind of labor-intensive reporting by visiting our donate page.

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Reductions to the NIH budget do not just impact researchers. NIH grants include both direct and indirect costs. Direct costs fund the researcher’s salary and immediate needs for the project itself. Indirect costs are awarded to the institution to support needs outside of the project.

“Without indirect costs, you wouldn’t have a building, wouldn’t have heat, you wouldn’t have any of the tools, the equipment that you would need to be able to run laboratory assessments,” said Boudreaux, the UMass Chan Medical School researcher. “The [institutional review board], my grants managers, administrators, people who are servicing the facility, their jobs could be threatened because a lot of their positions are covered by the indirect costs.”

On Feb. 7, the NIH announced a strict cap on indirect costs, limiting them to just 15%. Each institution negotiates their indirect cost rate with the NIH or other grantor representatives. UMass Amherst has a 61% indirect funding rate — of their total research portfolio funded by the NIH, $13.1 million are for indirect costs.

A recent lawsuit filed by Massachusetts and 21 other states outlines potential consequences of this cap. At UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester, the capped indirect funding rate will terminate $40 to $50 million in funding.

“It’s hard to imagine just how catastrophic a loss like this would be,” the anonymous researcher said.

Earlier this month, a federal judge in Massachusetts barred the Trump administration from instituting that 15% cap. However, the administration had actually requested that ruling so that it could move forward with an appeal, according to reporting from The New York Times.

Jim Kurose, a professor of computer science at UMass Amherst and former assistant director at the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC., said that while alternative funding sources may be available, they come with strings attached. Industry, for instance, often provides funding for innovative research.

However, “they have to deliver shareholder value to their shareholders,” he said. This typically results in studies being limited to just a few years, straining researchers’ abilities to carry on long-term research — for example, in medical research, comprehensive longitudinal studies ensuring the safety and efficacy of interventions over time. It also makes it more difficult to fund research not targeted at a company’s products or services.

Not just the money: impacts on public health 

Experts are concerned that funding cuts to the NIH will impact local and national health care in addition to the economy. Without the federal government, many behavioral health studies and training for future clinicians would not be funded, they say.

“Drug companies are not interested in funding these types of training and studies,” the anonymous researcher said.

There is also a substantial threat posed to current patients. The NIH funds many clinical trials, which offer innovative medications and interventions for physical and behavioral health conditions. In recent weeks, many NIH and other federally funded public health grants have been abruptly terminated, including some clinical trials which had active enrolled participants.

For instance, the NIH recently terminated a nationwide 24-year research initiative to prevent HIV/AIDS in adolescents and young adults. The Trump administration abruptly withdrew $18 million from The Adolescent Medicine Trials Network, a research organization that manages studies across many U.S. states, including Massachusetts. The cancelled study offered innovative therapies to support patients with HIV/AIDS, a representative from the network said in a private message, leaving the participants in Massachusetts unable to continue their treatment.

“The question is, ‘What’s going to happen to the patients? Are they going to continue to receive the intervention? Are they going to continue to be followed up on?’” Boudreaux said. The protocol for managing these issues is unclear, he said, as it is atypical for active NIH grants to be terminated mid-intervention.

The experts who spoke to The Shoestring said that the public does not understand the full scope of NIH research and its impact on public health. A substantial number of the terminated grants studied vaccine efficacy, medication adherence for people with HIV/AIDS, health disparities among racial and ethnic minorities, and reproductive healthcare for women. The anonymous researcher pointed out that these studies were not “terminated for any scientific reason,” but for ideological reasons that are consistent with other social policies the Trump Administration has taken.

Reviewing this dynamic list of recently terminated grants, gathering data from the Department of Health and Human Services, NIH, and self-reports, some common themes are apparent: research looking at vaccine efficacy, COVID-19, HIV/AIDS, and LGBTQ+ health issues.

In recent remarks at UMass Chan, Gov. Maura Healey said the funding cuts “are very extensive, including supporting critical work in gene therapy, rare disease research, HIV research, digital medicine, neuroscience and more.”

“UMass Chan has held groundbreaking clinical trials of new genetic therapies for devastating conditions like ALS and so many other diseases,” Healey said. “But this kind of progress is now at risk, and with that, hope is being stripped away from patients and families.”

Locating the aftershocks in western Massachusetts and beyond

A post on the NIH’s X account claims the proposed indirect cost cap would save the federal government about $4 billion annually. Impacts on institutions vary by their size as well as their ratio of endowment funding, private funding, and public grants.

Proponents of the indirect cost cap believe this restructuring has the possibility of creating more efficient processes within the NIH. A directive from the NIH director’s office described the cuts as “vital to ensure that as many funds as possible go towards direct scientific research costs rather than administrative overhead.”

Institutions receiving larger proportions of federal funding may have to reprioritize their budgets by “hiring fewer faculty or cutting some services,” labor economist Michael Robinson told The Shoestring.

Many scientific researchers and institutional personnel who receive NIH grants, however, firmly believe the proposed policy will primarily serve to eliminate crucial medical research.

On a panel for Progressive Massachusetts, organizer Melissa Vargas likened support for scientific research to “clean drinking water — very popular and has tons of public support.” According to the Pew Research Center, 79% of adults agree that science has made life easier.

Resistance movements led by groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists are one example of growing public discontent over Trump’s slashing of science-based initiatives. Locally, some protesters at a “Hands Off” rally in Northampton earlier this month held signs defending funding for scientific inquiry.

“Research brings hope to the human condition,” said Chancellor Michael Collins of UMass Chan in a press release following a visit from Gov. Maura Healey to highlight the cuts. “It is shocking to an academic community like ours that research would be attacked, particularly by folks who believe that America should be the best.”

This article was written by Smith College students in a data journalism course taught by Naila Moreira and Ben Baumer, in collaboration with The Shoestring’s editors. 

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Amy Cronin DiCaprio’s son, now 14, was born with congenital heart and lung defects. He underwent major surgeries in infancy, including one to remove a lobe of his lung, and open heart surgery just two weeks later. She said he suffers from significant behavioral health challenges as well and is on several prescription medications.

For health insurance, Cronin DiCaprio, a mother of two, relies on MassHealth — Massachusetts’ program that administers both Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. For her and her family, those programs are the only way they can receive health care.

“If we lost MassHealth, we just wouldn’t be able to do that anymore,” she recently told The Shoestring, warily twisting a ring on her finger. “We would just… there’s no way we could afford it.”

Those are very real fears for Cronin DiCaprio and millions of others across the country.

President Donald Trump and Republicans are currently preparing a budget that seems certain to contain significant cuts to Medicaid and CHIP, which some 2 million Massachusetts residents rely on through MassHealth. Nationwide, another 72 million Americans receive coverage through Medicaid.

These programs provide critical health services for individuals and families like Cronin DiCaprio’s. Currently unemployed after working in the non-profit public health sector, she said her home is in preforeclosure and the prospects of her family losing health coverage at this time is “terrifying.”

“Masshealth has been amazing in terms of being able to see specialists,” Cronin DiCaprio said. Her eldest son relies on continuous follow-up care including annual heart screenings, visits with pediatric pulmonology specialists, behavioral health specialists, and prescription medications.

Now, state and national lawmakers, human rights groups, and ordinary people are raising serious concerns about the future of these programs under the current presidential administration.

“The threats are real, and I don’t want to minimize the threats and the amount of money on the table,” Massachusetts State Sen. Jo Comerford, D-Northampton, told The Shoestring in a phone interview. “It is a hole that is unfillable by the state when we look at all of the other major holes that have emerged from reckless and dangerous Trump administration actions.

Comerford said she “can’t minimize the devastation” of Trump and Republicans’ massive cuts to federal programs.

“We’re seeing rollbacks across every agency we care about,” she said.

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During the first week of his presidential term, Trump caused far-reaching confusion, outrage, and fear with a slew of executive orders and an Office of Management and Budget memo that froze federal funds. The wording of the memo said that agencies whose work was in any way contradictory to the new ideology, outlined in the president’s executive orders, would need to find and assess those contradictions so the presidential administration could then decide the best uses for the funding “consistent with the law and the President’s priorities.”

Following the OMB memo, states reported being “cut off” from access to Medicaid systems. States regained access shortly afterward and the federal government has claimed that was caused by a technical “outage.”

Just a few days later, Trump’s billionaire buddy and the country’s biggest campaign donor to Trump and Republicans, Elon Musk, and his band of teenage and early 20’s tech bros who constitute the so-called Department of Government Efficiency were given access to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services. They reportedly accessed key payment and contracting systems. This further compounded public and legislative fears that Medicaid and Medicare programs would be targeted for significant cuts.

The OMB memo has since been rescinded, but challenges in accessing federal funding have continued for many of its recipients.

In the weeks following, Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives voted to advance a budget proposal that directs the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has authority over Medicaid, to find $880 billion in cuts.

Some Republican lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have since claimed these proposed federal funding cuts will not affect Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security because the budget plan passed on Feb. 25 does not specifically contain the words “Medicare,” “Medicaid,” or “Social Security.”

Many experts have said this is misdirection, noting that it would be a near financial impossibility to make the proposed cuts without taking from at least one of those programs.

“Both Speaker Johnson, other House Republican leaders and President Trump have said that they do not want to cut Medicare,” Georgetown University health policy expert Edwin Park recently told NPR. “So if you take Medicare off the table, Medicaid constitutes 93% of all mandatory spending that remains under the jurisdiction of the Energy and Commerce Committee.”

This conclusion from Park is also supported by a Congressional Budget Office report from March 5.

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When asked for an interview about the House budget in early March, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey told The Shoestring in a statement that the “budget resolution threatens the health care of 2 million Massachusetts residents.”

“It would nearly double health care costs for hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts residents who rely on the Affordable Care Act and increase grocery bills for more than a million children and their families by gutting food assistance,” the statement said. “The Senate needs to reject this shameful attack on the health and wellbeing of children and families in Massachusetts and across our country.”

Healey’s response outlined the categories of people receiving coverage under Medicaid programs who were vulnerable to losing health services and coverage, which included people with disabilities, pregnant people, and newborns. Healey said one in four Massachusetts residents received some form of Medicaid coverage.

While the proposal has been met with nationwide disapproval from constituents across political parties, lawmakers passed another Republican-led stop-gap spending bill on March 14 — together with support from Democrats led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — that will fund the government through September.

Johnson and other lawmakers have defended the cuts, saying that the money will come from the elimination of “waste and fraud,” without citing any specific evidence. Musk, meanwhile, has seemingly referred to people receiving services through federal programs as “the parasite class.” Last month, he reposted a meme on social media that referred to “watching Trump slash federal programs knowing it doesn’t affect you because you’re not a member of the Parasite Class.”

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With strict eligibility guidelines, it is hard to imagine where $880 billion worth of fraud might be in the Medicaid system.

Cronin DiCaprio and her family briefly lost coverage this past July due to missing a letter from MassHealth requiring her to update her household information and income — one of a list of annual requirements for maintaining coverage under the program.

During this gap in health coverage, Cronin DiCaprio said she ran out of prescription medications for herself and her older son, medications that cannot be stopped immediately and must be slowly tapered off. This gap came at a time during which the Fourth of July holiday closed and delayed many state and local offices.

“I was in the drive-thru pharmacy line at CVS in tears,” she said. An “incredibly kind” and “resourceful” pharmacist researched brand options and located every coupon and savings option that he could, but in the end she said she still ended up paying more than $2,000 for about two weeks of medication.

“I’m literally sitting in our house like a hysterical chemist, you know, trying to figure out how to taper him down on the antipsychotic meds that we had left so that he wouldn’t run out completely,” she said.

“It just feels like such an immovable obstacle, the cost associated with all elements of healthcare are really shocking,” she added.

Cronin DiCaprio also acknowledged a certain amount of privilege and agency due to her education — she has two master’s degrees — and her work-from-home job that allowed her to access and navigate the complex and time-consuming Medicaid system and ultimately regain health coverage for her family. Her job allowed her the flexibility to leave her phone on hold with the MassHealth system waiting to reach the relevant department staff for hours at a time on her desk while she did her regular work.

These hours-long wait times exist at current staffing and funding levels for the Medicaid program.

In addition to long wait times and complex paperwork, there are other barriers to coverage in the Medicaid system. The writer of this article, for example, receives Medicaid coverage based on disability status. This type of coverage, called CommonHealth, is re-evaluated annually, in some cases every two years. In addition to financial and residency verification requirements, Medicaid recipients of this designation must complete “disability supplement” paperwork rehashing their entire health history and seeing a state-selected provider for “evaluation.” For this writer, that is decades of health history spanning dozens of providers.

That system of “means testing” — and threats of getting kicked off disability insurance — simply doesn’t exist in the many countries worldwide that provide universal health care.

This eligibility process is not easy to navigate while living with, or caring for someone with, significant health issues. Challenges aside, if this Medicaid coverage disappeared, there is not currently an affordable health care alternative available for this writer.

While lawmakers continue to clash on spending packages, individuals and families across Massachusetts and the nation are waiting with worry and fear for their loved ones and community members.

”Even if we had to pay anything towards it, you know, we would just skip it, which is horrible to say, but that’s the position that we’re in,” Cronin DiCaprio said. “We would need to prioritize his prescriptions, you know, and he’s relatively stable in terms of his cardiac health, we would just, I don’t know, we would need to prioritize.”

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It isn’t just patients who will suffer from cuts to Medicaid funding. Health clinics in rural Minnesota have reportedly already seen a bit of the impacts that would result from the funding cuts. During the federal funding freeze earlier this year triggered by the OMB memo, some clinics reported difficulty making payroll with some having to furlough staff.

These clinics, called community health centers, typically receive a significant portion of their operating costs from federal funding through Medicaid payments and federal grants. There are 15 community health centers here in the Connecticut River Valley, according to the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers website, and many more across the state.

Federally qualified health centers, like CHC’s, play a critical role in providing health services, accepting patients regardless of their health insurance status, and providing services ranging from dental care to pediatric care and senior care. These centers also offer other social services like connections to food banks and housing services, which are also funded through federal grant support and contribute to community health and wellbeing. Funding cutbacks put all of these things at risk.

The loss of these centers will further burden the for-profit medical system as well. A 2020 study focused on Massachusetts concluded that federally qualified health centers, like CHC’s, increased access to health care in underserved areas and reduced spending on visits to emergency departments for non-emergency health needs.

Individual health providers will not be immune to these cuts either.

Cronin DiCaprio’s son has been seen by the same cardiologist since his open heart surgery in his first year of life. The family has been able to follow this doctor through his transition to private practice because of the MassHealth coverage at its current funding levels. Many providers will be forced to choose between keeping patients and being financially viable if cuts are made to the program.

When asked specifically what these funding cuts might look like locally, Sen. Comerford said she couldn’t speculate.

“We can certainly understand individual circumstances, but I don’t know what the systemic circumstances would be because you’d have to understand the scope from the federal government and then the state’s response,” Comerford said. Things are changing rapidly and people, families, workers, and businesses will be hurt by these actions, she added.

State Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa, D-Northampton, similarly did not have a specific answer for what the local impacts of the cuts might look like.

“It’s not looking good,” she told The Shoestring in a March 14 interview.

Sabadosa said a lot will depend on the magnitude of the cuts.

“In broad strokes, we’re talking about people losing their health insurance if the cuts are as they have indicated they may be,” she said. “Western Massachusetts has a large number of residents who are on Medicaid.”

Sabadosa was certain that Massachusetts hospitals and community health centers would feel the impacts of these cuts with many of their patients’ payments coming from Medicaid coverage.

“We won’t be able to make up for all of these losses and so we’ll have to figure out a way to try to mitigate the situation to the greatest extent possible, and it’s going to be extremely challenging,” she said.

The cuts proposed in the House budget “would likely translate to billions of dollars of revenue cuts from MassHealth per year,” a statement by Healey’s office said.

In addition to potential loss of individual health care and overall state budget impacts, Healey’s statement said “ripple effects” will include losses of jobs at hospitals and other health care positions, negative impacts on caregivers relying on long-term care services for loved ones receiving Medicaid coverage, and mounting pressure on an “already fragile health care system” potentially impacting health care access for all residents across the state.

Public outrage at lawmakers’ town halls nationwide has been so widespread it prompted Johnson, the Republican House speaker, to advise GOP lawmakers not to attend their own town halls.

When asked what was being done by elected officials in Massachusetts to evaluate and mitigate these cuts, Sabadosa said Massachusetts was “leading” in bringing lawsuits against the federal government and Trump administration in court. She also said public pressure does seem to be having some impact, and possibly stalled or reversed some actions taken by the Trump administration so far. She said people should continue to contact their federal representatives and show up to their town halls.

“Unfortunately, our federal government is not a reliable partner at the moment,” she said. “In fact, I would argue that they are abandoning the states. And because that is happening, we need more people to step up locally, however that may be, to support each other.”

Comerford had a similar response to those questions, saying Massachusetts was quickly challenging federal actions in the courts, and encouraged constituents to continue to contact her office.

“We’re fighting like hell every day to protect our people,” she said. “That is my job. 
I’m gonna keep resisting and fighting and backing,” Comerford said. “We believe the state can, and should, be a line of defense and we will keep pushing.”