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WEST SPRINGFIELD — West Springfield Police are part of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement task force, according to documents obtained by The Shoestring. 

In November 2024, Jay Gearing, West Springfield’s police chief, signed a memorandum of understanding between his department and Homeland Security Investigations, which together with Enforcement and Removal Operations is one of ICE’s two divisions. The agreement is preceded by one signed by former police chief G. Paul Connor dated June 2024. 

In a phone interview, Gearing said West Springfield police have not been engaged in any immigration enforcement. He said that if they had been, it wouldn’t have gone unnoticed, citing the fact that students in the city’s school district speak over 50 different languages. 

West Springfield is a diverse city. In 2020, for example, only three communities in the United States had more refugee resettlements per capita, according to a report from APM Research Lab and America Amplified. From 2022 to 2024, the number of English Language learners enrolled in West Springfield schools doubled. 

In September of this year, West Springfield Public Schools Executive Director for Communication Kerry Martins told The Reminder that she did not believe a recent uptick in absenteeism was attributable to fears of deportation among the city’s notable immigrant population. 

Homeland Security Investigations is the directorate within ICE responsible for investigating transnational crime and trade violations. It is distinct from Enforcement Removal Operations, which is the arm of ICE that handles all “identification, arrest, detention and removal of aliens who are subject to removal or are unlawfully present in the U.S.” 

While the memorandum of understanding that West Springfield signed does not allow local police officers administrative immigration enforcement powers, it does require Westside cops designated as customs officers to “follow HSI directives and instructions when utilizing enforcement authority conveyed by HSI.”

Under the Trump administration, these directives do not exclude immigration enforcement. Homeland Security Investigations officers are mandated to make “collateral arrests” of immigrants who aren’t the target of a deportation operation, despite federal judges ruling the practice is illegal. The result: about a third of the more than 65,000 people detained by ICE are being held on civil immigration violations, according to CBS News. Prior to Trump taking office, only 858 people were detained on civil violations, CBS found. 

A 2019 report by several organizations including the National Immigration Law Center concluded that under Trump’s first administration, HSI agents were “increasingly complicit in round-ups fueled by racial profiling, sham investigations that purport to involve child welfare but are intended to create fear among children’s loved ones and sponsors, and increased aggressive workplace raids that leave communities traumatized.” Last month, The New York Times published several investigations that found HSI agents had been pulled away from their typical duties, including investigating human smuggling and sex trafficking, to be redeployed to Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Title 19 of U.S. Code 1401 gives ICE authority to cross-designate other federal, state, and local law enforcement officers to investigate and enforce customs laws. It serves a different purpose than controversial 287(g) agreements, which allows ICE to deputize law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration laws. The only Massachusetts law enforcement agency with an active 287(g) agreement with ICE is the state Department of Corrections.

Gearing told The Shoestring that West Springfield’s agreement was still active, but it had been entered into as a “one off” so that Westside could get access to Homeland Security Investigations resources he said they needed in order to deal with alleged drug trafficking at a hotel on Riverdale Street. He said no collaboration had occurred between West Springfield and the Department of Homeland Security since late last year. 

Gearing said he could not recall the name of the hotel, or even if an arrest had been made. The Shoestring could not identify any news media, press releases, arrest logs, or federal court cases in U.S. District in Springfield between August and December of 2024 matching a description of the operation Gearing described. 

The memorandum of understanding was approved by Gearing, as well as Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent in Charge Michael Krol. Krol is an executive board member of the New England High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a collaboration between federal, state, and local law enforcement created by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. West Springfield PD is a participating agency. 

In addition to the HSI agreement, West Springfield has signed agreements with the United States Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency. A 2024 Department of Justice press release credits West Springfield as a participating agency in the joint investigation that led to the arrest of Pittsfield High School’s dean for alleged cocaine trafficking. 

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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.

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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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Editor’s note: This is the first article in a two-part series on the state’s takeover of Holyoke Public Schools. Part one focuses on educators’ fight for full local control of education in the Paper City.

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In early June, about 15 minutes before public comments are scheduled to begin in front of the Holyoke School Committee, members of the Holyoke Teachers Association are meeting in an underpass outside the school. The sky is threatening rain with its silver clouds, but the union doesn’t seem to mind. 

One union member, history teacher Bob Williams, explains that the union is there because of a statement the district’s lawyer, Dave Connelly, made during their last session at the bargaining table. According to several union members, the lawyer said that the district is “satisfied with the status quo.”

Union members, Williams says, are anything but satisfied.

Educators carry poster boards filled with handwritten postcards from teachers and students asking the School Committee members to “give teachers what they deserve.” The handwriting varies from messy and large to neat and small, written in pens and crayons and markers. 

“Educate, Organize, Win!” appears on the backs of several shirts, in English and Spanish, while other members don the royal purple of the Holyoke Public Schools. They cram into the space outside where the School Committee is set to meet. The air in the crowd begins as thick and anxious and thins out as teachers realize there’s a wait before the elected officials will see them. Conversation stirs and laughter erupts. 

When they’re finally allowed to enter, the mood immediately shifts. In public comment after public comment, the union members ask the School Committee for greater collaboration in their contract negotiations. One educator, Brandi Bellacicco, simply repeats back a phrase that School Committee member Yadilette Rivera-Colón used, in reference to a student’s project, suggesting that the officials should follow their own advice:

“In order for us to make change, we have to have radical ideas and innovative ideas.” 

The union members are organized and active because 10 years ago, the state took over their district. Putting Holyoke’s schools into a status called “receivership,” state education officials stripped away residents’ and workers’ democratic control of their own schools, including the union’s full rights to collective bargaining. So, for the last decade, a state-appointed receiver has held the powers normally given to a democratically elected school board and the superintendent it selects.

It’s something that has only ever happened to three districts statewide, all of which have teachers and student populations that are predominantly Hispanic. Holyoke has one of the largest Puerto Rican populations, per capita, in the entire United States outside of the island itself. The other two cities that have been under state receivership, Lawrence and Southbridge, also have student bodies that overwhelmingly identify as Hispanic or Latino, according to state data — 94.6% and 65.9%, respectively. All three schools have a student population that is about 80% low-income and nearly 90% have high needs. 

Back when state education officials were considering receivership for Holyoke, they were concerned about some troubling trends in the city’s schools. The district had the lowest four-year graduation rate in the state and an exceedingly high dropout rate, too. Test scores, which were already low, had been in a downward spiral. And the district’s out-of-school suspension rate in the school year before the state took control was five times the state average. For Black and Hispanic students, those rates were even higher.

During a decade of receivership, current receiver Anthony Soto said the district has made progress addressing its student retention rate, increasing its graduation rate, cutting the out-of-school suspension rate in half, and bringing in more teachers of color. 

“I appreciate the progress that Holyoke Public Schools has made to provide students with a high-quality education, including in graduation rates and the use of high-quality instructional materials and evidence-based early literacy practices,” Patrick Tutwiler, the state’s former education secretary, said in a statement last year.

But critics — in particular the state’s educators’ union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association — say that receivership is a tool to bust unions. They also contend that it doesn’t adequately address any of the reasons the state got involved in the first place. The union points to data showing that test scores haven’t improved and that teacher turnover rates increased immediately after receivership began.

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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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Last year, the state announced that it was giving back local control to Holyoke. However, union members say that isn’t entirely true. 

After months of those promises, the HTA — which is composed of the district’s 400-some teachers and others like librarians, speech therapists, and psychologists — was surprised to learn that under the city’s agreement with the state to exit receivership, the superintendent still holds unilateral power over parts of their contract. That includes compensation, the ability to decide the criteria for making staff cuts, and the method of teacher evaluation. That’s different from other districts, where educators and officials negotiate over those sorts of conditions at the bargaining table.

But the city’s educators aren’t sitting idly. A decade ago, they organized opposition to the takeover, but it wasn’t enough to prevent receivership. Now, a new generation of union organizers has taken the torch. A slate of rank-and-file organizers won election to leadership positions last year on a campaign of fighting for a just first contract upon exiting receivership. 

And now, educators are showing up to protest.  

***

Gus Morales fought “tooth and nail” against receivership, and he doesn’t regret it. Even if it cost him his job. 

A longtime educator and Holyoke resident, Morales now drives to eastern Massachusetts to teach English at a middle school. But in 2015, he was at the eye of the storm in Holyoke. 

Morales was elected as the HTA president while the state was considering taking over the district more than a decade ago. Before running for office, he considered himself a quiet and private person, someone who minded his own business. But as he started to hear about how unhappy his coworkers were, Morales decided that their struggle was his, too. 

“I would feel complicit if I just sat there and let things happen, so I started to get more involved, and the more involved I got, the more things I saw,” he said.

What he saw was that the district was being run “like a company,” with students who were struggling in the classroom being treated the same as an employee underperforming at their job. That didn’t sit right with him, so he successfully ran for union president on a campaign focused on taking teaching back from administrators “who had no business in teaching.” 

He said students came into the classroom from a variety of difficult circumstances — homelessness, abusive homes, or caregivers struggling with addiction, for example. The education system is not built to handle those circumstances, he said. 

Instead, Morales said data was “weaponized” against his students for punitive purposes.

He described what he called the “gold star system” in his classroom, where students would be publicly ranked by their scores on standardized tests — something he believed was humiliating, damaging to their self-esteem, and counter-productive to the goal of improving students’ learning experience. Critics of state standardized testing also feel that it is rooted in and reinforces systematic racism. Some academic research shows racial and economic disparities that impact the test scores of students.

The manner in which the district approached attempting to improve student outcomes “attacked” and placed blame on Black and brown students, he said, as well as teachers. 

Morales and others said that the state’s data didn’t tell the full story and still doesn’t. In particular, he pushed back against the use of standardized testing to measure student success. 

“The hyperfocus on testing has ruined teaching,” he said. He’s seen students even throw up from anxiety before taking standardized tests. “We’re causing harm.”

The period of time shortly before receivership was officially implemented was a nerve-wracking and scary time for Holyoke teachers, according to Morales. As the state made it increasingly obvious that it intended to take over the district, he and his fellow union members began to organize. 

And the initial opposition was fierce.

Elected officials across the city, and across the political spectrum, urged the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to vote against receivership. There was also grassroots opposition and organizing. Morales had on his side Barbara Madeloni, who had just stunned the state’s political class when she won election as the president of the MTA after running on a campaign to empower rank-and-file members to more aggressively advocate for themselves. 

Students across the district held a walkout to oppose the takeover. The HTA and community members held a rally before the state education board’s vote on receivership. Morales said that the room was packed.

But it wasn’t enough. On April 15, 2015, the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted to put Holyoke Public Schools into receivership. Morales said he felt like state officials had already made up their mind and organizers couldn’t have done more to convince them otherwise.

“We just weren’t ready,” Madeloni, who is now an organizer with Labor Notes, told The Shoestring. “We organized a good fight.”

(Disclosure: Madeloni sits on The Shoestring’s advisory board, which does not have any editorial role in our independent newsroom.)

The consequences were immediate. Madeloni said that receivership drives out teachers as well as families who opt into charter schools. To her, receivership is about “narrowing the possibilities for what education can mean for Black and brown students” and “driving towards privatization.”

The consequences went beyond the walls of the city’s schools, too.

Madeloni said schools and their school committees are one of the most local ways that someone can get engaged in their community. They can be someone’s first interaction with participating in local democratic structures. But under receivership, in which school committees have little power, that isn’t the case.

“Receivers say you, as a community, cannot run your own school,” she said. “We, as the state, will run that. So they’re profoundly anti-democratic, and it’s not an accident that that profound anti-democratic impulse is enacted in Black and brown and poor communities.” 

Meanwhile, Morales said his bosses started coming after him for ruffling the feathers of those who wanted the union to “shut up.”

“They tried everything they could to get rid of me,” he said. “When you speak truth to power, it makes people uncomfortable.”

At the time, Morales was an at-will, probationary employee in the first three years of his teaching contract, and the district was under no legal obligation to provide a reason for the termination of his contract. Just after Morales had been elected as the union’s president, and as he approached the end of his third year of teaching, district administrators told him they weren’t renewing his contract. 

The Holyoke Teachers Association sued the city on Morales’ behalf for alleged retaliation for his work in the union. Eventually, in 2016, MassLive reported that Morales and administrators agreed to a $40,000 settlement that saw him leave the district. 

It was a lonely and isolating experience, but Morales said it was what he signed up for. 

“This is my home. Holyoke will always be my home,” he said. “I will never speak negatively about this city because it’s the city that absorbed me when I moved here from Puerto Rico … To champion a cause and to champion for a change does not mean you’re being negative towards the city. It just means you want to see the city in its best place possible.” 

***

Early in 2024, there began to be rumblings that the state would release its control over Holyoke’s schools. And it was then that a new group of organizers ran for leadership positions in the HTA. 

One of those new leaders was Nick Cream, who is in his fifth year of teaching ethnic studies and history at Holyoke High School’s Dean Tech Campus. He said that fighting for a better world begins in the classroom.

“If we can think about classrooms as laboratories for liberation, then we can do that on a grander scale,” he said. 

Cream says the union’s new leadership is working to move the HTA in an “active, engaged, and inclusive” direction. 

Maria Perez is a long-time union member and pre-kindergarten teacher at Marcella R. Kelly Elementary School. She was a paraprofessional in the district before she became a teacher six years ago and joined HTA. Amid the change in union leadership, Perez said she feels more involved in union activity than before. She said this is the first time that she’s been knowledgeable about her contract and that the union’s leadership has activated rank-and-file members more than ever before. 

“This is the first time I find out that we’re negotiating, as a teacher,” Perez said. “I think this is the most transparency we’ve had from the union in many years.”

To Cream, that commitment to transparency means more than holding monthly meetings. It means taking action like expanding the bargaining team and hosting more events, which Cream feels is critical in the current political conditions. 

And quickly after the HTA’s election, political conditions changed in Holyoke.

In October, Gov. Maura Healey and her administration announced that the state was making a “provisional decision to remove Holyoke Public Schools from receivership.” 

But as union members would soon learn, that didn’t come without conditions.

The state, with the backing of the city’s School Committee, would implement what officials call “exit assurances.” Throughout the summer, the School Committee had worked with then-acting education commissioner Russell Johnston to create an exit plan to transition the district out of receivership.

Among those exit conditions were several provisions that gave the state-appointed receiver Anthony Soto, who is becoming the district’s superintendent, powers over union contracts not seen in other districts that aren’t under receivership. The state’s education department will still measure the district’s progress using data from benchmark testing, classroom observations, and more — something all School Committee members voted in favor of. 

Union members who spoke with The Shoestring said they are disappointed in the exit assurances and view them as a lighter form of receivership.

In an email to The Shoestring, Soto — himself a Holyoke Public Schools graduate — sent over a list of accomplishments he said the district has achieved during its time in receivership. Among them is building a “bilingual, biliterate, and bicultural” student community, a new program aimed at addressing retention rates in the district, increased graduation rates, and a significant increase of teachers of color.

Soto said the district and state believe that Holyoke teachers deserve a fair and equitable contract “regardless of governance structure,” and that there is a continuous spirit of collaboration. He said he “gathered input” from the union and elected officials before crafting the exit plan — a process that union leaders have stressed is different from negotiations among equal parties.

“Negotiations with the Holyoke Teachers Association are ongoing,” he said. “While a component of the exit assurances focus on four key areas of collective bargaining, they do not limit the union’s ability to bring forward full proposals. The School Committee and I remain committed to reviewing all proposals in good faith, with students’ best interests at the center of every decision.”

But union members say there’s no real “negotiations” on topics that the superintendent only has to consult them about, per the exit plan. Cream shared a bargaining document that he said shows minimal effort from management: 16 proposals from the union since February, but only one counter-proposal from the district. 

Mayor Joshua Garcia, the city’s first Latino mayor and a graduate of the city’s schools, won election in 2021 on a platform that included getting the district out of receivership. It’s an issue that talked about with Healey, too, when she was running for governor in 2022. Last year, expressed frustration with the state for not having a concrete plan about giving back local control to Holyoke, according to MassLive. 

Garcia, who as mayor chairs the School Committee, pushed back against the idea that the union doesn’t have bargaining power.

“Negotiations with the Holyoke Teachers Association are happening right now and are ongoing,” Garcia said in a statement to The Shoestring. “The idea of unions not being able to bargain or have never been able to bargain is just simply not true.”

Garcia said that he feels the MTA has found it convenient to use Holyoke “to help support their greater cause.” Though parts of the exit assurances focus on collective bargaining, he said that it does not impede the union’s ability to make more proposals. He also said that under receivership, the district “negotiated three contracts with teachers through collective bargaining or impact bargaining.”

Cream said that negotiations with the district and state under receivership “were not truly negotiations.” Under state control, the receiver had the ability to unilaterally open collective bargaining agreements to alter working conditions. Collective bargaining, by contrast, requires both management and the union to negotiate and come to an agreement that both parties then sign.

“I was on the bargaining team in 2022 and can say with absolute certainty that there were no actual negotiations,” Cream said. He called Garcia’s statement “disingenuous.” 

Cream said if the union had made proposals regarding the exit plan, the district could have simply chosen not to bargain over those proposals. He also said he took issue with Garcia using the MTA as a “boogeyman.” He said it “underlies what he thinks about the HTA: namely that we cannot and do not think for ourselves or talk to our members about the schools they would like to see and that our students deserve.”

“These words are possibly the most harmful to us as a union,” Cream said. “To be told over and over again that we have had our voices heard and for our very reasonable demands and feedback to be almost completely ignored is demeaning, insulting, and disrespectful.”

***

At the School Committee’s June meeting, Cream is the last to go up for public comment. The first thing he does is thank his fellow union members for the work they’ve been doing. He calls attention to the current political moment, when rights are under attack on a national level — from free speech to labor.

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Cream said. “History does not happen to us, we the people make history. And we’re making it right now.”

As he ends his comment, Cream begins a union chant — seemingly a promise from Holyoke’s educators to keep mobilizing in the city’s name. 

“By Holyoke, for Holyoke.”

The rest of the members join in, and they exit the small meeting space in a trail of applause. It’s one of many acts of solidarity and collaboration that the union initiated this spring, from walk-outs and rallies to bargaining sessions open to all union members. For those like Cream, it was never simply about working conditions, but the community of Holyoke and a commitment to conserving democracy at large. 

“The reality is we owe it to these young people,” Cream told The Shoestring. “We’re making this kind of tacit agreement with their families that we’re going to not only keep them safe, but we’re gonna develop their minds, their spirits, their interpersonal skills … their ability to navigate for themselves.” 

Creams said that if he doesn’t set a good example of that in his classroom, he’s letting his students down.

“If I put up with things that I believe are unfair and exploitative and unjust, then I’m setting an example for them right to see that, and to put up with the same things,” he said.

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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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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.

***

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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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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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.”

***

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.”

***

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.”