Thank you so much for this honor, YWCA! I remember the only space that accepted me as a young mother w/ an infant during Board meetings. I'll keep speaking, particularly for gender & racial justice. We have to keep organizing & speaking out no matter the cost. www.facebook.com/share/p/1Bw8...

I cut my hair today & I feel renewed. That was after I had to deal with probation things. My ego isn’t bruised. Too bad I can’t roll over all the hours of trash cleanup I did as an elected official.😏

Replacing one white supremacist xenophobe with another isn’t a successful outcome for immigrants. The system continues unchanged, unless we change it from the ground up.

“My wish for you is that you continue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.” - Maya Angelou Never have such words resonated more deeply than right now.

Quakertown PA MAGA police chief puts a 15-year old girl in a reverse chokehold and SHE is being prosecuted for aggravated assault?! 😡

The idea that white men will save Muslim women, or ANY women, through war is such crap propaganda. The only thing women & girls experience during wars is being killed or raped.

We need to stop w/ this excuse. Imperialist and colonial racist maniacs don’t need Epstein files an excuse to implement a white supremacist agenda.

I don’t know why anyone would have an expectation in the UN holding US + Israel govts accountable. Netanyahu slaughtered Palestinians in a televised genocide with US money & help & the world cheered him on. Institutions won’t save us.

U.S. and Israel kill little Iranian girls.

Cannot stop thinking about a refugee who survived genocide to be brutalized by local police, then murdered by Border Patrol. Rest in peace sir.

Definitions of real crisis. www.masslive.com/centralmass/... Homelessness, evictions, immigrants being hunted, people living in poverty, youth w/out opportunites, politicians targeted for criticising power, politicians upholding racism, lack of accountability, silencing dissent, climate change.

“When Shah Alam did not follow police commands to drop his curtain rod, they Tasered and beat him, then arrested him, Macaluso said. The officers suffered minor injuries in the scuffle, he said.” www.investigativepost.org/2026/02/25/b...

Their playbook pages 1-4. Pg 1, call their critics anti-public safety. Pg 2. Smear, lie, threaten. Pg. 3 criminalize. Pg. 4 bully any supporters & silence any future dissenters. They think page 5 is our conclusion. Truth is, we've been writing many chapters before your miserable ego started.

I can relate. They are very scared of immigrants like us who use our experiences to call their cruelty and inhumanity out. www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/25/m...

"It's better to just stand alone than not stand at all," Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, told reporters after he was ejected from President Trump's State of the Union address. MORE: https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/al-green-removed-state-of-the-union/

Feb has always been a crappy month. Trial. Verdict. And the month I made the decision to take my dad off life support. Tomorrow will be 7 years. I thought about dad on the trial date. Sing one for me, my favorite tenor. m.youtube.com/watch?v=tlbK...

A former co-worker casually shared that she was invited to travel internationally for free by their friend who works for🧊. We worked w/ immigrants hunted by 🧊. I held my breath & then dissociated immediately. It was the: “They just do paperwork” justification that followed that got me.

There are many mixed-status families living in subsidized housing. HUD wants to separate families of mixed-immigrations status by evicting or kicking out family members. It’s not just the Feds ending rental assistance. The MassGov., also made it impossible to access shelters. Systems of cruelty.

“Human-made traumatic experiences are often more challenging to recover from. The harm comes not just from the event itself, but from the knowledge that another person deliberately chose to inflict pain or deny basic needs.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

INBOX: the police chief of Quakertown, Pa., led a group of plainclothes officers to disrupt a peaceful high school student sidewalk protest yesterday. They threw an underage girl to the ground, choked her, and disconnected all calls to the detention center where she and others are currently held.

Albania’s PM and Kosovo’s President both joined the genocidal “board of peace”. I’m glad to know many Albanians like me will continue to denounce Albanian’s leaders support of the Palestinian genocide & alignment w fascists.

It’s almost like they think their decision are neutral.

does anyone care that rightwing members of nyc city council follow twitter accounts circulating calls for people to bring dogs to times square to terrorize a ramadan prayer event does anyone care that doj civil rights assistant ag follows accounts telling people to spray bacon grease on worshippers

An anonymous government aided by police also has no place in our society.

People have been disappeared from MA jails for years. This isn't new. It's just happening more often to more categories of people. When presumed-innocent people are kidnapped by ICE after loved ones post bail, state court judges issue warrants for "failure to apoear" -- that is also violence.

People are being disappeared from Massachusetts jails

"Stephen Majeski, a deportation officer with ICE’s enforcement and removal operations, requested a 'list of all sentenced inmates in the facility.' ... 12 minutes later, Elizabeth Conley, chief administrative assistant at Suffolk County sheriff’s office, provided the list in an attachment."

“My experience has taught me that the power of ordinary people cannot be overstated.” Jo Ann Bland

Amazing!! Alex is one of our best! wbjournal.com/article/worc...

@billshaner.bsky.social reporting is stellar. There are serious repercussions from this conviction & prosecution. Beyond the personal cost, this is about chilling community defense & police misconduct enabled by prosecutorial discretion. www.worcestersucks.email/p/convicted-...

Excellent piece by Luke O'Neil. The only note I have is one thing not mentioned by Etel Haxhiaj: the community responded quickly because ICE had been quietly disappearing ppl here for months before this incident.

"The more pressing question is, what kind of societal precedent does this case set? It establishes the standard of criminalizing good samaritans who rush to help their neighbors, particularly against state violence."

Etel’s conviction sets a terrifying precedent for people trying to help their neighbors from ICE and the local police who continue to protect and serve federal agents over their own communities.

Under reported situation in a city that often goes unjustly overlooked.

Haxhiaj was herself an immigrant seeking refuge in the US 25+ years ago. She remembers being interviewed by an American Consul who asked why she wanted so badly to come here. "And I just remember begging him if he only gave me that chance that I would try to do good with my citizenship."

There is no rational world in which what Haxhiaj did amounts to assault. It simply highlights the ridiculous double standard when it comes to how we allow our brave warriors to brutalize us to no end while also counting the most modest or incidental resistance as a grave affront to the law.

In May we reported on the abduction by ICE of an asylum seeker in Worcester. @etelhaxhiaj.bsky.social, a city councilor at the time, was absurdly and unjustly convicted last week of assaulting a police officer that day in what she says was a politically motivated trial. We talked about it.

Thank you so much @lukeoneil47.bsky.social for shining the spotlight on this story. It is way bigger than I. My family and I continue to be grateful as we try to process what happened and how we keep fighting for the truth.

The Northwestern DA’s office successfully convicted Etel Haxhiaj, a rapid responder to a Worcester ICE raid, of assault on a police officer. Haxhiaj declined a plea offer that would have required her to sign an apology letter. “I chose the truth,” she said. @billshaner.bsky.social reports:

WPD’s position is they don’t collaborate with ICE. 👇

The lieutenant who applied for criminal charges against me, explicitly offered ICE agent to press charges on their behalf against me for “punching” and “assaulting” ICE agents. His police report stated that I “punched” an ICE agent.

“Several jurors refused to convict any of the Stanford Palestine solidarity protesters who occupied administrators' offices in June 2024, barricading themselves inside for several hours to protest the genocide.” apnews.com/article/stan...

Culture is never innocuous; it is consequential. I think of the ways people understand that our law and order system is unjust, but cop for copaganda. You cannot separate how the system perpetuates violence against the innocent, especially Black and Brown people, and the culture that holds it up

This all went down in #mapoli, Worcester to be exact where the stories of police corruption and abuse deserve more attention

For local elected officials who are trying to understand how this trial connects to the national issues- this statement from the Trump administration makes it pretty clear that they know the actions of the WPD and silence of city leaders aids their work.

Thank you immensely @andrewjmarsh.bsky.social for this powerful beautiful analysis in @billshaner.bsky.social’s Worcester Sucks. ❤️ www.worcestersucks.email/p/criminaliz...

100%. Rosane Ferreira-De Oliveira came into the United States as an asylum seeker. Won her asylum case and was NOT the subject of DHS's abduction. They used her daughters and the infant to lure her, violentely and unlawfully detain her and spread lies about her.

I’ll keep protecting my neighbors, until state sanctioned violence & kidnapping of immigrants ends. Local police aren’t exempt from the constitution.