NORTHAMPTON — On Saturday, dozens of demonstrators gathered outside Northwestern District Attorney David Sullivan’s office to pressure him to drop charges against two Worcester community organizers who responded to ICE activity in that city last year.
Sullivan’s office took over the cases against Etel Haxhiaj and Ashley Spring last July after Worcester District Attorney Joe Early Jr. recused his office from the case. Sullivan’s first assistant district attorney, Steven Gagne, is set to take the pair to court on Feb. 10.
“This prosecution is a troubling misuse of prosecutorial power that undermines community safety and democratic leadership,” said Jillian Phillips, an organizer with the LUCE Immigrant Justice Network of Massachusetts, to cheers and chants of “drop the charges” from the crowd on Saturday.
The rally came just days after Sullivan announced that he’s prepared to prosecute ICE agents should they break any laws in his jurisdiction. Following Gov. Maura Healey’s high profile rollout of new measures intended to curb ICE abuses in the state earlier in the week, Sullivan’s hypothetical made for a strong headline.
ICE agents are “very aggressive in their tactics,” he told New England Public Media’s Adam Frenier. Immigrants and citizens alike, he said, “are afraid to go to health centers, they’re afraid to go to their places of worship.”
“They can’t get access to justice,” he said. “Victims don’t even come forward with 911 calls when they’ve been domestically assaulted or sexually assaulted. These are very fundamental rights, and we need to protect our citizens and let people know.”
Regarding Healey’s proposals, Sullivan told Frenier they’re “not creating anything new. It’s just going back to the customs and protocols that we had going back to the start of ICE.”
When reached for comment for this article, Sullivan’s spokesperson, Melissa Sippel, wrote, “Due to the Supreme Judicial Court’s Rules of Professional Conduct, we cannot comment any further on these pending cases, particularly so close to trial.
Sippel did, however, offer what she called a point of clarity: “The criminal charges against both defendants stem not from their demonstration against ICE, but rather, from their alleged assaults upon two Worcester Police Officers.”
Spring, who did not attend the rally but watched it via video, told The Shoestring via email that the folks who braved the frigid temperature to attend the demonstration did so because they believe in their community.
“I think DA Sullivan is going through the motions of the criminal (in)justice system with little regard for the message it’s sending the community. We are in unprecedented times where Americans are literally under physical attack by a well-funded and undertrained interior military force that is serving a white supremacist agenda,” Spring said. “We are living in a country where dissent has been met with public execution, and that is not hyperbolic. That is the truth. So to ignore the current moment really obfuscates the question of law and order. Who does it apply to?”
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While Sullivan may in the future prosecute ICE agents, he is still poised to move forward with prosecuting two women who opposed an ICE abduction in Worcester last year.
Police brought assault charges against Haxhiaj, at the time a city councilor, and Spring, a community organizer and mother, for their actions standing up to masked ICE agents who came for a mother with an open asylum claim in their community.
Haxhiaj, Spring, and some 30 other community organizers responded to a call placed with the LUCE hotline about an ICE raid in progress. Spring was one of the first on scene and she arrived to find six masked agents in tactical vests surrounding a mother, two teens, and a baby in a car parked on the side of the street. As more organizers joined, they demanded to see a warrant from the agents, who witnesses said used the children as bait to bring the mother to the scene. The ICE agents offered no explanation, even as the crowd grew. Instead, they called the local police.
While the Worcester city manager and mayor have maintained that the police arrived on scene that day to protect the public peace, the president of the patrolman’s union, which represents almost all of the 30-odd officers who responded, has a different perspective. New England Police Benevolent Association’s Local 911 President Thomas Duffy told WBUR last May: “From the perspective of the first officers who arrived on scene, the biggest risk right now is to protect the safety of their federal agents based on the actions that they observed when they got there.”
This assessment aligns with what eyewitnesses saw on May 8.
Dozens of Worcester Police Department officers responded to the call. They yanked organizers off of the van after ICE agents stuffed the mother inside. As the SUV drove away to a destination unknown, her daughter ran after it. WPD officers tackled the daughter to the ground and handcuffed her. Their knees on her back, she lay on the pavement crying.
Police pressed charges against the daughter — reckless child endangerment among others — then dropped them a few days later. Her mother would spend the next six months in ICE custody, shuffled between federal prisons in Rhode Island and New Hampshire before a judge approved the open asylum claim she’d had pending review. She is still in the country. During her detainment, two of her daughters went missing for separate stretches. One turned up in Brazil and the other — the one the police tackled and criminally charged — was put in the foster care system.
Police charged Spring a few hours after the incident with felony assault with a dangerous weapon (an “unknown liquid” that turned out to be water from a baby’s bottle). Gagne, the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office prosecutor, eventually dropped it down to misdemeanor assault shortly after taking the case.
Haxhiaj wasn’t charged until almost a month later. On June 4, the Worcester Police Department brought two charges of assault and battery on a police officer to a clerk magistrate hearing, a process unique to Massachusetts, at Worcester Superior Court. An assistant clerk-magistrate found probable cause for one of the charges and dismissed the other.
It would later come out that the delayed charges may have been the result of a heated meeting between the police chief and Duffy, who in the days following the Eureka Street incident issued several statements calling Haxhiaj “unfit to serve” for her interference in the ICE arrest. (In the fall, Duffy personally campaigned for Haxhiaj’s opponent. She lost her seat in the November election despite putting up the best electoral performance of her career. At a pre-trial conference in September, Duffy entered the courtroom before it was open to the public and had a private conversation with Gagne. Both declined to comment on the content of the discussion.)
Haxhiaj pleaded not guilty at a July arraignment. Afterward, she maintained her innocence to a crowd of supporters outside the courthouse, a position she reiterated after filing a motion to dismiss in September. At a November pre-trial conference, a judge denied the motion and set the trial date for Feb. 10.
Haxhiaj, Spring, and the rest of the community members on Eureka Street on May 8 were some of the first in the state to directly encounter the new street tactics of ICE under Trump’s second term. That meant they were also some of the first to find out how the local police department would navigate a conflict between federal agents and members of the community they serve.
Haxhiaj said she feels the dynamic on display at Eureka Street needs changing.
“Since cities and towns are in the frontlines of ICE’s actions, police departments need to train their police officers to not respond to ICE requests, as well as document and share with communities these requests,” she told The Shoestring. “I’d like to see that police departments state clearly and unequivocally that when they say they’re responding to maintain the peace and public safety, they mean community members not federal agents tearing our families apart.”
She also said she’d like to see the governor use her power to end the Department of Corrections’ formal cooperation agreement with ICE — the only such agreement still in effect between a state entity and ICE.
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The demonstration on Saturday was a joint effort of several coalitions, statewide and local, including Worcester Indivisible, Indivisible Northampton, Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution, Indivisible West Quabbin, Showing Up for Racial Justice – Worcester, Refuse Fascism, and Independent Socialist Group. For two hours, speakers condemned the prosecution of Haxhiaj and Spring.
“Targeting an immigrant councilwoman in this way sends a chilling message to every immigrant neighbor who dares to lead, to speak, to stand up for their rights,” Phillips, the LUCE organizer, said.
John Bonifaz, an Amherst-based civil rights attorney and president of Free Speech For The People, said his organization has called on district attorneys across the state to start coordinating with local police chiefs to protect their communities from “this secret police force.”
“We know that on May 8, 2025, ICE showed up on Eureka Street in Worcester,” he said. “They kidnapped a woman off the streets. We know that her daughter, 16 years old, screamed and cried to stop it. The Worcester police slammed her to the ground, face down, and arrested her. We know that Etel showed up with other members of her community to protect her neighbors, to protect her constituents, to protect her community. We know the Worcester police showed up to protect ICE.”
The charges against Haxhiaj and Spring, he said, must be dropped “in the interest of justice.” Then, echoing what Sullivan said on the radio a few days earlier, he told the crowd that “resources should be redirected to where they belong: holding ICE accountable for their unlawful actions across this state and across this country.”
Elliot Oberholtzer, a coordinator with Western Mass Asylum Support Network, connected the charges against Haxhiaj and Spring to a long history of police actions that call to question their claim to serve the public good.
“From the start, the role has not been to defend people from the violence of the state,” Oberholtzer said. “Their role has been to defend the interests of some people, people with power and wealth, from the challenges that labor organizing, immigration, freedom and self-determination for people of color and community defense pose to that power.”
Cheers from the crowd followed.
“That’s right,” someone yelled. “Let’s go,” yelled another.