By LEAH WILLINGHAM, Associated Press

CHELMSFORD, Mass. (AP) — A Massachusetts high school student who was arrested by immigration agents on his way to volleyball practice has been released from custody after a judge granted him bond Thursday.

Marcelo Gomes da Silva, 18, who came to the U.S. from Brazil at age 7, was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents Saturday. Authorities have said the agents were looking for the Milford High School teenager’s father, who owns the car Gomes da Silva was driving at the time and had parked in a friend’s driveway.

“It shouldn’t have happened in the first place. This is all a waste,” his lawyer, Robin Nice, told reporters after a hearing in Chelmsford. Gomes da Silva appeared at the hearing via video from elsewhere in Massachusetts before being released on $2,000 bond.

Supporters gather outside federal court in support of Marcelo Gomes da Silva, who was arrested on his way to volleyball practice last weekend, on Thursday, June 5, 2025 in Milford, Mass.(AP Photo/Mark Stockwell)

“We disrupted a kid’s life. We just disrupted a community’s life,” Nice said. “These kids should be celebrating graduation and prom, I assume? They should be doing kid stuff, and it is a travesty and a waste of our judicial process to have to go through this.”

She said Gomes da Silva slept on the cement floor of a room holding 25 to 35 men, many twice his age, most of the time he was detained, with no windows, no time outside and no permission to shower. He was able to brush his teeth twice. Nice said that at one point Gomes da Silva asked for a Bible and was denied.

He went to the hospital Wednesday because he had concerns about a concussion he received before he was detained and was suffering from a bad cold, Nice said.

“He’s looking forward to eating Snickers and chicken nuggets when he is released,” she said.

Not ICE’s target, but detained anyway

U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said earlier this week that ICE officers were targeting a “known public safety threat” and that Gomes da Silva’s father “has a habit of reckless driving at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour through residential areas.”

“While ICE officers never intended to apprehend Gomes da Silva, he was found to be in the United States illegally and subject to removal proceedings, so officers made the arrest,” she said in a statement.

A homeowner around a sign supporting Marcelo Gomes Da Silva, who was arrested on his way to volleyball practice last weekend, on Thursday, June 5, 2025 in Milford, Mass. (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell)

Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said Monday that “like any local law enforcement officer, if you encounter someone that has a warrant or … he’s here illegally, we will take action on it.”

Gomes da Silva initially entered the country on a visitor visa and was later issued a student visa that has since lapsed, Nice said. She described him as deeply rooted in his community and a dedicated member of both the school marching band and a band at his church.

The immigration judge set a placeholder hearing date for a couple of weeks from Thursday, but it might take place months from that, Nice said.

“We’re optimistic that he’ll have a future in the United States,” she said.

A federal judge considering Gomes da Silva’s request to be released while his immigration case proceeds has given the government until June 16 to respond and ordered that Gomes da Silva not be moved out of Massachusetts without 48 hours’ notice given to the court. The government sought permission Wednesday to move Gomes da Silva to a detention facility in a different New England state, Nice said. A judge quickly denied the request.

Supporters gather outside federal court in support of Marcelo Gomes da Silva, who was arrested on his way to volleyball practice last weekend, on Thursday, June 5, 2025 in Milford, Mass. (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell)(AP Photo/Mark Stockwell)

A shaken community

“I love my son. We need Marcelo back home. It’s no family without him,” João Paulo Gomes Pereira said in a video released Wednesday. “We love America. Please, bring my son back.”

The video showed the family in the teen’s bedroom. Gomes da Silva’s sister describes watching movies with her brother and enjoying food he cooks for her: “I miss everything about him.”

Supporters gather outside federal court in support of Marcelo Gomes da Silva, who was arrested on his way to volleyball practice last weekend, on Thursday, June 5, 2025 in Milford, Mass. (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell) (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell)

Students at Milford High staged a walkout Monday to protest his detainment. Other supporters wore white and packed the stands of the high school gymnasium Tuesday night, when the volleyball team dedicated a match to their missing teammate.

Hanna Ghannan, who graduated from the school the day after Gomes de Silva was detained, was among those cheering outside the courthouse as the news came that her classmate would be let out on bond.

“I’m just happy that everyone’s coming to together as a community because there is a lot of hate — and I mean a lot of hate,” she said.

Supporters gather outside federal court in support of Marcelo Gomes da Silva, who was arrested on his way to volleyball practice last weekend, on Thursday, June 5, 2025 in Milford, Mass. (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell) (AP Photo/Mark Stockwell)

Amani Jack, also a recent Milford High graduate, said her classmate’s absence loomed large over the graduation ceremony, where he was supposed to play in the band. She said if she had a chance to speak with the president, she’d ask him to ‘just put yourself in our shoes.’

“He did say he was going to deport criminals,” she said. “Marcelo is not a criminal. He’s a student. I really want him to take a step in our shoes, witnessing this. Try and understand how we feel. We’re just trying to graduate high school.”

Veronica Hernandez, a family advocate from Medford who said she works in a largely Hispanic community where ICE has had an active presence, said cases like Gomes da Silva’s show immigration enforcement is serious about taking “anybody” without legal status, not just those accused of crimes.

“I think seeing that something so simple as a child driving themselves and their friends to volleyball practice at risk struck a chord,” she said.

Associated Press reporter Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire, contributed to this story.

Wall Street analysts recently began joking that the best way to predict the behavior of President Donald Trump — and make money in the process — was by practicing the “TACO trade,” which stands for “Trump always chickens out.” You can always bet on Trump rolling back a reckless tariff.

This mocking of Trump’s inconsistency, which drives him nuts — “Don’t ever say what you said,” he told a reporter who asked him about it — not only is accurate but also deserves to be more widely applied.

One day he is pushing Ukraine away; the next day he is shaking Ukraine down for its minerals; the next day Ukraine is back in the fold. One day Russian President Vladimir Putin is Trump’s friend; the next day he’s “crazy.” One day Canada will be the 51st state; the next day it is the target of tariffs. One day he brags that he hires only “the best” people; the next day more than 100 experts at the National Security Council are pushed out just weeks after many were hired. One day the president hosts a gala at his Virginia golf club for the biggest buyers of his meme coin, who spent a combined $148 million for the chance to hear him give a talk standing behind the presidential seal, and the White House spokesperson suggests it’s not corruption because the president was “attending it in his personal time.”

Trump is governing by unchecked gut impulses, with little or no homework or coordination among agencies. He respects no real lines of authority, has his golfing buddy (Steve Witkoff) act as secretary of state and his secretary of state (Marco Rubio) act as his ambassador to Panama. He compels anyone who wants to stop him to take him to court, while blurring all lines between his legal duties and personal enrichment.

What is this telling us? We are not being governed anymore by a traditional American administration. We are being governed by the Trump Organization Inc.

In Trump I, the president surrounded himself with some people of weight who could act as buffers. In Trump II, he has surrounded himself only with sycophants who act like amplifiers. In Trump I, he ran a standard, but chaotic, administration. In Trump II, the president is unchained and running the U.S. government exactly the way he ran his private company: out of his hip pocket and with only the markets or the courts able to stop him.

That is especially true because today Democrats are too weak, Republicans are too craven, big law firms like Paul, Weiss and Skadden Arps are too morally bankrupt and government bureaucrats are too defenseless to do anything.

So if the motto of Trump I was “It’s our turn to rule,” the motto of Trump II is the kind preferred by dictatorial African regimes: “It’s our turn to eat.”

Consider …

If you think all of this is funny or exaggerated, it’s not. Consider just a few examples of Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip — “fire, ready, aim” — style of governance, where there is zero second-order thinking.

Weeks after taking office, Trump announced a series of global tariffs without any serious consultation with the U.S. auto industry. Along the way, he discovered that only about one-third of the parts of the popular Ford F-150 are made in America and cannot be replaced anytime soon. The tariffs have been such a blow to the whole auto industry that Ford, General Motors and Stellantis announced they could not give earning predictions for the rest of 2025, citing tariff uncertainty and possible supply-chain disruptions.

Then China reacted predictably to Trump’s 145% tariffs on all Chinese exports to America. As The New York Times’ Beijing correspondent Keith Bradsher reported Monday, Beijing abruptly halted exports of rare-earth magnets that go into U.S.-made cars, drones, robots and missiles. If Trump doesn’t find a way to strike a deal (“chicken out”) on some of his China tariffs, U.S. car factories may have to cut back production “in the coming days and weeks,” Bradsher reported.

What do you think are the chances that Trump had gamed out in advance these second-order consequences of his tariffs on China? I bet zero. He just shot from the hip.

Right-wing woke

It gets worse. As I have been arguing since Trump came to office, his ridiculous right-wing woke obsession with destroying the U.S. electric vehicle industry that President Joe Biden was trying to build up undermines U.S. efforts to compete with China in electric batteries. Batteries are the new oil; they will power the new industrial ecosystem of AI-infused self-driving cars, robots, drones and clean tech.

The consequence of this, economics writer Noah Smith observed, is the weakening of America’s capacity to build the kind of cheap, battery-powered drones that Ukraine just used to destroy part of Russia’s air fleet — and that China could use the same way against our aircraft carriers. “Trump and the GOP,” Smith noted, “have decided to think of batteries as a culture-war issue instead of one of national security. They think they’re attacking hippie-dippy green energy, sticking it to the socialist environmentalist kids and standing up for good old red-blooded American oil and gas. Instead, what they’re actually doing is unilaterally disarming America’s future drone force and ceding the key weapon of the modern battlefield to China.”

Do you think Trump connected any of these dots? Not a chance. It was fire, ready, aim.

Jobs that use steel, not make steel

Here’s another example of that failing. Trump just announced that he would double U.S. steel tariffs to 50%. Surely the president would not have made such a move without studying what happened in his first term when he suddenly raised steel tariffs to 25%. Fortunately, others have. It was a total failure.

At first, the 2018 Trump steel tariffs added about 6,000 jobs to the U.S. steel industry’s workforce, according to the Census Bureau, The Wall Street Journal reported. But by the end of 2019, it added, those gains evaporated, leading to the loss of about 75,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Why? Well, as The Journal wrote in a May 17, 2021, editorial titled “How Trump’s Steel Tariffs Failed,” his 25% tariff “hurt industries that buy and use steel, plus their workers and millions of consumers.” That’s because so many more American jobs are held by people who use steel than make steel.

I challenge anyone in this administration to show me that Trump gamed out his new 50% steel tariff and proved that it would work better this time around.

Driving STEM students elsewhere

How about Trump’s education strategy? You cannot put up a meaningful trade wall against China unless you also have an education strategy to increase our advanced manufacturing.

China’s universities put so much emphasis on STEM education — science, technology, engineering and math — that every year China produces some 3.5 million STEM graduates, just under the number of graduates from associate, bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral programs in all disciplines in the United States.

To compete in the AI-driven economy of the future, a country cannot have too many engineers. But we have a glaring shortage. How have we been filling that hole? By admitting tens of thousands of engineering students and engineers from China and India in particular.

So, surely Trump thought this all through in advance?

Fat chance. He started a technology trade war with China — which controls about 30% of global manufacturing, almost double that of the United States — at the same time that he is trying to crush America’s premier research centers like the National Institutes of Health, while having his secretary of state vow to “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students.” On top of it all, he has appointed a former professional wrestling executive who once referred to AI as “A1” — like the steak sauce — as education secretary.

Not just Chinese, but now many other international STEM students, seeing all of this, are deciding to stay away. The United States will not feel the negative effects of that tomorrow while we still reap the benefits of decades of welcoming the most brainy or energetic immigrants. But we will a decade from now.

What has distinguished and enriched the United States for so many years — and kept it the dominant global economic and military power — has been the ability to consistently attract that extra scientist or ambitious immigrant, that extra dollar of investment and that extra dollop of trust from allies. As the biggest economy in the world, we benefited disproportionately from a stable, global free market.

“Any conventional understating of U.S. power would say that we would be crazy to put all three at risk, but that is exactly what we are doing today,” Nader Mousavizadeh, a founder of the geopolitical consulting firm Macro Advisory Partners, told me.

“We are behaving as if we are outsiders and outliers to a global order that we are in fact the architects of,” he added. “For now, we are still the preferred destination for savings, investment and talent, but the sound you hear out there today is the beginning of a global workaround for all three. Because more and more people are starting to wonder: Are we really the rock they thought we were?”

Congess on bended knee

In sum, what you are seeing from this Trump II administration, and its bended-knee Congress, is a dangerous, undisciplined, intellectually inconsistent farce that we will pay dearly for in the future. Major geoeconomic moves are being made by one man who has done no homework, modeling or stress-testing and has fostered little apparent interagency process, with no congressional oversight or apparent reference to history.

If you think this is not dangerous, just keep in mind that the Trump Organization Inc. over the years filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for six different businesses. There was a reason for that: the operating style and values of its boss.

Thomas Friedman writes a column for the New York Times.

Historian Nancy Baker Jones was a child when her father, who was serving in the U.S. Army in Europe, was called home in 1953 to testify at U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings on an alleged communist spy ring at an army laboratory in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. 

During McCarthy’s four-year reactionary crusade to root out “card carrying Communists,” hundreds of government, Hollywood, and university employees were imprisoned, and thousands more lost their jobs and were blacklisted despite a lack of evidence they were subverting the government. After what came to be known as the Army-McCarthy hearings, the senator’s meteoric popularity just as quickly plummeted, and in December 1954 he was censured by the U.S. Senate for behavior that worked to “obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate.”

Reading from an excerpt of her autobiography at the Alliance for Texas History’s first annual conference, which 400 people attended at Texas State University May 15-17, Jones recounted her lifelong career helping to build African-American and women’s history programs in Texas universities during the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and expanding the state’s historical encyclopedia, called the Handbook of Texas, to reflect diverse narratives starting in the 1980s. Jones warned the audience of a new McCarthyism arising and reminded them of the role historians can play to combat it. 

“The Alliance for Texas History was created from our own messy reality of history at a time when war appears to have been declared on our profession. We have already faced a difficult truth and started something new in the world, so that we will not repeat the past.” 

This alliance was formed last year after Jones, who was serving as board president of the 128-year-old Texas State Historical Association (TSHA), was sued and ousted by TSHA’s executive director and oil tycoon J.P. Bryan. Bryan sought to stack the board with conservative, non-academic historians over professional historians who he told the Galveston Daily News want to “demean the Anglo efforts in settling the western part of the United States for the purpose of spreading freedoms for all.” 

The struggle to chronicle our state and national past, to determine whose history is told or not told, continues to play out across Texas from the state Capitol to libraries, museums, and the classroom. Concerns about state action that could restrict the work of academic historians arose in conversations and presentations during the historical conference. 

Ben Johnson, co-editor of the Alliance’s Journal for Texas History, opened the conference with a speech describing the current climate for historians: “Until the last few years, never in my lifetime did state officeholders cancel book signings, did legislatures create laws banning the teaching of particular historical texts or concepts, or crowds gather to protest and sometimes remove statues of historical figures. Nationally and in many states, particularly Texas, history has become a venue for political and social combat.”

Two weeks after the May conference, state lawmakers passed Senate Bill 37, a new law that will strip from university faculty members their control over curricula and faculty hiring and hand this decision-making power to an institutional governing board. A statewide “curriculum advisory committee” chosen by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board will also have the power to decide required curricula for all higher education institutions from community colleges to medical schools. Under the new law, governor appointees will also be empowered to investigate and recommend the withholding of funding for universities found to be noncompliant with SB 37 or Senate Bill 17, a 2023 law that banned diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in Texas’ public colleges and universities. In the final version of SB 37, lawmakers removed a provision mandating faculty “not advocate or promote the idea that any race, sex, or ethnicity or any religious belief is inherently superior,” language that professors testified could have been used to censor conversations in government and history courses, especially. 

During one of the conference’s panels, “Teaching LGBTQ History in Texas,” academic historians grappled with how to include the topic in their classrooms during a time of increasing state surveillance of universities. Lauren Gutterman, a University of Texas at Austin American Studies professor shared how SB 17 has already had a “chilling effect” among UT students and faculty, even though the law did not impact curricula or research. Guest lectures on LGBTQ topics were canceled by UT administrators due to “preemptive over-compliance with SB 17,” and faculty were “self censoring out of fear,” Gutterman told attendees. 

“SB 37 is going much further in increasing government oversight of what happens in our classes. So I can only imagine the kind of self-censorship, and then the actual censorship that we experience from the government, is just going to be heightened,” Gutterman told the Texas Observer. 

Over the past year, it’s been more difficult for her department to recruit graduate students, and the UT faculty regularly ask each other. “‘Are you in the market?’ ‘Are you leaving?’ It’s just a kind of ubiquitous concern,” Gutterman said. 

She and other historians at the conference encouraged their colleagues not to self-censor. Gutterman told the Observer that faculty members need to “push back against the kind of anticipatory compliance or over-compliance … beyond what the law required.” 

While the state is narrowing what students can learn in the classroom, the Alliance for Texas History has opened up their call for diverse histories to be presented at their conference and in their publication. During the conference, historians, faculty members, and graduate students shared their research and concerns and received feedback from their colleagues without fear of reprisal. 

The Alliance for Texas History is “taking the broadest possible approach to the Texas past,” Gutterman said. “It’s  particularly important at a moment when our state leaders have demonstrated that they don’t want students to have a really full, inclusive accounting of our state or national past.”  

Alliance for Texas History conference (Courtesy/Adam Clark)

Johnson said in his speech, “The irony of all of these restrictions on history is that they come at a time when the study of the Texas past in public is robust, more inclusive, more expansive, and more nationally prominent than ever before.”

Over the three days of the conference, academic historians, museum curators, public school students, and other individuals selected from a program of 45 panels to attend on topics as diverse as “New Deal Texas,” “Trailblazers in Twentieth-Century Texas Sports,” “Racial Ideology, Eugenics, and the State Fair of Texas,” and “The Revitalization of the Karankawa.” 

In closing the conference, Jones assured attendees the Alliance for Texas History would continue to embrace the histories of all Texans: “Facing difficult truths about the past, moving forward with new understanding and assuring that we do not repeat what should not be repeated. This is what [historian and philosopher] Hannah Arendt called the messy reality of history. There is no finality. She said that it is a story with many beginnings but no ends. We are free to change the world and to start something new in it, and when we do that, that is a healing act.”

The post Amid New McCarthyism, the Alliance for Texas History Embraces Diverse Scholarship appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The Minnesota Department of Public Safety is warning Minnesotans to watch out for scam text messages that appear to be from the “Minnesota Department of Motor Vehicles” or “DPSMN.”

These fake messages claim the recipient needs to pay for outstanding traffic tickets and threaten consequences if they do not pay. Some Minnesotans have received several messages that became more and more demanding, according to the Department of Public Safety.

Public Safety will never communicate about traffic tickets or ask for payment through text message. If a Minnesota resident receives one of these texts, here is what the department recommends doing:

Do not click on any links in the message, give personal information or send money.
Mark the text as spam and delete it without responding.

If a recipient is concerned the message is real, they can reach out to the Driver and Vehicle Services division of DPS at drive.mn.gov with questions.

If people have already paid for these fake tickets, they can file a report with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center at ic3.gov.

Related Articles

Who’s in charge? CDC’s leadership ‘crisis’ apparent amid new COVID-19 vaccine guidance

DOC commissioner asks for patience from Stillwater prison families, dismisses idea of reopening Appleton prison

Measles vaccination rates drop after COVID-19 pandemic in counties across the US

40 St. Paul street lights stripped of copper wiring, though reports are down overall

Federal law enforcement presence draws protests in South Minneapolis