ICE took a 13-year-old they said had a gun. Local cops say he didn’t.

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A 13-year-old Massachusetts boy is in ICE custody hundreds of miles from home, and trying to figure out how this was allowed to happen has been challenging. A local news story about the ordeal went viral on Sunday, prompting more questions than answers about the conduct of local police, their relationship to federal immigration enforcement and whether the boy’s family even knew he was being taken out of state. While we have some new information, the cloud of confusion remains.

Here’s what we know at this point: Last Thursday, police in Everett, Massachusetts say the boy made a credible threat of violence against another student in the school district. When officers picked him up at a bus stop outside his school, they allegedly found a knife in his possession. Once the boy was fingerprinted, ICE became aware of the case. According to the Boston Globe, the boy’s mother was called to pick him up after he was arrested, waited for about an hour and a half, and was then told her son was taken by ICE. He was held overnight in a Massachusetts ICE facility and then taken Friday to one in Virginia. We know he came to the US from Brazil and, along with his family, has a pending asylum case.

“I’ve never done a bond or a habeas for a kid this young, ever,” US District Judge Richard G. Stearns said during an emergency habeas corpus hearing Friday filed by a lawyer on behalf of the boy. “This is the youngest.”

Everett is a city of nearly 50,000 people that borders Boston directly to the north. According to the 2010 Census, 33% of residents were born outside of the US. Per the 2020 Census, the city is a little more than 50% white, with a big Hispanic and Latino community, as well as large Italian and Brazilian populations. As people at a city council meeting testified Tuesday night, ICE has had a bombastic presence in the community since the start of the second Trump administration.

After I reached out to ICE spokesperson Casey Latimer on Monday regarding the boy taken from Everett, I received a reply from a different spokesperson named James Covington. He wrote “Please see the below from DHS on the 13-year-old alien. Please feel free to direct any questions to them.”

The “below” Covington was referring to was—and bear with me here—a screenshot of an X post from DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin who had quote posted Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council. Reichlin-Melnick had posted about the story, writing “This makes NO SENSE. A 13-year-old was arrested by local police for unknown reasons, and then turned over to ICE, which is detaining him far away from his mother — who is going through immigration court, has an asylum application on file, and is legally authorized to work.”

McLaughlin then added her own commentary: “Here are the facts: he posed a public safety threat with an extensive rap sheet including violent assault with a dangerous weapon, battery, breaking and entering, destruction of property. He was in possession of a firearm and 5-7 inch knife when arrested.” 

The problem is that we have no way of confirming what the government referred to as “facts.” And in fact, some of the facts have already been proven not to be facts. 

Everett Mayor Carlo DiMaria held a press conference Tuesday afternoon with Police Chief Paul Strong by his side. First he read a prepared statement about the city’s version of events, and then he took questions from reporters in the room. 

In his prepared statement, DiMaria talked about the credible threat of violence that prompted a police investigation. The mayor said police found the boy was in possession of a six to seven inch knife. But, contradicting the DHS X post, “no guns were found.” DiMaria stressed that the police are only concerned with public safety and do not make arrests based on immigration status. He said Everett PD did not reach out to ICE, but ICE has access to certain databases. Whether or not they have a formal relationship is still unclear. “Once an individual is taken into ICE custody, the city of Everett and the Everett police have no authority or control over what happens next,” DiMaria said.

When a reporter asked the mayor if a parent was present when ICE arrived at Everett PD to take the child, the mayor seemed unsure and conferred with Chief Strong. He then said "Yeah, the mother was there." But when the reporter asked DiMaria why ICE didn't take the mother as well (since she has the same immigration status as her son), he said "the mother had left the station at a certain point when ICE came.” 

I followed up with the Director of Communications for the City of Everett after the press conference to try and clarify whether or not the boy’s mother was present when ICE took him from the police department or if she even knew ICE was taking him into custody. She wrote, “The Police Chief says the mother was contacted when the boy was arrested and was at the station. She left when ICE arrived.” Then I asked “Can you clarify what you mean by ‘she left when ICE arrived’? Was she informed ICE was taking her son and did she see them take him?” She replied “All we can confirm is that she left when ICE arrived.” When I asked if that means the city will not confirm whether or not the mother was informed by Everett PD that ICE was taking her child, I did not receive a response. 

I also reached out to DHS media relations and emailed McLaughlin directly after the mayor’s press conference to ask if she stood by her X statement from Monday. I have not received a reply. When I followed up with Covington at ICE to see if DHS stood by their statement, he told me DHS was working on a response. As of this writing, DHS has not provided me personally or publicly released any comments about the incorrect information in their original statement.

“We cannot turn a blind eye to what the communities of color are going through in the city of Everett,” City Councilor Stephanie Martins told a crowd of people gathered Tuesday evening in front of Everett City Hall shortly before a city council meeting was scheduled to begin, per video shared with The Handbasket by an attendee. Residents lined up to get a seat in the meeting, of which there were only 60. Every seat was reportedly filled, and others stood against the back wall of the room.

People across ages, genders, races, languages and countries of birth took the mic during the public comment portion of the council meeting to express their outrage and disgust over how the city was handling the boy’s abduction. (You can watch the meeting in full here.) They demanded specific answers about the Everett Police Department’s collaboration with ICE. And there was a common thread throughout: If one person’s rights are under attack, so are everyone else’s. 

Everett is a community that has been repeatedly terrorized by ICE this year, which was made abundantly clear when two different speakers shared their own stories of family members abducted by the agency. One woman had her cousin and her husband taken, while another had her son snatched away. According to both women, their loved ones did not have criminal records. 

One speaker, who identified herself as a Jewish resident of Everett, talked about the legacy of the Holocaust and how it intersects with this moment. “The first thing that happened with the Holocaust—it didn't start with concentration camps,” she said. “It started with finding a group of people to scapegoat and to blame.”

“I have witnessed several abductions by unmarked officers in my neighborhood,” another resident said to the packed room. “They have refused to answer me about who they are. But we know who they are. Continuing to snatch our community members off the streets without due process, without officers saying who they are and what they are doing is a violation of our humanity and makes our neighborhoods unsafe for everyone, regardless of your citizenship status.”

And Katy Rogers, an Everett City Council Member, spoke directly to the president and his team. “To the Trump administration: Return the child to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” she said. “Our state is well-equipped to handle crime. Remove ICE from our city, issue a formal correction to the misinformation spread online, and fire Tricia McLaughlin, your Public Affairs Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, for publicly releasing false information about a minor without notifying local officials and compromising an active investigation.”

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley represents Everett in Congress and issued a statement on Tuesday excoriating the Trump administration’s treatment of the boy. “He is a 7th-grader who should have been met with compassion and care, not criminalized and sent to an adult prison,” Pressley wrote.

In the court hearing last Friday, Judge Stearns ordered the government to justify the boy’s arrest by end of day Tuesday. And if not, he said the boy must be given a bond hearing by this coming Friday. As of this writing, the government has not provided a justification. Meanwhile, the boy remains trapped in a prison 500 miles away from home with an unhealed broken foot (his mother said he hurt it prior to his detainment), sleeping on a concrete floor with an aluminum blanket, and crying to his mother on the phone. His family has launched a GoFundMe to cover bond and legal and travel expenses. 

There is a natural inclination, especially among Americans steeped in our culture of mass incarceration, to judge the propriety of a person’s punishment not based on what they’ve done, but on how deserving one believes they are of receiving justice. On its face, any 13-year-old kid that allegedly made threats and was found to be in possession of a knife should be afforded the rights of due process in the juvenile court system. But because this boy was born in another country, because he and his family were asylum-seekers (authorized to work legally in the US) and not American citizens, and regardless of any piece of his personal story or history that led him to this point, some believe he is not owed those same rights. This boy—this child— deserves to rot in a federal facility, they say, and to be dragged across state lines away from his home. And for some, his mere existence in this country is crime enough. 

But it’s important to bust these myths. It’s crucial to remember, as so many speakers at the Everett City Council meeting reminded us, that all of our safety is intertwined. DHS and its many agencies are trying to turn neighbors against one another. But our neighbors are not our enemies—in fact, they are the ones most likely to protect us.

“Even the worst people who have done the worst things” deserve due process, the speaker at the council meeting who talked about her Jewish roots, said. “And it's not just to protect them: It's to protect all of us. Because then who's to stop the federal government from saying, ‘No, you're wrong, you're a criminal, you're bad. We don't have to prove it. We're in charge.’ It doesn't stop. It never, ever stops.”

There is still so much we don’t know about this case, yet it’s hard to imagine there could be any justification for this kind of treatment of a child—especially when the original explanation is already falling apart. But as long as this regime thinks it can act without accountability, it will continue to do just that.