Marcelo Gomes da Silva is still trying to get back to his old life. The 18-year-old, who was born in Brazil, wants to enjoy the summer before his senior year at Milford High School in Massachusetts—go to pool parties, hang out with friends. Since his arrest by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he has been praised for his strength. “But that’s not really what I want,” he told Mother Jones on a video call. “I want everyone to think of me as Marcelo Gomes da Silva, just as I was before.”
On a Saturday morning in late May, ICE arrested Gomes da Silva on his way to volleyball practice. At first, when he noticed a white Ford Explorer trailing his car, he thought little of it. But when Gomes da Silva pulled into a friend’s driveway, an ICE agent walked up, knocked on the window, asked for his documents, and eventually handcuffed him. The officer asked Gomes da Silva if he knew the reason for his arrest. He said he did not. “Because you’re illegal,” the agent told him, “you’re an immigrant.”
“I hadn’t seen that kind of activation in the 22 years I’ve lived here. Nothing like it.”
Gomes da Silva had never thought of himself as undocumented. He came to the United States at age 7 as a visitor and later obtained a now-lapsed student visa. “I was just in shock,” he said. “I didn’t know what was going on and I was kind of questioning God…Why is this happening to me? Did I do something? I never really understood why I was there.”
The Department of Homeland Security said ICE officers “never intended to apprehend” Gomes da Silva but were instead looking for his father, the owner of the car, whom they accused of having a “habit of reckless driving.” To the US government, Gomes da Silva was an accidental target in the wrong place at the wrong time. These so-called “collateral arrests”—often warrantless apprehensions of immigrants without a criminal history—have become more commonplace as the Trump administration pushes the legal limits of its deportation dragnet.
“I didn’t say he was dangerous,” acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said of Gomes da Silva at a press conference days after his detention. “I said he’s in the country illegally and we’re not going to walk away from anybody.” Gomes da Silva was taken to ICE’s Boston field office in Burlington, where he was detained for six days until a judge released him on bond in early June.
The arrest of the Brazilian-native honors student has thrust Milford into the national spotlight, making it a flashpoint for President Donald Trump’s turbocharged immigration enforcement. It has also served as a catalyst for resistance in a town where dynamics around immigration have at times created fissures. “It definitely brought the community much closer together,” said Coleen Greco, the mother of one of Gomes da Silva’s volleyball teammates. “I hadn’t seen that kind of activation in the 22 years I’ve lived here. Nothing like it.”
Word of Gomes da Silva’s detention spread quickly through Milford, a 30,000-person blue-collar town 40 miles southwest of Boston. When he didn’t show up to volleyball practice that Saturday morning, his teammates and coaches assumed he must have overslept. Then coach Andrew Mainini got a text from a player, an undocumented 17-year-old who was in the car with Gomes da Silva. ICE had let him go along with an exchange student from Spain, but held onto Gomes da Silva. Mainini recalled feeling shocked and helpless. “We didn’t know what to do,” he said.
After practice, school administrators gathered everyone in the locker room and shared the news. There was a deep silence. Some players cried. One of them threw up. “I knew it was happening in Milford, but I didn’t really know anybody who was detained,” said Greco’s son Colin. “That’s when emotion just hit everybody and we were like, ‘This is real.’”
In the weeks leading up to the incident with Gomes da Silva, communities in Massachusetts were already on high alert. In May, ICE Boston launched what it described as an “enhanced immigration targeted operation.” The monthlong clampdown dubbed Operation Patriot led to almost 1,500 arrests across the state, where immigration arrests are up by more than 300 percent, according to a New York Times analysis.
Diego Low, director of the Metrowest Worker Center in Framingham, said Milford had been hit the hardest by immigration enforcement. In the 48 hours before Gomes da Silva’s arrest, he said ICE agents were “pounding on the back door” of Catholic Charities Worcester County to be let in during a food distribution drive. And on May 30, a Milford father of twins in the process of applying for a green card was detained and later transferred to Burlington.
Because the region is a hub for construction workers, Low said, there had also been a noticeable surge in vans being stopped by officers in the early mornings. “It had been relentless,” he said. “Those of us who are connected to the town’s immigrant community were reeling.”
“I think that many people really believed that we were going to be deporting criminals. They didn’t think an innocent high school student from their community would be targeted for this.”
Milford is an immigrant town; almost 30 percent of its population is foreign-born. Over the past 15 years, the predominantly Irish and Italian ancestry community has seen a steady growth in the number of Brazilian and Hispanic residents, according to the Boston Globe. At times, this demographic shift has given rise to tensions between newcomers and locals.
Low specifically recalled an incident in 2011 in which an undocumented migrant from Ecuador struck and killed a motorcyclist, Matthew Denice. The man was later convicted of several charges, including manslaughter, and sentenced to serve 12 to 14 years in prison. ICE deported him in 2023. The year after Denice’s death, Milford became the first New England town to sign on to an ICE program to crack down on the hiring of undocumented immigrants.
“It just created this wave of rechazo,” Low said of the anti-immigration backlash that erupted in the town, which has the second-largest Ecuadorian population in the state. “And to some extent, there’s still a faint reverberation of that to this day.” Denice’s mother, Maureen Maloney, was invited on stage during a 2016 Trump campaign event in Arizona. (She spoke out recently in support of more immigration enforcement.)
When Colin texted his mother to say ICE had taken Gomes da Silva, Greco could not believe it. She thought it must have been a typo. But then she jumped into action. Greco reached out to her sister, an immigration attorney, who alerted a longtime immigrant rights advocate in the governor’s office. She also began contacting local reporters and helped connect Gomes da Silva’s parents, who are undocumented, with a legal team and Low, a Portuguese speaker. “The dad was obviously grief-stricken,” she said, “and his English was getting worse and worse because he was just so emotional.”
On June 1, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, issued a statement demanding information about Gomes da Silva’s arrest. He was supposed to play in the band at the high school graduation that day. After the ceremony, students, still in robes, marched a mile to the town hall, where they staged a rally calling for his release. They were joined by about 200 teachers, according to the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and many other community members. Democratic US Rep. Jake Auchincloss attended the rally and called out the Trump administration on X, saying it “pardons cop-beaters from Jan 6 but detains high-school volleyball players.”
The mobilization immediately after Gomes da Silva’s arrest struck Low as a “pivotal moment” for Milford, where Trump won 42 percent of votes in 2024. “It’s really the first time I can remember that there’s been a significant portion of the community speaking up on behalf of the immigrants who live here,” Low said, noting that he hadn’t heard a public official in the town espouse such a pro-immigrant stance in all his years of organizing work. “I think that’s really important going forward.”
Since the large-scale ICE roundups, his organization has shifted its primary focus from cases like worker wage theft to locating and assisting the families of people who have been detained. That includes an emergency mutual aid fund to provide legal support and pay for bond and an ICE watch group that monitors the agency’s presence. “None of us were prepared for how to respond to this moment,” Low added, “and so we’re inventing it…We’re trying to find ways the community can defend itself.”
To keep the momentum going, residents are holding community meetings to discuss how to prepare for future situations. Mainini, the volleyball coach, attended one gathering of about 20 people, which included teachers from different school districts and faith leaders working with the Brazilian and Ecuadorian immigrant populations. He’s joined a subcommittee dedicated to family preparedness and getting documents ready for parents to assign guardianship of their US citizen children in the event of their detention or deportation. Other groups are tasked with food and resource allocation and volunteer outreach.
When asked why Gomes da Silva’s case hit a nerve in Milford, Mainini underscored how integrated he was in the town. “When we think of undocumented immigrants, we don’t think of Marcelo, this boy that we went to school with since kindergarten,” he said. Some neighbors may not have even realized Gomes da Silva didn’t have legal status until now. “I think that many people really believed that we were going to be deporting criminals. They didn’t think an innocent high school student from their community would be targeted for this.” Mainini added: “It was a perfect storm.”
While in ICE custody at Burlington, Gomes da Silva held on to this faith. He talked to other detainees about Jesus, and they prayed together before going to sleep on the concrete floor with the lights on and only a space blanket to cover themselves. In the facility, which is supposed to hold people only temporarily before they’re transferred to longer-term detention, he shared a single toilet with some 35 men. They weren’t allowed outdoors, Gomes da Silva said, so to pass the time, they sometimes played tic-tac-toe with water bottle caps on an improvised board someone scratched on the floor. “We never really got to know what was going on in the outside,” he said.
A day after his arrest, lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition seeking Gomes da Silva’s release. The document stated that Gomes da Silva has no criminal history. Not long after, a judge issued an order preventing ICE from transferring him out of state for at least 72 hours.
While Gomes da Silva waited, the local resistance continued. It was primarily led by the students, who walked out of class the Monday after the arrest wearing white T-shirts with the words “Free Marcelo.” An online fundraiser was set up to help the family. Neighbors began bringing them groceries. For several days, Greco’s house became a sort of command post as supporters flowed in and out to offer help and write affidavits attesting to Gomes da Silva’s standing in the community. “I don’t think he really understands how this all came together,” she said, “and just how fast…When I think about all the miracles I got to witness over those two weeks, it still blows my mind.”
On June 5, Immigration Judge Jenny Beverly in Chelmsford ruled that DHS had not proved that Gomes da Silva was a “danger to community” and set a $2,000 bond for his release. Outside the courthouse, friends and teammates celebrated the decision. Gomes da Silva was freed that day and, standing through a car’s sunroof, rode back home as his neighbors and relatives awaited waving signs. His father, in tears, apologized as he embraced him.
“He just kept bringing up that ‘I can’t believe my son was in handcuffs,’” Gomes da Silva said, “‘I can’t believe my son was in jail.’”
Gomes da Silva’s lawyers have since filed an asylum application on his behalf. While it’s unlikely that he could be redetained, he’s still vulnerable. “It’s still precarious in the sense that nothing is guaranteed,” said Robin Nice, a Boston-based immigration lawyer who started representing Gomes da Silva after learning about his case through a loose network of attorneys active on Facebook and Signal groups. “And the court process is probably going to take at least two years…He is in this kind of limbo status.”
Meanwhile, Gomes da Silva hopes to pay forward the support he received by helping other immigrants, especially those lingering in detention. This experience, he said, proved that “the love that you show to others will always come back.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.