CNN
 — 

Police in Gloucester, Massachusetts, are seeking charges against three teenagers who allegedly assaulted a transgender teen, who says he was punched and called slurs during the attack.

The Gloucester Police Department filed applications for assault and battery charges in Gloucester Juvenile Court against two 17-year-old males and one 16-year-old male, according to a news release.

Evidence from the investigation did not support the pursuit of hate crime charges, police said in the release. But the alleged victim and his mother are hopeful that will change, their attorney told CNN.

The teenagers, unnamed by the police department, will now attend a hearing where a clerk magistrate will determine whether there is probable cause for the charges, the release says. It’s unclear when the clerk magistrate hearing will take place.

Police responded to a reported assault during a party in the woods on August 30, the release says. One “juvenile” male was taken to a local hospital for treatment of his injuries, according to the release.

Although the news release doesn’t identify the victim, 16-year-old Jayden Tkaczyk told CNN affiliate WCVB he was stomped on, punched in the face and called homophobic slurs during the incident.

Tkaczyk “sustained lacerations and contusions, including black eyes, and serious nervous damage” due to the “severe beating,” his attorney, Craig Rourke, told CNN. Tkaczyk had previously experienced bullying at school, Rourke added.

The police department said its investigation, which included a specially trained hate crime investigator from the Massachusetts State Police, “did not ultimately support hate crime charges.”

Tkaczyk’s lawyer and his family are calling for hate crime charges, citing slurs they say the attackers used.

Tkaczyk’s mother, Jasmine Tkaczyk, told WCVB that her son “told me as they were stomping on his face they were using the F slur, so I don’t know how anyone can justify that and say that’s not a hate crime.”

Tkaczyk told WCVB, “Especially chasing me into the woods and saying that same thing, because they were calling me that slur, and they were calling me worse slurs.”

Rourke told CNN they were “glad that the charges are being pursued” and “hopeful that hate crime charges will follow in the future.”

Rourke described Tkaczyk as someone who was “targeted and picked on for being who they are.”

Rourke’s team is optimistic the magistrate will find probable cause for the charges and the case will move forward, he added. “Hopefully, maybe that’ll bring some closure to this incident,” he said.

Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, a Democrat, previously denounced the attack on Tkaczyk.

“There should be no place in our Commonwealth or our country for violence against trans children,” the senator wrote on X in September. “We must love, protect & respect trans kids.”

Hope Watt-Bucci, the president of North Shore Pride, an LGBTQ group based in Manchester, Massachusetts, told CNN she was “horrified” to learn about the attack on Tkaczyk. Watt-Bucci said attacks against the LGBTQ community in Massachusetts’ North Shore were growing significantly, including “microaggressions, public displays of discrimination and hatred towards our community or physical violence.” The Justice Department says that there were 23 hate crimes motivated by gender identity in 2022 in Massachusetts, a significant increase from 10 in 2021 and 11 in 2020.

North Shore Pride will “continue to stand in solidarity and continue to stand for the same freedoms and protections for all people,” she added.

BOSTON – A family from the greater Boston area says they were the victims of a racist tirade by a stranger on a United Airlines bus last week. Pervez Taufiq captured the incident on his cell phone as he says a woman started yelling at his four-year-old son.

United Airlines passenger on racist rant

“She’s yelling at him, the four-year-old, and says ‘shut up, just shut up,’” Taufiq said. “And I snapped, and I said, ‘don’t you ever speak to my son that way. You have no right.’”

Taufiq and his wife Nicole are both wedding photographers who travel the globe. He says they were flying to California on a United Airlines flight with their three kids when they first noticed the woman’s bizarre behavior. She was seated next to his 11-year-old son in business class.

“She asked if I was Indian, and I said yes, I was Indian,” Taufiq says his son told him.

After landing, passengers on the flight were driven to the airport on a United bus. That is where Taufiq says the woman started using racial epithets about his family. The video posted to Taufiq’s social media shows the two going back and forth.

“You’re from India. You have no respect,” she is heard saying in the cell phone video. “I’m American,” she says.

“So are we,” Taufiq responds in the video.

“No, you’re not American,” she says back to him.

The video also shows the woman referring to Taufiq and his family as “Tandoori.”

“That’s brutal to have someone tell you that because you don’t look like them, you’re not American,” Taufiq told WBZ-TV.

Taufiq says United Airlines staff asked his family if they would like to leave the bus, and he replied that he wanted the woman removed. The video shows the woman walking off of the bus to talk to staff members, and Taufiq says she did not return.

Hopes people will speak up in future

Throughout the incident, Taufiq told WBZ-TV that one man spoke up for his family. He hopes this ordeal will help others speak up if this happens to anyone else.

“This is not acceptable and if you see it, stand up, say something, be with the person that’s going through this,” he said.

Nicole Taufiq says their 11-year-old son is processing what happened. The couple and their children have traveled to 34 countries for their work. They say they have never had to explain racism to their kids before.

“He’s dealing with it in different ways. Like, everyday is a new question, a new angle. I think he’s still trying to process this whole experience in his own way, and I think that’s just hard to watch,” Nicole said.

The couple hopes to identify the woman in the video and press charges.

“I certainly would love it if someone found her, and we could press charges against her and then realistically for her to get the very loud message that she’s one of very few and there are a lot more people like us,” Taufiq said.

WBZ-TV reached out to United Airlines for a comment and was told the company did not have any additional information to share.

Plymouth County Correctional Facility currently holds about 350 detainees on behalf of ICE, marking a sharp increase over the past year. Absent state intervention, the detained population at Plymouth will likely continue to grow under the Trump administration. Sheriff Joseph McDonald recently renewed the county’s contract with ICE for five more years, despite mounting reports of flagrant human rights abuses — including allegations of unsanitary conditions, abusive staff, overcrowding, rotten food, and inadequate health care.

Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren are aware of the abysmal conditions at Plymouth, and have spoken out against the jail’s continued failure to abide by detention standards. The jail is currently under review by the attorney general. As long as there are ICE beds to fill at Plymouth, immigration detention will continue.

Though some have characterized Massachusetts as a sanctuary state, gaps between statewide laws and city policies remain vulnerable to exploitation in service of mass deportation. For example, the Boston Regional Intelligence Center — a fusion center enabling extensive information sharing between federal immigration authorities and local law enforcement — easily sidesteps toothless commitments to non-cooperation. Between 2014 and 2017, the BRIC reported 135 children to ICE after incidents at school, putting them at serious risk of deportation. Ending, or at least vastly limiting, the scope of the BRIC is a concrete step that state and local leaders can take to stymie the information sharing that inevitably leads to detention and deportation.

Three quarters of ICE arrests in the interior of the United States happen as a result of interactions with the criminal legal system. Though a handful of sanctuary cities exist in the Commonwealth, and though case law prohibits law enforcement from holding noncitizens solely on the basis of an ICE detainer, nothing prevents a local sheriff’s office or state prosecutor from notifying ICE of a noncitizen in their custody or courtroom. Elected officials must instruct district attorneys, sheriffs, police chiefs, and other law enforcement officials that they are not to communicate with ICE regarding noncitizens’ presence in jails or courtrooms.

Moreover, guidance should be provided to district attorney offices to encourage non-prosecution and reduced sentences where possible, to avoid deportation consequences. Healey can also grant pardons to protect longtime residents whose state criminal convictions make them deportable, in consideration of their records of rehabilitation, contributions, and roots in the state.

Finally, Massachusetts must reinstate the state’s right-to-shelter law for all residents. The pipeline from homelessness to deportation is well documented. Healey should reverse her recent decision to impose a strict six-month limit on family stays in shelters. The families in shelters have fled violence, poverty, civil strife, and natural disasters; they are traumatized and struggling to find safety and stability. Unhoused families living on the streets of Massachusetts will be sitting ducks for ICE enforcement efforts under Trump. State leaders can take steps now to protect these families from deportation by reinstating the availability of stable, long-term shelter.

As elected officials consider how to make good on their promises to push back against an increasingly hostile Trump agenda, they should implement these four recommendations. Absent concrete, immediate actions at the state and local level, noncitizen community members in Massachusetts will remain at significant risk of detention, deportation, and family separation.

Sarah Sherman-Stokes is a clinical associate professor of law and associate director of the Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Clinic at Boston University School of Law. Leah Hastings is a staff attorney at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, where she runs the Immigrant Detention Conditions Project.