☠︎︎ ︎𝔩𝔦𝔳𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔡𝔢𝔞𝔡 𝔡𝔬𝔩𝔩𝔰 .ᐟ

So, the movie SURROUNDED deserves its own post...

Letitia Wright's SURROUNDED got slept-on when it dropped in 2023, TBH...

She also acted her ass off.

As I have said, it deals with a similar theme to SINNERS...just within a Western setting instead of a southern juke joint. Basically, it's a one location thriller wherein the heroine Mo, played by Tish, has to navigate when a criminal gang encumbers her journey on a stagecoach. Anyway. it's on PRIME. WATCH IT. SUPPORT IT. Letitia Wright is a producer and it is unheard of for a Black woman that young to produce and star in a movie like this. I literally cannot name another western starring a Black woman and if you trust/know my taste, I'm saying it's a decent watch. ...And Jamie Bell basically plays in a similar pool as Remmick. If you are looking for a similarly themed movie to SINNERS, just a different genre and sans blues music... SURROUNDED is pretty much that. BUT and THIS IS KEY, because it's from the perspective of a Black woman... that status means the lack of trust expands a bit because of the greater danger to her. In fact, I think it's interesting to compare her approach to her situation to how the people in that juke joint handled theirs.

#THISISAREC I may come back to this post to expand on that comparison, actually, under a cut, of course, after a rewatch. Because the similarities and differences are interesting.

Strong progressive parties with engaged labor unions are the best defense against fascism.

Corporate tyranny is the enemy. Billionaire overlords want you destitute.

#Don't ask me the color of nothing

THE ERA OF VANISHING HAS BEGUN

They are not arresting people. They are vanishing them.

Rumeysa Ozturk wasn’t read her rights. She wasn’t told why she was being detained. She was walking to break her fast in Somerville, Massachusetts when masked men in an unmarked SUV pulled up, took her phone, slapped on handcuffs, and dragged her into a vehicle like she was some kind of national security threat.

She’s a doctoral student. A Fulbright scholar. A trauma researcher. But in Donald Trump’s America, she fit the profile: Muslim, foreign-born, sympathetic to Palestinians.

Now she’s locked in a for-profit detention center in Louisiana, hundreds of miles from her lawyer, after a federal judge specifically said she wasn’t to be moved.

They moved her anyway. Because rules no longer apply to those with badges — real or fake.

A MOVEMENT BUILT ON CHAINS AND COWARDS

Alireza Doroudi is gone too.

He’s a doctoral student at the University of Alabama, born in Iran, studying mechanical engineering. No criminal record. No warning. Just scooped off the grid.

ICE refuses to say where he’s being held. No public charge has been announced. His only crime appears to be existing in the wrong body, from the wrong country, in the wrong era.

Mahmoud Khalil was next — a Columbia student, arrested for leading pro-Palestinian protests. Trump labeled him a “radical foreign Hamas sympathizer” on Truth Social. Days later, he was gone.

Jeanette Vizguerra was taken from her Target shift in Colorado, chained at the waist.

Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, a farmworker organizer, was dragged from his car at dawn in Washington. His window was smashed by federal agents. His voice silenced.

These aren’t isolated incidents. These are deliberate acts of political intimidation.

They are testing the system — testing us — to see how many people they can disappear before we stop calling it democracy.

WHEN ICE IS A BADGE — AND A COSTUME

While the real ICE disappears scholars, organizers, and mothers, the fakes are circling like vultures.

In South Carolina, Sean-Michael Johnson posed as an ICE officer. He pulled over a van of Latino men, screamed slurs, jiggled their keys, and knocked a phone out of someone’s hand. “You’re going back to Mexico!” he shouted. He wasn’t an agent — but he played one with conviction.

In North Carolina, Carl Thomas Bennett used a fake badge to sexually assault a woman at a motel. He told her if she didn’t comply, he’d have her deported. He held up a counterfeit ID and pretended to be the state.

And in Philadelphia, a Temple University student in an “ICE” shirt tried to storm a dorm building with two accomplices. They were dressed for the part, intoxicated by the illusion of authority, emboldened by the climate.

This is what happens when the state makes cruelty a brand. When a badge becomes a fetish object. When the line between enforcement and cosplay disappears altogether.

THE WHOLE SYSTEM IS THE CRIME

Let’s stop pretending this is a coincidence.

This is a unified strategy. The Trump administration is using ICE like a personal strike force — targeting international students, protest leaders, organizers, and mothers with surgical precision.

They invoke secret designations. They bypass due process. They manufacture pretexts out of thin air and rely on the fog of bureaucracy to hide the blood on the floor.

The point isn’t law enforcement. The point is deterrence. Spectacle. Control.

This is what political cleansing looks like when it’s dressed up in the language of national security.

They’re showing the world that resistance has a cost — and the cost is your freedom, your voice, your visibility, your future.

SILENCE IS CONSENT. AND WE ARE LOUD.

There is no middle ground here. No fence to sit on. No neutral position when people are being kidnapped in the name of the state.

ICE doesn’t need your applause. It needs your silence. Every time a student vanishes and the media shrugs, every time a woman is cuffed and the public looks away, the machine gets stronger.

They are daring us to ignore it. They are counting on our numbness. They are betting that we’ll keep scrolling.

We cannot let them win.

This is not border policy. This is not visa enforcement. This is not safety.This is authoritarianism with a PowerPoint presentation.This is fascism disguised as formality.

This is the state stripping people from the land and pretending it’s order.

Let the record show:

They took people.

And we did not look away.

We saw it.

We named it.

We raised hell.

And we did not stop.

(I didn’t write this. Credit goes to Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge)

SOUND ON: "Listen to the words of our sister Bisan.

"Listen closely. To each and every word. We must do everything we can, right now, to speak up and help. However we can. NOW." from Khaled Beydoun, 15/Feb/2024: