Pinned
🕊️
may he rest in eternal peace.
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)
I found this article about what your body goes through when you decide to do something like Cory Booker's 25-hour protest speech really interesting. I saw more than one person tagging posts about him with stuff like when do you pee, and this has some great answers for you
Payroll removed archived version of this link.
Do you ever think about how wei ying survived 2 months in the burial mounds literally dead but still surviving, just to fight in a war right after. Only to then later take his own life and then when he was forced back alive, he absolutely hated it at first?
And do you think about how devastating that is?
We watched him lose his will to live and that hurts my heart
Look I love unconditional devotion love stories as much as the next person, but there's really something so deliciously raw about conditional devotion.
I have served you and I have loved you for decades, but I will not give up my principles for you. You cut out part of my heart and took it with you down that path that you insist on walking, but you walk it alone. Even when the bleeding, gaping hole you left in my chest kills me, I will not follow you.
me everytime one of my seemingly non-specific homoerotic text posts breaks containment
so many dad!Zhan feelings that I had to turn the original fic into a series
🐇 dad!Zhan centric 🐇 gen fic 🐇 ~3.5k words 🐇 canon setting 🐇 baby junior quartet (sans jingyi…….but don’t worry I have plans for him)
I am contractually obligated to reblog vampirates.
Cory Booker has been talking in the senate for over 20 hours now
He’s not filibustering. He’s protesting the current administration.
For those of you from outside the US or those of you who didn’t pay attention in government class, in the US senate there’s really no limit to the amount of time a senator can speak. So sometimes if they don’t want a bill to pass they just. Don’t stop talking. To hopefully get past the deadline to vote on a bill. This is called filibustering.
Senator Cory Booker isn’t doing that. He’s disrupting “the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able”. Just in protest. This doesn’t usually happen.
He’s less than 20 minutes away from breaking the record of the longest speech given on the senate floor
Cory Booker has officially broken Strom Thurmond’s record for longest speech on the senate floor and he’s still going
For those of you wondering what he’s been talking about this whole time, his staff wrote down a bunch of stuff for him to read like stories from people across the political spectrum opposed to what the administration is doing. He’s also been telling personal anecdotes about meeting important civil rights leaders and other democratic senators have been pausing him for “questions” but the questions have been as long as a small speech and have both served the purpose of giving him a second to sit down and updating him on the news that he’s been missing while he’s been talking.
He has yielded the floor at 25 hrs and 4 mins. His eyes are so wide they look like they’re going to bug out of his skull so I don’t blame him for stopping. He said to go out and get in some good trouble.
HE BROKE THE RECORD
Senator Cory Booker just broke the all-time record for the longest Senate floor speech, speaking for over 24 hours without a pause (no food, no bathroom breaks, only water to drink) as a protest against Trump and Musk and what they're doing.
The previous record was set in 1957, when Strom Thurmond spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes protesting the Civil Rights Act.
Senator Booker has blown past that record, currently at 25 hours and still speaking as of 8 pm local time. Respect.
i need more fics where Lan Qiren begrudgingly accepts wei wuxian simply on the matter of "if i give him a project then maybe he'll shut up and leave me alone to my peace" and then being surprised when wwx supersedes and is like "ig he's not a heretic when he's given something to do" to subtly showing him off to the other sects when wwx and lwj marry like, "Ofc I couldn't let THE hanguang-jun marry someone who couldn't keep up with him, after all I taught wwx myself."
so as you might have guessed because I said I was camping in the woods to avoid getting sick (lol):
someone in my household has covid unfortunately but we did manage to get them a Paxlovid subscription. they’re uninsured, and even GoodRx coupons only brought the cost down to $1,300 USD.
I thought to check the drug manufacturer website and quickly signed up online through its portal and received a pharmacy card by email that lowered the cost to $0
There are also options for insured patients to dramatically lower their copays. I’m in the U.S., and I’m unsure whether this is applicable elsewhere, but I wanted to share this info on access to potentially lifesaving medication, for anyone it may help!