🚨 Weekend Hot Takes🚨

A Country in Chaos - Week Ending June 15, 2025

Good morning, Red Umbrella fam. Hope your coffee is strong and your boundaries stronger, because this weekend delivered a full-course meal of carceral nonsense, QAnon fever dreams, ICE agents crashing into elementary school zones, and a grown man throwing himself a military parade for his birthday. So yeah—just another totally normal weekend in the land of the free.

Listen to Audio Version HERE!

🔥 Florida’s War on the Unhoused Heats Up—Again

While most Floridians were dodging summer storms and eating boiled peanuts, Governor DeSantis quietly greenlit new local ordinances that criminalize public camping—even in cities with zero available shelter beds.

Translation: exist while poor, and catch a charge. Again.

We’d ask where the compassion is, but let’s be honest: this isn’t about safety, it’s about optics. Sweep the sidewalks for tourism, disappear the people, and use jails as de facto shelters. Same playbook, shinier press release.

💡 What we need: Housing FIRST, not handcuffs. Dignity, not displacement.

What we got? More criminal charges. Less Public Safety.

🍔 The Cheeseburger Caper That Wasn’t

QAnon blogs struck again this weekend, claiming a burger joint in California was a front for child trafficking. Their “evidence”? Vague work schedules, Instagram photos, and… someone using the bathroom too often.

Spoiler: No trafficking. Just underpaid workers trying to survive. But the flood of tips clogged up lines—including Polaris—leaving real survivors on hold.

🌕 Bonus chaos and for those who keep track of the moon cycles: Yes, it was a full moon. Yes, our hotline lit up like it was Mercury retrograde and Friday the 13th.

🚗  ICE on the Run—Literally

Last Tuesday in Westbury, Long Island, ICE (or more precisely, Homeland Security Investigations) agents crashed into a pickup truck near an elementary school after being confronted by furious parents.

Why the confrontation? Because unmarked cars full of feds loitering around schools set off panic—especially for immigrant families who’ve seen too many disappearances that start just like this.

Community members surrounded the agents, shouting "You should be ashamed!” and “Are you the parent of a child at this school” and finally “Get the f—k out of here!” until the  masked cowards fled—only to slam into another vehicle during their getaway. (We really wish we were making this up.) Yes. You heard right.

They punched the gas and took off, running a stop sign causing yet another crash.

ICE says it wasn’t a school raid. But you know what it was? A reminder of how terrorizing everyday life has become for many.

Let that sink in: A single “routine investigation” by ICE agents caused a full-blown freeze in essential community services.

Lawmakers are calling it “brute force.” ICE is calling it standard procedure. Either way, the people left holding the trauma are the ones least protected and most criminalized.

🎂 Oh Right… That Parade

Oops, we almost forgot to mention the most absurd flex of the weekend:Former President Donald J. Trump celebrated his 78th birthday by hijacking the Army’s 250th anniversary celebration and turning it into a full-blown military cosplay parade. Yes, there were tanks. Yes, there were uniforms. Yes, there were anthems blasting like it was a boot camp TikTok.

And the crowd? Well, word on the street is that the “usual big Trump crowds” (🙄) were more of a modest gathering—maybe 2,000 people total. Could’ve been the closed-off streets… or the event map… or maybe just the fact that reading maps isn’t exactly the strongest skill set in the MAGA demographic. Which, honestly, tracks—given how confusing ballot instructions seem to be too.

Because nothing says “please clap” quite like rerouting the military for a birthday party where half the audience can’t find the entrance and the other half doesn’t understand what they’re cheering for.

Meanwhile, actual millions were in the streets chanting “NO KINGS”, waving signs like “We’re not pledging allegiance to delusion.” While one side paraded props, the other side brought the people.

🎂 Happy Birthday, I guess? Maybe next year just rent a bounce house and call it a day.

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🔍 What This Means for Us

Criminalization of Fear: Federal agents are policing presence itself—poor, housed or unhoused, immigrant or dancer, doesn’t matter. If you’re vulnerable, you’re a target.

Collateral Damage: These “operations” destroy access to critical services. People don’t just disappear into jail—they disappear from the community.

Our Role: We know what state violence looks like in heels or in uniforms. It’s our lived experience that tells the truth behind these headlines.

🗣️ Monday Action Call

🔺 Raise awareness in your networks—especially about ICE showing up unannounced in immigrant communities and how it echoes carceral logic used against sex workers.

🔺 Fund grassroots responses: legal aid, mutual aid, and sanctuary programs—not more body cams or barbed wire.

🔺 Listen to survivors and sex workers. You can find us in the coal mine and we are chirping our asses off. Sex Workers and Survivors know what safety actually looks like—and it’s never a raid.

Closing Rant

Here’s what this weekend taught us (again):

It’s not that people don’t care about trafficking or safety—it’s how they care. When concern turns into clickbait raid, tanks-for-birthdays, and ICE agents running over neighborhoods, the most vulnerable people pay the price.

You want to help? Then stop handing the mic to law enforcement and start passing the resources to peer-led orgs doing the work every damn day.

Real Problems. Real Solutions.

We’ve got the roadmap—if people are finally ready to listen.

Because justice wears a red umbrella, not a badge.

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