The FBI says that anti-capitalist graffiti can indicate a mobilization to violence and can be reported to the bureau, according to a counterterrorism report obtained by Prism through a public records request. The public safety awareness report, dated Jan. 30, states that “anarchist violent extremists,” dubbed AVEs by the FBI, “pose [a] persistent public safety threat.
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On the evening of June 11, 2025, Shailynn Bray-Waters joined hundreds of other protesters at a demonstration outside an ICE field office in Spokane, Washington. She’d learned through social media that two of her former ESL students — Cesar Alexander Alvarez Perez and Joswar Slater Rodriguez Torres, both lawful asylum seekers from Venezuela — had been detained during a routine immigration check-in.
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This week, Minnesota federal prosecutors handed down a blockbuster indictment of 15 activists involved in efforts to resist Operation Metro Surge, part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that flooded 2,700 federal agents into the Twin Cities to target Somali communities. Eleven of the 15 activists are charged only with conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer.
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A new, thought-provoking documentary hits theaters this summer. Beyond the Wire, by filmmaker and researcher Dr. S. Rasheem, offers a powerful counternarrative to the popular crime series The Wire. In this exclusive, one-on-one interview between Dr. Rasheem and Rattling the Bars host Mansa Musa, they explore how her background in community organizing compelled her to tell a different story of Baltimore—one focused on the boots-on-the-ground activism that defies the narrative of a hopeless, crime-ridden city in need of over-policing. Premiering this June, Beyond the Wire is already being hailed by critics and organizers alike as an indispensable representation of “The Greatest City in America.”
Credits:
Producer / Videographer / Editor: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated as soon as possible.
Mansa Musa:
Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. A new documentary Beyond the Why, which provides a powerful counter narrative to the popular crime series, The Wire is premiering this month. Today I’m honored and joined by the filmmaker, Dr. S. Rasheen. Welcome to the show, Dr. Rashid.
Dr. S. Rasheem:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here. All
Mansa Musa:
Right tell our audience a little bit about yourself and more importantly, your background and community organizing.
Dr. S. Rasheem:
Yeah. So my background as it relates to this work, how I came to even being able to a point where I’m doing filmmaking, I’ll also share that. So I am a social scientist by socialization and training. So it just means that I largely study people, large populations of people. The people that I particularly focus
Republicans are quietly constructing a punishment regime to prepare for post-democratic governance. They just don’t want you to know about it yet.
That was our takeaway from a recent exchange with Republican Congressman Mike Lawler on the steps of Capitol Hill. We asked him why Republicans were proposing an additional $70 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol—funding that the party eventually passed through a process called reconciliation, a maneuver that allowed them to bypass the filibuster in the Senate without Democratic support.
The funding, now approved, was proposed without any details. A perplexing omission, given that the Big Beautiful Bill had already bestowed an eye-popping $140 billion on the controversial immigration agencies, at least $100 billion of which remains unspent, according to a report by the Senate Budget Committee Democratic staff.
So, we asked him, “What was all this money for?”
“Are you for abolishing ICE?” Lawler shot back. We ignored his question and tried to push for specifics. He offered none.
But his non-answer was revealing. The lack of details could be written off as politics as usual, but our recent reporting suggests something more insidious.
That’s because the plan to provide nearly unlimited funding to ICE and CBP without explicit justification is just one part of a broader project that we have watched unfold on Capitol Hill. All together, it’s a push to construct the most expansive punishment regime in recent American history. And it’s a necessary component of the authoritarian overhaul pursued by the Trump administration.
The funding for ICE is just a down payment on critical infrastructure necessary to make it work.
Punishment, as we’ve observed, is currently at
On Tuesday, hundreds marched through downtown Senatobia, Mississippi, in protest of the police murder of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley two days prior. Police responded to the protest, which stopped in front of the local Walmart and continued to grow in size, by teargassing the protesters. On Sunday afternoon, police officers shot and killed 1-year-old Kohen in a car outside of the Walmart.
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