Yesterday, the country woke up to the news of state violence: Renee Nicole Good was clearly murdered by an ICE agent. There was video and headlines and shock. Renee was a mother, a wife, and a white woman, and her death sparked a new level of public outrage among Americans.
That reaction matters — and it also tells the truth.
In 2025, at least 32 people died in ICE custody, the deadliest year in more than two decades. We also know at least five more people were killed in enforcement operations — shootings, raids, traffic stops, and other encounters in our communities. The majority were Black and Brown community members. These deaths happened quietly. Without footage. Without national outrage. Without the moral reckoning we afford to victims who look like those in power.
This is how violence survives: through force, yes, but also through selective attention — whose pain is marketable, whose life is worthy of grief, whose death demands accountability.
As The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), one of our partners, has warned, “This cruelty doesn’t just harm immigrants — it corrodes the rule of law itself.” When a system is allowed to harm, kidnap, and displace some without consequence, it will eventually come for all we hold dear. That is not a warning. It is a pattern.
art via @theunapologeticstreetseries
Gender and racial equity are not abstractions. They are how we understand who is protected and who is left exposed. They explain why this moment feels like an awakening for some — and a confirmation for many who have been living with this violence all along.
Across California, partners like La Defensa and CHIRLA are building the infrastructure that makes accountability possible — court watch, community defense, policy change, and organizing that refuses to let state violence operate unseen.
But let’s be clear: not everyone killed by ICE gets headlines. Keith Porter was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent in Northridge on New Year’s Day — and almost no one talked about it. He wasn’t a white woman. He didn’t make the news. His death is part of a long pattern of violence that remains invisible until it touches someone the media deems important.
Our neighbors, our friends, our families are all at risk. This is the moment to move: to fund the work, stand with impacted communities, and choose collective protection over silence.
That’s why we fund and follow the leadership of organizations rooted in justice that have been doing this work long before the headlines:
ICE and the agents responsible for separating, kidnapping, and murdering members of our communities must be held accountable. Let 2026 be the year we abolish ICE. Let 2026 be the year we stop the raids, the deportations, and all anti-immigrant violence.
Let what scares and enrages you today become the power we wield together tomorrow.