IN MEMORY

IN MEMORY

Miguel Angel Garcia-Hernandez
Norlan Guzman-Fuentes
Huabing Xie
Ismael Ayala Uribe
Santos Reyes-Banegas
Oscar Duarte Rascon
Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas
Chaofeng Ge
Tien Xuan Phan
Isidro Perez
Johnny Noviello
Jesus Molina-Veya
Abelardo Avelleneda-Delgado
Marie Ange Blaise
Nhon Ngoc Nguyen
Brayan Rayo-Garzon
Juan Alexis Tineo-Martinez
Maksym Chernyak
Serawit Gezahegn Dejene
Genry Ruiz Guillen

They died in 2025 while in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

They were not statistics.
They were not administrative failures.
They were not “incidents.”

They were people with names, histories, families, and futures interrupted under state supervision.

Each death represents a choice.
Detention over care.
Enforcement over life.

Beyond detention centers, people have also died as a direct result of immigration enforcement tactics: raids, high-speed pursuits, armed confrontations, and strategies designed to terrify rather than protect. These deaths often occur away from cameras, in fields and factories, on highways, at job sites, and in neighborhoods abruptly transformed into militarized zones.

Renee Nicole Good
Legal observer, shot and killed while monitoring an ICE operation in Minneapolis.
January 7, 2026.

Jose Castro-Rivera
A 24-year-old Honduran man struck and killed by a vehicle while fleeing ICE agents after a traffic stop in Virginia.
October 23, 2025.

Silverio Villegas González
Killed during an immigration enforcement action in a Chicago suburb.
September 2025.

Unnamed Farmworker
Killed in California after falling from a greenhouse while attempting to escape an ICE raid.
July 2025.

Name Withheld
Killed in Los Angeles by an off-duty ICE agent using his service weapon.
December 31, 2025. Investigation ongoing.

These deaths are not anomalies.
They are the foreseeable outcomes of policies that treat migration as a crime, enforcement as warfare, and human beings as expendable.

REHUMANIZATION

Rehumanization is the work of returning the human to places where it has been stripped away. It counters dehumanization by restoring dignity, empathy, and specificity, insisting that people are not abstractions, threats, or functions, but living, contradictory, feeling beings.

Rehumanization happens through listening, through stories, through attention, through choosing relationship over efficiency and care over extraction. Dehumanization is never abstract: it enables violence, justifies inequality, and teaches indifference. Rehumanization interrupts that logic by making humanity visible again, in others and in ourselves.

Counteracting Dehumanization
Actively resisting narratives and systems that reduce people to labels, enemies, or expendable labor.

Restoring Dignity
Affirming inherent worth where shame, trauma, or structural violence have eroded selfhood.

Reawakening Empathy
Relearning how to see others as intentional, feeling subjects rather than problems to be managed.

Rehumanization heals trauma, challenges systemic oppression, and rebuilds trust. It slows the machinery that turns people into numbers and insists on presence, care, and accountability. Without it, cruelty becomes procedural. With it, connection becomes possible again.

IN THIS MOMENT

Eight days into 2026, life can feel unbearable under this regime of hate and sanctioned cruelty. There are moments when it seems designed to exhaust us, to make us believe that endurance itself is futile. That sense of impossibility feels intentional, as if breaking the collective spirit is part of the strategy.

And yet, something else is happening at the same time.

In response to this violence, people are finding one another. Lines that once felt fixed are beginning to blur. Communities that rarely spoke are starting to listen. The loudest voices of hate, though aggressive and unhinged, are revealing themselves as what they are: a minority, amplified but not representative. Their power depends on noise, not numbers.

What feels dangerous now may also be clarifying. The threat is real, but so is the resistance forming against it. People who never imagined standing side by side are beginning to understand that survival, dignity, and democracy require collective action. Not agreement on everything, but agreement on what matters most.

We can argue about our differences later.
Right now, the work is staying human, staying together, and refusing to be broken.

THE LIE OF COMPARISON

Some point out that more people were deported under Biden, Obama, Bush, or Clinton. That may be factually true if we are only counting numbers. But numbers alone don’t tell the story, and they never have.

What distinguishes this moment is not deportation as policy, but deportation as ideology.

What we are witnessing now is immigration enforcement openly tied to an attack on democracy itself: the erosion of individual rights, the normalization of state violence, the dismantling of due process, and the explicit appeal to racial grievance. This is enforcement framed not as governance, but as punishment. Not as law, but as spectacle. Not as policy, but as a tool for restoring a mythic, majority-white America.

Previous administrations operated within deeply flawed systems and caused real harm. They deserve critique. But they did not openly frame immigration as an existential racial threat. They did not celebrate cruelty, chaos, and fear as political strategy. They did not rely on dehumanization as a rallying cry or treat state violence as proof of strength.

Intent matters.
Language matters.
Context matters.

This is not about tallying removals. It is about the use of state power to divide, intimidate, and break democratic norms while targeting already vulnerable communities. It is about transforming enforcement into a cultural weapon and making cruelty the point.

We can and should critique past administrations. But pretending all deportation regimes are morally equivalent ignores the reality in front of us.

What is happening now is not simply more of the same.
It is something darker, more explicit, and more dangerous.

And naming that difference is not partisan.
It is necessary.

A LIVING RECORD

Sadly, this may become a living document.

The road ahead is uncertain, but one thing is already clear: the violence is not accidental, and the rhetoric is not harmless. When cruelty is normalized, when fear is cultivated, when entire communities are framed as threats, tragedy follows. Not hypothetically. Predictably.

If more names are added here, it will not be because no one warned us.
It will be because hate was allowed to harden into policy, and violence was allowed to masquerade as governance.

This memorial exists not only to remember those already lost, but to insist that what comes next is neither inevitable nor unseen.