Away Again, While the State Takes Another Life Near George Floyd Square

I was not in Minneapolis when George Floyd was murdered.

Like so many who love that city, I watched from afar as a place that raised me cracked open before the world—its grief livestreamed, its streets turned into both a crime scene and a sanctuary. The distance did not soften the blow. It sharpened it. To be away was to feel helpless, untethered, and furious all at once.

And now, I am away again.

This time, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement took a life just steps from George Floyd Square.

The government has released a statement. Witnesses who were there tell a different story. Officials insist on procedure, protocol, and justification. Community members insist on what they saw with their own eyes. But beneath the dueling narratives is a truth that cannot be press-released away: a woman is dead, and ICE is responsible.

George Floyd Square is not neutral ground. It is sacred ground. It is a living memorial created not by the state, but by ordinary people who refused to let the world forget what state violence looks like. Violence occurring so close to that space is not coincidence—it is continuity. It is a reminder that the machinery that killed George Floyd never stopped moving; it simply changed uniforms, jurisdictions, and talking points.

We are told, again, to wait for the investigation. To trust the process. To withhold judgment. But communities like mine have been asked to wait for generations, and the waiting has always come with bodies. The pattern is familiar: an agency acts with lethal force, the state issues a carefully worded statement, and those closest to the harm are asked to doubt their own eyes, their own grief, their own truth.

This is how erasure happens—not only through death, but through narrative control.

Immigration enforcement is too often framed as administrative, bureaucratic, bloodless. But ICE is a policing institution, born from the same logic that treats certain lives as threats rather than people. Its violence is racialized. Its targets are dehumanized. And when that violence results in death, proximity to George Floyd Square should force a national reckoning, not a footnote.

For Minneapolis, this is retraumatization. For those of us shaped by that city, it is heartbreak layered on heartbreak. To be away is to feel the old wound reopen—the sense that no matter where you go, the state’s capacity to harm follows the same script.

We do not need perfect facts to name a moral truth. A woman is dead. Her death occurred in the course of state enforcement. That alone demands accountability, transparency, and humility from institutions that have shown us, time and again, that they do not deserve blind trust.

George Floyd Square exists because the people built it when the government failed them. The least we can do now is listen to those same people when they tell us what they witnessed. The least we can do is refuse to let another life be obscured by official language and bureaucratic distance.

I was away when George Floyd was killed. I am away now. But distance does not absolve us of responsibility. If anything, it demands that we speak louder—so that the dead are not rewritten out of the story, and so that the living are not asked, yet again, to carry this grief alone. -