NONE OF US ARE SAFE
The night before Alex was killed, Minneapolis was already awake.
Thousands of people filled the downtown streets—chanting, marching, demanding answers after yet another life was taken by federal immigration agents. The air carried grief, rage, and something else that felt heavier: recognition. This was not an isolated incident. This was not a mistake. This was escalation.
By morning, Alex was dead.
Two Americans killed by ICE in Minneapolis. Both white. And suddenly the fear feels louder in rooms where it once barely whispered.
For generations, marginalized communities—Black, Brown, Indigenous, undocumented—have lived with the quiet certainty that the state can kill us and call it policy, procedure, or protocol. We have organized funerals while officials held press conferences. We have buried loved ones under the language of “officer-involved shootings” and “ongoing investigations.” We know what it means to protest one night and mourn the next.
What is different now is not the violence. What is different is who is being forced to see it.
White Americans are encountering a fear they have largely been shielded from: the fear of state violence as something indiscriminate, uncontainable, and unaccountable. The fear that compliance does not guarantee safety. The fear that citizenship does not function as armor. The fear that the system will not protect you—it may be the thing that kills you.
The fact that the victims were white should not be the reason this moment matters. But it is the reason so many people are finally paying attention.
For those of us from marginalized communities, the message has always been clear. If the state can brutalize immigrants, it can brutalize citizens. If it can disappear Black and Brown bodies into detention centers, jails, and graves, it can do the same to anyone once political conditions allow it. Power that is unchecked does not stay targeted. It spreads.
The protests that filled Minneapolis the night before Alex was killed were not just about grief—they were about warning. People were already saying: this is dangerous. This is out of control. This is what happens when militarized agencies operate without accountability in our neighborhoods.
And still, by morning, there was another body.
The fear rippling through marginalized communities right now is not hypothetical. It is a deepening confirmation. If white Americans—people historically buffered by race, citizenship, and proximity to power—can be killed by federal agents in public spaces, then none of us are safe. Not organizers. Not bystanders. Not nurses. Not parents. Not people simply trying to live.
White supremacy has always relied on a lie: that violence is reserved for “others,” that safety is a reward for proximity to whiteness and obedience to the state. What Minneapolis is revealing—again—is that this promise was never real. It was conditional. And conditions are changing.
This is not about centering white pain. It is about recognizing what marginalized communities have been saying for decades: state violence is a structural threat, not a personal failure. It does not require wrongdoing. It requires permission.
And that permission has been granted—through silence, through deference to federal authority, through the normalization of armed agents operating with impunity in civilian life.
The streets of Minneapolis were full because people understand this instinctively. Protest is not chaos—it is collective survival. It is what happens when communities try to stop the next killing before it happens.
We are at an inflection point. Either we confront the reality that agencies like ICE function as instruments of racialized state violence—or we continue pretending these deaths are anomalies while the body count grows.
If white Americans are beginning to feel the fear that has long defined life for the rest of us, the question is not whether that fear is justified. It is whether it will finally produce solidarity, accountability, and action.
Because the truth is simple and devastating:
None of us are safe under a system that answers protest with bullets and grief with excuses.
And until that system is dismantled, the streets will keep filling—and the names will keep growing.
Click links for more information
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20260108/118805/HMKP-119-JU00-20260108-SD004.pdf
