Will you stand up for your community when the time comes, or will you bow to the oppressor in hopes they won’t turn on you too?
Questions like this should not be controversial but a point of basic humanity. Yet, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ravages our streets and communities, such humanity has been lost.
Our humanity should extend beyond party lines, beyond ideology and beyond any political label. We should care for those in our community who make our lives truly what they are.
On Jan. 24, Alex Jeffrey Pretti was brutally attacked and murdered by ICE for trying to live by his occupational oath: “Do no harm.” He was a U.S. citizen, intensive-care nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis and someone’s son.
On Jan. 7, Renee Nicole Good, who was also a U.S. citizen and a, mother of three was shot in the head as she simply attempted to drive away from ICE.
Such recent murders do not even scratch the surface of the harm, fear and chaos that ICE — and frankly the Trump administration — have unleashed upon our country.
A country founded by immigrants, on the notion of freedom and on the ideals of checks and balances. A country that has now lost its way, leaving people who demand change screaming into deaf ears.
Meanwhile, innocent lives are being ripped away.
Think of the neighbors who sing happy birthday while you sit with a sombrero on your head, the stranger who pulls over to help you on the side of the road and the nurses and doctors who care for you at your weakest. Those people are your community, not the politicians who sit in their ivory towers unaffected while people are being murdered.
When will it be enough? When they kill your mother, father, son or daughter, is that when you will decide to stand up?
