Silence is how erasure finishes its work. So, we speak their names:  Renee Nicole Good, Alex Jeffrey Pretti. Their names come to us as grief, as outrage, as the unbearable weight of lives taken. Taken by a world that has decided that  disagreement is dangerous, defiance is fatal, and compliance is survival.   “No” can cost us everything. Refusing, questioning, hesitating …even for a moment… can be answered with a weapon. Death. Ancient hope… Ancient hope where someone will stop and help and ask, “Are you okay?” is stripped away. Stripped away by fear and force. We live in a world where a Good Samaritan doctor cannot even do the most human thing, cannot place fingers on a body to check for life. How many more will die surrounded by a system that has forgotten how to listen, that confuses safety with control, that answers humanity with domination? We are called to stand witness. We cannot look away. We cannot rush past their names. Renee Nicole Good. Alex Jeffrey Pretti.   We cannot move toward comfort and closure, or ignoring. We are called to stand witness. Stand witness to lives taken. Murdered. Stand witness and say that this should not have happened, that this must not be normal. We are called to stand witness. And may it be loud. May it be relentless. May our grief become refusal, refusal to accept a world where this keeps happening. Renee Nicole Good. Alex Jeffrey Pretti.

In honoring these two individuals killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis, we must also remember that their deaths are not isolated tragedies but part of a broader pattern of loss and lives lost under ICE enforcement, and all people killed by ICE deserve to be named and held in our collective witness.

— Reflections appears regularly on the religion page. The column features a variety of local writers, coordinated through the Monroe Area Clergy Group. Rev. Christina Schoenwetter is the Associate Pastor of Engagement at St. John’s United Church of Christ in Monroe.