There’s a question I keep coming back to lately: why does it take a certain kind of victim for people in this country to finally start paying attention to government violence? It’s not a new question. It’s actually one that’s been answered over and over again but most people just don’t want to look at the answer directly. 

Think back to 2020, when George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on his neck for over nine minutes. The video went viral everywhere. Millions of people took to the streets, there were protests in all 50 states and even in other countries. There were a lot of people who genuinely felt something and wanted change but also a lot of people who had never cared before suddenly cared. But why didn’t they care before? Black people in this country had been saying for decades that the police were killing them without facing almost any consequences. They weren’t making it up. The data was there. But it took a video and a specific video of a man dying slowly and visibly on camera. And then what happened? The protests soon faded, calls to reform police departments mostly stalled or got rolled back. Some of the cities that made the loudest promises quietly increased their police budgets a year or two later. And the killings kept happening. According to mappingpoliceviolence.org, police killed more than 1,100 people in the United States in 2022, 2023 and 2024. A lot of those were unarmed Black men. Most of those names never went viral. Most of those families never got a White House statement or a national moment of silence. Most of the country went back to not paying attention, until the next video surfaced that was impossible to look away from. 

Now fast forward to 2025 and 2026. Immigration enforcement under the Trump administration has ramped up dramatically. According to the American Immigration Council, arrests of people with no criminal record surged by 2,450 percent in Trump’s first year, driven by things like street patrols, workplace raids, and re-arrests of people who showed up to scheduled ICE check-ins. According to NPR, nearly 60,000 people were being held in immigration detention by fall of 2025, the highest number in years. And people are dying. According to NPR, 2025 was the deadliest year in ICE custody since 2004, with at least 20 people dying while detained. One man in Texas was choked to death by guards and the case was ruled a homicide. Another detainee died after repeated medical complaints were ignored. Former officials told NPR that the DHS oversight office responsible for investigating those deaths had been gutted with hundreds of staff cuts, meaning even less accountability going forward. These are not complicated cases. These are people in government custody who died and the government was responsible for keeping them alive. But there were no protests outside the White House. No viral hashtags. No celebrities posting about it. 

Here in Connecticut it’s happening too, closer than most people realize. According to an analysis by the CT Mirror using federal data, ICE made 405 arrests in Connecticut from January through July of 2025 alone, more than doubling the number made during the same period in 2024. Stamford, Danbury, Bridgeport, and Norwalk were all heavily targeted in August 2025, according to CT Public and CT Mirror, federal officers went inside the Stamford courthouse, broke through a bathroom door, and took two men into custody who had come to court as victims of an armed robbery. But still wasn’t enough to get the country outraged.

Then January 7, 2026 happened: Renee Good, a 37-year-old woman, was shot and killed by an ICE agent on a residential street in Minneapolis after dropping her son off at school that morning. The administration immediately said she tried to run an officer over. Videos reviewed by ABC News and CNN showed her car turning away from the agent when the shots were fired. Then January 24, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and military veteran, was shot and killed by two CBP officers while filming an immigration enforcement operation on his phone. Now people are starting to pay attention. And I understand why these deaths got attention; There was video evidence. They were white American citizens with sympathetic backstories. It makes sense that those things move people. But I keep thinking about the 20-plus people who died in ICE detention centers in 2025 with none of that. I keep thinking about the unarmed Black men killed by police every year whose names most of us never learned. When the victims are Black men killed by police or immigrants dying in detention, the story rarely breaks out of the communities most affected. It gets covered, but quietly. It gets noted, then moved past. The outrage, when it comes at all, stays small and local and easy to ignore. The difference isn’t what happened to Renee Good and Alex Pretti wasn’t serious. It absolutely was. The difference is who we’ve already decided deserves our grief and who we’ve already decided is just the cost of a policy we don’t have to think too hard about. That’s not just a media problem. That’s an us problem. 

If you believe government violence is wrong, then you have to believe it’s wrong all the time, for everyone, not just when it’s finally impossible to ignore.