2026 began on the heels of a death at the hands of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), setting the stage for both mass mobilizations and increased violence from the current presidential administration. On New Year’s Eve 2025, forty-three-year-old Keith Porter Jr.—a father of two, a son, and a brother—was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent outside his apartment in Northridge, Los Angeles.
Porter’s death went largely unnoticed. For weeks, it did not electrify national movements against ICE and its brutality. It did not dominate cable news panels, spark congressional hearings, or generate sustained nationwide protest. By contrast, the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, both of whom were killed in January by ICE agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, quickly galvanized national demonstrations and intense media coverage.
This disparity and its subsequent discussion are not about ranking grief or diminishing loss; every life taken unjustly by the state deserves accountability. But the uneven response forces us to consider a hard question: Why do some deaths become national calls to action while others are absorbed quietly into the background noise of American violence?
The answer lies, in some part, in this country’s racial attention economy. Historians, scholars, and activists have often discussed “missing white woman syndrome,” a phenomenon in which missing person cases involving white victims receive disproportionate coverage and urgency compared to those involving people of color. The same sad logic operates with violence perpetrated by police and federal law enforcement. A 2019 study concluded that white people’s views on abuses of power in policing violence depends on the race of the victim. That same study even found evidence suggesting “that white respondents react more strongly to a police shooting if the victim is a dog than a Black man.”
Alternatively, Black and brown communities consistently show up when white people are harmed. From multiracial coalitions protesting federal overreach to Black-led movements demanding justice for all victims of state violence, solidarity has rarely been conditional. In 2019, after an on-duty officer killed Justine Damond—a white woman—Black, white, and brown protestors demanded justice. This killing culminated in a rarity, the first on-duty murder conviction for an officer in the state of Minnesota. Yet, outside of the flash in the pan movements of 2020, the inverse of reciprocated unconditional support is not reliably true. Quite frankly, Black suffering often requires a white counterpart to become legible as a national crisis.
Eight people have been killed by or died in ICE custody this year alone. Good and Pretti are well known at this point, but the others often go unnamed, reserved to be mourned by their loved ones, without national outrage and mobilization in their name. So let us grieve the lives of Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Víctor Manuel Díaz, Parady La, Luis Beltrán Yáñez-Cruz, and Heber Sánchez Domínguez. In 2025, thirty-two people lost their lives at the hands of ICE—and they also deserve justice in their names.
Unfortunately, this is how whiteness and white supremacy works. As a culture, the United States has assessed a value to Black and brown lives that is viewed as less when compared to our white counterparts.
Remember #SayHerName, the popular slogan addressing the police murder of Breonna Taylor and the many other Black women who have been forgotten in the hands of state violence? The Say Her Name movement was created by Kimberlé Crenshaw and the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) to highlight the failure of society to mention Black women in the broader discussion of police violence—the movement had to literally implore white Americans to say Taylor’s name.
This is not new. From the founding of this country, to the Jim Crow era and through the present, Black death has been normalized in ways that white death has not. Emmett Till’s murder only shook the nation because his mother refused to allow the country to look away. Visibility had to be forced then, as it often does now.
Keith Porter Jr. should be a name that commands nationwide reckoning—not because his death is exceptional, but because it is emblematic. White bloodshed should not be the prerequisite for mass mobilization. A just society does not wait for whiteness to confer urgency on injustice.
If movements for accountability are to mean anything, they must reject a hierarchy of grief. State violence is a systemic problem, and it demands a response rooted in equal humanity—no matter the victim’s race.