Whose Lives Move Us?

The Truth of Our Moral Failure

I am grateful today that people are demanding change in immigration enforcement. Compassion matters. Protests work. Public pressure can save lives. When the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti finally broke through the national conscience, it seems that something is beginning to shift.

But we must be honest and speak the following truth:

It is a moral failure that it took these deaths for so many of us to care.

Before their names were spoken on national news, other names were spoken only in detention logs, medical reports, and quiet phone calls to grieving families. This year alone (it has only been a month), the lives of several immigrants have been lost while in the custody of ICE, among them: Heber Sanchaz Domínguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Parady La, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Núñez Caceres, and Geraldo Lunas Campos.

And they are not alone. In 2025, dozens more died or disappeared in detention centers across this country, largely unseen and unheard by the wider public.

Their deaths did not spark marches. Their names did not trend on social media. Their stories were rarely told.

And that silence should trouble us deeply.

It is also important to tell the truth about Keith Porter Jr. He was a 43-year-old Black father of two, a U.S. citizen, killed on New Year’s Eve by an off-duty ICE agent in Los Angeles. His death, too, received far less attention than recent high-profile cases, despite raising serious questions about the use of force and accountability by federal immigration agents. Porter’s story reminds us that systems built on fear and unchecked power do not only harm detainees behind locked doors, but they spill into neighborhoods, communities, and everyday life.

The harm we are witnessing is not only political, it is profoundly spiritual. Scripture reveals that God does not measure human worth by citizenship, skin tone, or public visibility, and shows particular concern for those whose lives are easiest to ignore: the foreigner, the detained, the poor, the marginalized. When Jesus says that the truth will set us free, he is not speaking only of personal honesty. He is calling us to tell the truth about whose lives we grieve, and whose lives we have learned not to see.

Again, I am grateful that people are finally calling for change. However, there is a dangerous temptation in moments like this to settle for selective compassion; that is, to mourn loudly when the story feels familiar, when the victim looks like “one of us,” or when the violence happens in public view. But the gospel does not allow us to draw such narrow circles of concern. Jesus consistently widens them. Again and again, he pulls the invisible into the center and asks his followers, “Do you see them now” (Luke 7:44)?

This is not about minimizing any death. Renée Good and Alex Pretti deserved to live. Their families deserve justice, but so do the families of the immigrants who died behind locked doors, far from cameras and crowds, and so does the family of Keith Porter Jr.

If our outrage depends on visibility, it is not yet shaped by love. If our compassion stops at the border of citizenship or is different because of the color of one’s skin, they are not yet shaped by Christ.

The Church exists to tell the truth the world would rather avoid. And one of the hardest truths we must face right now is this: a corrupt, racist system that routinely detains, neglects, and dehumanizes people, and then lies about it, will continue to take lives unless we rise up and demand something different.

This is a moment not just for protest, but for repentance. We must repent for the times we did not ask who was missing, and we must repent for the names we never learned. Then, after repentance, we must recommit to speak out, to remember, and to insist that every life bears God’s image and therefore deserves our concern and calls for justice. And then, we must demand change with our voices and our votes.

It is the truth that can and will set us free. But only if we are brave enough to tell the whole truth.