The Lights Are On, and They are Blinding
Amos / James H. Cone / Wendell BerryQuick Note: This essay is late, but I’m catching up and will be following up with February’s essay very soon, and then finally March’s essay. Thank you for hanging in there with me.
This Epiphany, the lights are not gentle. They are the overhead fluorescents snapping on in a private prison where there are people crowded in cages on the floor.
The church calendar says this is the season of revelation. Fine. Let us have some revelation.
Amos is not subtle. He addresses a nation of devout, prosperous, festival-attending people who believe God is pleased with them. The music is excellent. The offerings are on time. The courts are corrupt, the poor are being ground into dust, and God, who is apparently not as manageable as previously assumed, rejects the whole operation, the entire shebang. Take your songs away from me, God says. I will not listen to the melody of your harps. Let justice roll down like waters. Not trickle. Roll.
Reading Amos in January 2026 is not theoretical. It is a mirror held up to a country where immigration enforcement has become a killing operation. Say their names like what they are: a list that should not exist, a list that actually has thousands of entries of non-violent, law-abiding people being ground to dust.
Renée Nicole Good. Alex Pretti. Keith Porter Jr. Ruben Ray Martinez. Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres. Geraldo Lunas Campos. Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz. Parady La. Victor Manuel Diaz. Heber Sánchez Domínguez. Nurul Amin Shah Alam. Aliya Rahman. Kaden Rummler. Britain Rodriguez. D’Iris Jackson, six months old. Liam Conejo Ramos, five years old.
(Apologies for any mispronunciations. See the list below for each person’s story)
This list is in no way comprehensive and does not count all of the people taken, killed, injured, or terrorized by forces working outside of due process. The latest data indicates almost 70,000 people are in custody, 73% of whom have no criminal convictions.
The government has language for all of this. Enforcement operations. Presumed suicide. Courtesy ride. Targeted stops. Less-lethal methods.
Amos has different language. In chapter five alone: I hate, I despise your festivals. Your solemn assemblies are a stench to me. That is not a measured man. That is barely contained fury, disciplined into prophecy, aimed with precision at the people doing the harm and the people calling themselves faithful while it happens.
I have been sitting with fury for months. I have also been making signs for twenty-five years — ink and brushes, cardboard, bedsheets when someone needs a banner. You work with what you have, as the flawed person you are right now. The rage and the work are not separate things.
James Cone refuses distance as well. In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, he forces Christian readers to confront what crucifixion was: state execution, public and humiliating, meant to terrorize. He places the cross alongside the lynching tree and refuses the comfort of metaphor. If we, as Christians, follow someone executed by the state as a threat to order, then we cannot feign shock when the state defines new threats and acts accordingly. Neutrality becomes a choice.
Wendell Berry writes from the soil rather than the scaffold, but the logic is similar. In Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, he traces how extraction becomes a governing ethic: land reduced to yield, labor reduced to cost, community reduced to inefficiency. Once efficiency outranks relationship, harm becomes administrative. The damage is filed, processed, absorbed. Violence rarely begins as spectacle. It begins as paperwork.
Taken together, Amos and Cone and Berry leave very little room for moral insulation.
And yet insulation is exactly what I practiced in January.
This is the part I would rather omit. The lights were on and I could see clearly, and I did not move. I went to work. I came home. I read the news, which arrives filtered more and more through the concerns of billionaires who have already made their arrangements. I scrolled platforms engineered for outrage and drift. I felt a rage so large it had no shape, and it did not translate into action. It translated into paralysis.
That is where Lent found me.
Coming Next
FEBRUARY | Lent: Repentance & Repair
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Notes on the names above, absolutely incomplete:
Renée Nicole Good, 37, U.S. citizen and Minneapolis resident, was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on January 7, 2026, while seated in her car during an immigration enforcement operation. Video evidence contradicted the Trump administration’s claim that she had used her vehicle as a weapon. She was a mother of three. The killing sparked protests across the country. She was shot less than a mile from where George Floyd was murdered in 2020.Alex Pretti, 37, an ICU nurse and U.S. citizen, was shot and killed by federal agents on January 24, 2026, in Minneapolis while recording them on his phone during a protest. Video shows him coming to the aid of a woman who had been pushed by officers. He was carrying a legally permitted firearm in his waistband. Officers removed the gun while he was on the ground. He was then shot 10 times within 5 seconds.
Keith Porter Jr., 43, a U.S. citizen and father of two, was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve outside his apartment building in Northridge, Los Angeles, while firing celebratory shots into the air. DHS described it as a response to an “active shooter situation.” His mother said: “He didn’t even get to pop the champagne.” The agent has not been publicly identified or charged. The shooting received minimal national coverage. Porter was Black.
Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, a U.S. citizen, was shot and killed by an ICE Homeland Security Investigations agent in South Padre Island, Texas, on March 15, 2025. ICE described it as a failure to follow law enforcement instructions during a traffic incident. Sources confirmed that HSI was assisting with traffic control following an accident — not conducting immigration enforcement operations, as ICE claimed. DHS did not acknowledge the killing until media outlets broke the story in February 2026
Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, 42, a Honduran immigrant with no criminal record, died January 5, 2026, at a hospital in Houston after being held at the Joe Corley Processing Center in Texas. He had entered the country irregularly and was arrested during an enforcement operation in November 2025. ICE said he died of chronic heart-related health issues.
Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55, a Cuban father, died at the Camp East Montana detention facility in El Paso, Texas, in January 2026. Local authorities ruled his death a homicide. It was the second death at that facility in January alone, the third since December 2025. ICE’s public disclosure came late and contained almost no information.
Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, 68, had lived in the United States for more than 20 years when ICE picked him up in New Jersey in November 2025 and transferred him to a detention center in California. He died January 6, 2026, after being hospitalized for heart-related health issues. His family said he had been ill for weeks and was given only pain medication. His daughter Josselyn Yanez said: “We hoped our father would get out of that place, that he would come out alive — not the way he did.”
Parady La, 46, a Cambodian father who came to the United States at age two, was arrested by ICE on January 6, 2026, and sent to the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia, where he experienced severe drug withdrawal. He was found unresponsive in his cell the next day. ICE administered naloxone — a drug used to treat opioid overdose, not withdrawal — and transferred him to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with anoxic brain injury, cardiac arrest, shock, and multiple organ failure. He died January 9. His nephew Michael La said the account they were receiving "just didn't add up."
Victor Manuel Diaz, a Nicaraguan immigrant, was arrested in Minneapolis on January 6, 2026, as part of Operation Metro Surge and transferred to a detention facility in Texas. He died in custody eight days later. ICE ruled it a presumed suicide. His brother Yorlan said: “I don’t believe he took his life. He was not a criminal. He was looking for a better life.”
Heber Sánchez Domínguez, 34, a Mexican husband and father, was arrested and sent to the Robert A. Deyton Detention Facility in Georgia. Seven days later, on January 14, 2026, he was found hanging in his cell. No criminal investigation has been reported.
Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind Rohingya refugee, was given what Border Patrol described as a “courtesy ride” and left alone at a coffee shop in Buffalo, New York, without his family being notified. He was found dead days later in the winter cold.
Aliya Rahman, a disabled Minneapolis woman, was dragged from her car by masked ICE agents on her way to a medical appointment. She told agents she could not exit the vehicle due to her disability. An agent smashed her passenger window and she was forcibly removed and taken to a detention center, where she lost consciousness after being denied medical care. DHS described her as an “agitator.”
Kaden Rummler, 21, a college student hoping to pursue a career in forestry, was permanently blinded in his left eye when a federal agent shot a projectile into his face at point-blank range at a protest in Santa Ana, California, on January 9, 2026. He underwent six hours of surgery. Shards of metal and a nickel-sized piece of plastic remain lodged in his skull. He can no longer drive.
Britain Rodriguez, 31, was also blinded in one eye by a projectile fired by federal agents at the same Santa Ana protest as Rummler.
D’Iris Jackson is six months old. His family — parents Destiny and Shawn Jackson and five siblings — were driving home from a basketball game in Minneapolis on January 14, 2026, when they became trapped between protesters and federal agents. ICE agents rolled a tear gas canister under their SUV. The airbags deployed, the doors locked, and the vehicle filled with toxic smoke. Bystanders broke the family out. D’Iris was limp and unresponsive. His mother, a certified EMT, performed CPR on him in a stranger’s house while she said: “I’m going to give you every breath I have until you get yours back.” His father approached an ICE agent for help. The agent gripped his gun and told him to calm down.
Liam Conejo Ramos is five years old. He was wearing a Spider-Man backpack and returning from preschool with his father on January 20, 2026, when ICE agents detained them in their driveway in Columbia Heights, Minnesota. His father is an asylum seeker with no criminal record. School officials say agents directed Liam to knock on his own front door to draw family members out. His mother, pregnant, watched from the window. Both father and son were transferred to a detention facility in Texas described by attorneys as having contaminated water and food with insects in it. ICE disputes the word bait. The image of Liam in his blue hat, escorted by masked federal agents, circulated worldwide.
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