Are We Mad Yet?

As I and others from RPA joined a vigil with nurses at Kaiser in Richmond, I was reminded of the past we cannot forget.

We stand with immigrants and against ICE. Our purpose to be in service to our community is renewed as we support our diverse neighbors regardless of their origins, their immigration status, or the color of their skin.

To date three American citizens that we know about have been killed in state sanctioned violence by ICE: Keith Porter Jr (12/31/25) Renee Nicole Good(Jan 7, 26) and Alex Pretti (Jan 24, 26). In 2025, a record number (thirty-two) of people detained by ICE died in their custody. A 5-year-old, sickened while imprisoned by ICE along with his father, was released after Justice Fred Bier labeled ICE’s detainment of the pair as the “fox guarding the henhouse” in a scathing stay.

Are we mad yet?

I am a Black woman. For over 400 years, people who look like me have known and experienced what most U.S. residents are experiencing for the first time. We have been lynched, murdered, disenfranchised, and had our wealth and property stolen (e.g., Seneca Village, Black Wall Street, to name two). We have had our bodies experimented on. Since our arrival on U.S. land, we have been victims of state-sanctioned violence against us. The trauma is captured and trapped in our bodies. It’s in our DNA. We remember; we cannot forget. We constantly experience the fight or flight response to the stressors that we face. Our bodies won’t let us forget. Our country won’t let us forget. I won’t let us forget.

America was built on the backs of Blacks, but we don’t have ownership. Our truth is fiercely and continuously being erased. Just this past January in Philadelphia, a monument was dismantled that honored nine people enslaved by President George Washington.

Immigrants in this country pay into our social security system, yet they cannot retrieve funds in their old age; they prop up our economy, and yet are met with violence and intimidation by a government that knows their worth. Many of us have lived through this before; we know the story deep in our bones.

I recently watched a 23-year-old Black woman who, through tears, described her abduction and incarceration by ICE. She reported that she was forcibly taken along with a Native American woman as if neither had the right to exist in this country. Who has the right to this country if not Black and indigenous people? 

This country that was once a haven for so many is now one where nobody should feel safe. That is by design.  We watch as the American people are bamboozled into thinking the government is declaring war on drugs and immigrants who are undocumented and criminal. If Minnesota has taught us anything, ICE is not simply enforcing immigration laws. Under this administration, ICE is coming for our constitutional rights (the same constitution that includes immigrants), our peace, our safety, our privacy, our government coffers, and more. The President of the United States and his sons are currently suing the IRS for 10 billion dollars, even though our tax information was shared with unauthorized recipients by Doge.

After recently celebrating Dr Martin Luther King’s life, I was drawn back to my childhood, where my siblings and I piled into our home to find our usually busy parents glued to the television. We sat quiet, motionless, and mesmerized on the floor watching the black and white television set. I can still feel the discomfort of seeing Black women, men, and children attacked with powerful water hoses. Dogs, German Shepherds, pouncing on command upon innocent women, men, and children. We saw and understood the hatred in the eyes of supposed law enforcement and southern whites that was so strong, the images are still emblazoned in my mind.

The nightmare unfolding before my young eyes was to be relived over and over in my lifetime. Each time, the vicarious trauma took its toll as if happening in real time. The heightened stress and anxiety is always as if I was experiencing it myself.

Am I at the breaking point yet?

If you have learned nothing else from the struggles of others, now is the time to pay attention. We still carry the trauma of watching the repeated indignities over and over again: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Ahmaud Arbery (killed by civilians but in a racially charged context), Freddie Gray, Stephon Clark, Alton Sterling,Botham Jean, Atatiana Jefferson, Andre Hill, among others. I remember reciting their names one-by-one from memory before the list got too long.

Today’s trauma is something we’re going to have to deal with for a long time. Our bodies leave us no choice. 

We have been here before, we have seen the mountaintop and have been assassinated for sharing the vision. Yet today, at every vigil, every protest, every action, we remember our past and we remember the cost, the risk we face. We cannot forget. 

Still, we stand with our immigrant community against ICE.

Action over rhetoric. This is the time.

B K Williams

Co-Chair of Richmond Progressive Alliance