The Power List: MARK LENO

Wednesday night, my friend and I were at a bar when the bartender appeared distraught.We asked if she was OK. She looked at us, glassy-eyed, and said one word. Minneapolis. She told us she was from there. Then she stepped outside for a brief cry before returning to work.We did not ask many more questions. We did not really say anything at all. We just sat there, numb, sharing a long, loud silence that has become its own kind of language. The kind you use when something terrible feels both shocking and inevitable. The kind you use when this is no longer breaking news, but the air we breathe.She did not mean Minneapolis in the celebratory, Janet Jackson sense. She meant it like a death notice. Like something snapped.Earlier that day, federal immigration agents shot and killed a woman in her car. Her name was Renee Nicole Good. She was 37 years old. She was a United States citizen. She was a mother. She lived a few blocks from where she died.By nightfall, the federal government had already decided who she was allowed to be in death. A domestic terrorist. A threat. A problem eliminated.The videos tell a different story. So do witnesses. So do basic use of force standards that most major police departments abandoned decades ago. So does the fact that she was not the subject of any investigation at all. But facts are no longer the point.This administration ran on America First. What we are watching now is America dead last. Americans killed by federal agents. Americans silenced for protesting. Americans labeled enemies for refusing to comply quietly. And if you think this stops at the border, you have not been paying attention.ICE’s violence does not begin or end with Minneapolis. In 2025, ICE oversaw the deadliest year in immigration detention in more than two decades. Thirty-two people died in custody. Some from medical neglect. Some from suicide. Some after begging for care that never came. Some after being transferred between facilities like freight. Many of them had lived here for decades. Some arrived as children. Some were asylum seekers. Some had criminal records. Some did not. None of that should matter, because human life is not conditional.This administration would like you to believe these deaths are unfortunate outliers. That enforcement is necessary. That the numbers are small. That the system works. But systems do not accidentally kill people at scale. They do it through policy. Through indifference. Through the quiet normalization of cruelty.Minneapolis is not a fluke. It is a consequence.This happened less than a mile from where George Floyd was murdered in 2020, a detail that feels less like a coincidence and more like a warning. Minneapolis knows what officer created danger looks like. It knows what happens when authorities escalate a situation and then claim fear as justification. It knows how quickly a narrative hardens before investigations even begin. And it knows what follows.Now we are watching the dismantling of Renee Good. We are watching how quickly the state moves to control the story. To declare dissent terrorism. To label witnesses agitators. To threaten military deployment before anyone has even been buried. To paint anyone who uses their voice as a domestic threat, and to turn Americans against one another while even greater injustices are carried out in our name, both here and beyond our borders.That is not public safety. That is authoritarian reflex.Queer people recognize this pattern immediately. We always have. Our history is a record of being told to stay quiet for our own good. Of being warned not to provoke. Of being advised to survive by disappearing. By watching the state decide which lives are expendable in the name of order.Silence has never protected us. It has only made harm easier to deny.That is why this moment matters. What is happening is bigger than ICE. Bigger than Minneapolis. Bigger than immigration policy. It is about who the government is willing to kill, cage, or smear, and how quickly it expects the rest of us to move on.We are being trained to accept state violence as background noise. To treat death as administrative error. To let fear do the work of censorship. This government depends on that quiet. It depends on exhaustion. It depends on people learning to look away. Once the state decides it can kill an American woman in broad daylight and call it enforcement, the line is already gone. The rest is just paperwork.Justice may take time. Accountability may be resisted. But silence only guarantees repetition.Renee Good deserved to go home that day. The people who died in ICE custody deserved medical care, dignity, and life. The rest of us deserve a country that does not confuse terror with governance.Quiet is no longer an option.Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. @momdarkness Keep Reading →