What we are witnessing is not public safety.

Blood stains our streets. Renee Nicole Good, as her mother mourned her, “a poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado,” has been killed. Shot point blank in the face 3 times. She was mother to a six year old child. She was also a part of our LGBTQ+ community. We grieve deeply and we are furious. This is not an isolated tragedy, it is the inevitable outcome of a political project rooted in dehumanization, authoritarianism, and cruelty.

We mourn the loss of life with broken hearts, and we rage at the conditions that made this killing possible. What we are witnessing is not public safety. It is state-sanctioned intimidation. Armed, cowardly-masked agents operating without transparency or accountability are terrorizing communities, particularly immigrants and communities of color, under the guise of law enforcement. When power is exercised without integrity, without restraint, and without regard for human life, it forfeits its legitimacy.

Let us be clear: cruelty is not a byproduct of this moment, it is the point. From our streets to our courts to our classrooms, marginalized communities are being targeted, harassed, and stripped of care, safety, and voice. Immigrant families are hunted. Protesters and observers are met with violence. Low-income communities are denied healthcare and childcare. Truth-tellers are silenced. This is an assault on civil society itself, on the rule of law, on bodily autonomy, on the idea that all people are entitled to dignity and safety.

For the LGBTQ+ community, this is painfully familiar. We know what happens when repression goes unchecked. We know that when rogue and repressive regimes are allowed to harass, criminalize, and brutalize one community with impunity, the violence never stops there. It spreads. It metastasizes. Scapegoats are chosen to distract from failed leadership and hollow ideology, and more lives are put at risk.

Since January 20th, our LGBTQ+ communities have witnessed an escalation and endured near-daily attacks on our rights, our dignity, and our very existence.

That shared trauma sharpens our clarity in this moment. We see ourselves reflected in today’s state-sanctioned violence, and we refuse to look away. To look directly at the bloodied vehicle, the college tote bag in the front seat, the stuffed animals on the dash we see the evidence of a life, now erased. The 37 year old woman shot in the face was not a “domestic terrorist” as state propagandists have unscrupulously labeled her, she was us. Anyone of us that deigns to speak truth to power. Or to innocently drive down our own damn home streets.

As a community foundation that has spent nearly 40 years fighting bigotry, discrimination, and injustice, we are duty-bound to respond, not just with words, but with action. We demand that our local, state, and federal leaders act now: vocally, forcefully, and with every tool available to them. Silence is complicity.

We stand in unwavering solidarity with immigrant communities and with all people targeted by repression and hate. That solidarity must be loud, political, financial, and embodied. It must show up in the streets, in policy, in philanthropy, and in collective care.

We are doubling down on our commitment to show up, because history has taught us this truth: when injustice reigns, neutrality is surrender. And we will not surrender.