I need to say this plainly: We do not know all the names.
That is part of what has been sitting so heavily with, or maybe even on, me.
Over the last 12 months, approximately 32 people have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and during immigration enforcement actions, and I, a pastor, a Baptist, someone who believes God knows every name, can only name a few.
Braxton Wade
I know one name clearly. And I cannot ignore the truth that part of why I know it is because she was a white woman, because her death fit what this country has been trained to recognize as tragic, credible and worthy of attention.
As a Baptist, I was taught early that faith is not inherited and not imposed. It is chosen. It is embodied. It is marked in water. We go down into the baptismal waters because we believe God is doing something real to us and God loves each of us. We come up because we believe our lives now belong to a different story, a story shaped by the Triune God.
Which means I have to ask: What kind of people are we becoming if nameless death does not disturb us?
We know Renee Nicole Good.
And I am grateful we do.
“What kind of people are we becoming if nameless death does not disturb us?”
But I also am unsettled by the fact that there are dozens of people of color whose names we do not know.
We know her name because her death broke through the noise. Because there were witnesses. Because her story could be told in ways the public already understands. But the gospel does not confuse visibility with value. God does not wait for a life to resemble our own before calling it sacred. Jesus does not just see a blind man; he sees and calls the name of Bartimaeus.
The God we claim to worship is a naming God.
God calls people by name before empires ever notice them. God hears cries before paperwork is filed. God sees Hagar when no one else does. Jesus stops for the ones others pass by. Even when we do not know their names, God does and calls us to know their names.
And still, if I am honest, I am wrestling with the church.
Because we do not always live like we believe that. We lament selectively. We wait for perfect clarity when people already are dead. We call our fear “wisdom” and our neutrality “complexity.” We want to stay measured, reasonable, silent even when bodies disappear behind detention walls.
But Jesus, over and over, reframes for us who our neighbor is and gives us the commandment to love our neighbor.
At our best, Baptists have insisted that love of neighbor is concrete. Not abstract. Not theoretical. The neighbor is the one close enough to be wounded by our indifference. The neighbor is the one whose name we do not know yet and should want to.
This week at Second Baptist Church in Richmond, Noel Schoonmaker preached a line I have not been able to shake: “We do not just care about what happens in the baptismal waters. We also have to care how we leave them.” He continued by asking the congregation: “Have we left the baptismal waters learning to love our neighbor? Have we left the baptismal waters transformed by the Holy Spirit?”
“We want to stay measured, reasonable, silent even when bodies disappear behind detention walls.”
These questions have been pressing on me.
If baptism really changes us, then it has to change how we see people. How we respond to suffering. How willing we are to speak when silence would be easier. If we rise from the waters unchanged, unmoved by injustice, unbothered by nameless death, then we have misunderstood what those waters were ever for. We have confused tradition with transformation.
So I want to do something simple, pastoral and defiant.
I want to say their names.
Not because a list can capture the fullness of who they were. It cannot. And not because naming them fixes what has been broken. It does not.
But because love remembers. And the church never should be more comfortable with forgetting than God is.
So we say the names we know:
- Renee Nicole Good
- Nenko Stanev Gantchev
- Delvin Francisco Rodriguez
- Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir
- Jean Wilson Brutus
- Shiraz Fatehali Sachwani
- Pete Sumalo Montejo
- Francisco Gaspar-Andres
- Kai Yin Wong
- Gabriel Garcia-Aviles
- Hasan Ali Moh’D Saleh
- Leo Cruz-Silva
- Miguel Angel Garcia-Hernandez
- Huabing Xie
- Norlan Guzman-Fuentes
- Ismael Ayala Uribe
- Santos Reyes-Banegas
- Oscar Duarte Rascon
- Parady La
- Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz
- Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres
- Geraldo Lunas Campos
And we also name those whose names never were released. Those known only to their families. Those buried in reports and footnotes. Those remembered by God alone.
This list is not complete, and it should not be. It is a beginning, not an ending.
Because God knows their names. Because baptism binds us to our neighbors. Because love does not look away, nor does it remain silent.
The question for us is, “Have those baptismal waters changed us?”
Because if they have, then silence cannot be our final response. And forgetting cannot be either.
Braxton Wade is a Clemons Fellow with BNG. He is a graduate of the University of Richmond and Chicago Theological Seminary and lives in Richmond, Va.