TRANS LATINA BUSINESS OWNER LANESSA RODRIGUEZ WAS KILLED INSIDE HER OWN BUSINESS

Lanessa Rodriguez was 35, proud, hardworking, and building a future in Fort Pierce, Florida.

She was shot multiple times inside the business she helped build. Friends remembered her as “energy,” a woman who was generous, ambitious, secure in herself, and secure in her womanhood.

That is the part the record cannot be allowed to shrink.

I already wrote about the Trump administration’s erasure of violence against trans people from federal data. Now the pattern is showing itself in real time: trans women are being killed, and the work of naming them fully is being left to journalists, families, and the communities who refuse to let them disappear.

Lanessa Rodriguez was not a generic crime story.

Her name belongs in the record — and in the world’s memory — so people can honor her fully.

This is part of the Trump administration’s anti-trans persecution: denying trans women their rights in life, then dishonoring them after death by erasing them from public records.