Candles, cards, posters, and more memorial ephemera line a fence outside of the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center where ICU nurse and AFGE Local 3669 member Alex Pretti worked. Photo by Amie Stager.
National Nurses United (NNU), the nationwide union representing nurses, one of the most trusted professions in the United States, is responding to the murder of a fellow nurse by armed, masked federal agents in the state of Minnesota. Alex Pretti was an intensive care unit RN for the Veterans Health Administration in Minneapolis, and he was a member of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 3669, when unnamed Border Patrol agents murdered him on January 24. Although he was not a member of the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA), a chapter of NNU, the union is holding a candlelight vigil in his honor on Wednesday evening.
The vigils are part of a week of action of thousands of nurses represented by NNU across the country who are calling for justice for Pretti’s murder, including the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They say Trump’s deployment of thousands of federal agents to Minnesota poses a threat to public health.
“Nurses demand the immediate abolition of ICE,” the union said in a statement. “Nurses are trained to respond to emergent situations and this is why we are calling for urgent action to end the ICE violence in our communities. National Nurses United calls for a no vote on the Homeland Security Appropriations bill that is up for Senate approval next week and demands Congress abolish ICE entirely. We will be doing everything in our power to vote out any elected official who supports funding for this all-out assault on the health, safety, and civil rights of our people.”
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill, which gives ICE $10 billion, passed in the House of Representatives in a 220-207 vote. The Senate is set to vote on the bill this week, but if there is enough opposition, the federal government could face a partial shutdown.
“As nurses, we work side by side through long shifts, difficult moments, and shared commitments to care. Losing a member of our community is felt deeply by all of us,” says Chris Rubesch, president of the Minnesota Nurses Association, in a statement. “Our strength as a union comes not only from bedside work but from our compassion and solidarity with one another. It is that solidarity that has driven some to call for a general strike to honor Alex’s death.”
On January 23, more than 50,000 people in Minnesota engaged in collective actions in subzero temperatures as part of a statewide economic shutdown that included strikes, arrests and civil disobedience, hundreds of businesses closing their doors, and rallies (some estimates claim that it was closer to 100,000 people that marched). Following the murder of Pretti the day after the historic demonstration, student groups at the University of Minnesota have called to expand the action to the entire country.
On January 27, National Nurses United mobilized alongside AFGE, the Chicago Teachers Union, SEIU, and other unions and community groups at the Jesse Brown VA hospital in Chicago. “As a National Nurses United nurse, as an ICU nurse, I can’t help but see myself in Alex Pretti,” Chicago nurse Scott Mechanic told the crowd. “But I see myself, too, in the many community members in the neighborhood I live who’ve been abducted by ICE. I see myself in the millions of people across this world whose lives have been diminished, whose lives have been cut short by our unjust and racist immigration system. I have been to the southern border of our country and I can say that the violence we are seeing by Border Patrol has been going on for many years. We are just seeing it now in our cities and in our communities.”
“This is a call to every healthcare worker, to every union member, to every American, to continue these acts of bravery, to confront ICE, to confront Border Patrol where they show up,” Mechanic added. “And we will not stop until ICE is abolished.”