Nurses saw themselves in Alex Pretti’s death. Now they’re demanding justice.

Jean Stone, a maternal newborn nurse in Pennsylvania, was working a hospital shift when her husband sent a text. They’ve murdered another person. 

She immediately looked it up. The man, Alex Pretti, was an intensive care unit nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital. But the video of his death, of Pretti being shot by federal agents in the streets of South Minneapolis on Saturday, took on another dimension for Stone.

“For a nurse, it adds immediate context to what we’re seeing in those videos,” Stone said. As she watched Pretti stand between an agent and a woman who was shoved to the ground, she thought, “that is not like the general human at-large move — to go towards that person,” Stone said. 

In Pretti’s final moments, Stone saw a nurse. 

To watch him come to the aid of a woman and reportedly ask her if she’s OK, “That’s something that a nurse says constantly in the process of a shift,” Stone said. 

The impact of Pretti’s death has undoubtedly reverberated across America, but perhaps more deeply among the nation’s nurses and health care professionals, who see themselves reflected in the actions he took before his death. It’s a sentiment that has come up again and again as nurses, a workforce dominated by women, begin mobilizing in Pretti’s name. A social media campaign, “Alex Pretti was one of us,” is taking off. On the streets, nurses are protesting, holding vigils and saying Pretti’s name at strike picket lines.

“Alex carried patience, compassion and calm as a steady light within him. Even at the very end, that light was there,” wrote Jessica Hauser, a nursing student who worked with Pretti at the Minneapolis VA, in a now-viral post. “I recognized his familiar stillness and signature calm composure shining through during those unbearable final moments captured on camera.” 

National Nurses United (NNU), the nation’s largest union representing registered nurses, is calling for a week of action to honor Pretti and for the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “ICE messed with the wrong profession,” the organization said in a statement.

“We’re a profession where our purpose in life is to be the caretakers of society — the caretakers of people,” Mary Turner, president of NNU and an ICU nurse in the Twin Cities, told The 19th. “That involves so much mental, emotional, physical, spiritual effort, that when something like what happened to Alex happens, it is a devastating blow to our very soul.” 

Stories of Pretti’s life that have emerged show the role he played in supporting his women colleagues. Nationally, only about 11 percent of nurses are men. Dr. Avalon Swenson, a resident physician in Minnesota, recently recounted working with Pretti at the VA ICU, where he “made a point of asking my opinion and making sure my patients had what they needed without my asking.” 

In a post on Instagram, Swenson detailed an encounter with a patient who made comments about her gender, asking if she was their “birthday stripper” when she wished the patient happy birthday. The patient refused to call her Dr. Swenson. 

“Alex was always in the room with me, for my safety he later told me. He jumped into every conversation with patient and family, correcting each first name use with ‘she’s Dr. Swenson.’ He told them he would not continue to tolerate their verbiage and inappropriate questions toward his colleague and made a point, after the first question, to say simply ‘why would you ask your doctor that? It’s wrong and so inappropriate. Please respect her,’” Swenson wrote. 

Jess Lott, a neonatal ICU nurse in Pittsburgh, whose boyfriend is also a nurse, said men nurses play an important role in supporting women colleagues. Part of what has brought the story of Pretti home for nurses like her, she said, is learning about who he was from the people who knew him and worked with him. 

“A lot of us — most of us probably — are empaths just by nature. So the full weight of it is just sometimes so overwhelming,” Lott said. “Every single one of these deaths should affect us profoundly, but we do live in our bubbles, and so when you come after one of our own — I’m just really hoping that no matter who you voted for, you can say that this is wrong.” 

Nurses like Lott have taken their concerns directly to the streets. On Wednesday, Lott and Stone joined a delegation of nurses demonstrating in front of Sen. John Fetterman’s offices in Pittsburgh, urging the Democrat to vote against additional funding for ICE. After the demonstration, nurses and health care workers joined a prayer circle to honor Pretti. 

In New York, where nurses have been on strike for three weeks to demand better working conditions, Pretti’s death has added a new layer to their demands. Nurses are asking that hospital systems pledge to protect immigrant patients and immigrant staffers from ICE detentions. There are also concerns that federal agents will turn up at hospitals and health care facilities following a rollback of federal guidelines that had categorized these spaces as “sensitive locations” where enforcement should not occur. Earlier this month, a Venezuelan family was detained in the parking lot of an urgent care in Oregon as a mother and father sought care for their 7-year-old daughter’s nosebleed. 

Turner with NNU said nurses have been advocating for better working conditions for years because of challenges with stagnant pay and consolidated resources tied to hospital mergers. That took on a new weight at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when nurses and other health professionals became the frontline of mass illness and death. More than five years later, nurses are still pushing for better pay, more sustainable staffing ratios and better on-site security. Now, they’re also worried about the impact of ICE agents at hospitals and other care settings.

Turner said even though the nursing workforce was exhausted during the early years of the pandemic, at least they felt somewhat safe to show up to work. In the new year, many of them feel that the working conditions are worsening. A nurse in Maine reported being harassed by federal agents as she drove an immigrant colleague to work.

“Now add to it: anxiety, fear, anger, depression. We’ve got Black and Brown nurses that are afraid to come to work. So that short staffing? Even more short staffing,” she said.

Events being hosted this week have drawn a strong response from union members, Turner said. She said a series of candlelight vigils offer not just a space to demand accountability, but an opportunity to be in community with one another.

“Nurses as a rule don’t take time out to do this kind of thing. We’re just go, go, go,” she said. “We hardly ever take time to stop and take a breath. To do something like this is to renew ourselves.”

In California, where nurses began a 30,000-worker strike this week, OB-GYN nurse Kadi Gonzalez said pushing back against ICE was already part of their fight as they challenge their employer over investments into private prison operators. Then Pretti died.

Gonzalez said her friends are now also feeling newfound concern about her protesting because they know she would have done the same as Pretti did in his final moments. 

“People are worried about me, but that’s who we are,” she said. “Nurses go where the danger is and they want to help.”

Gonzalez, who has a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old, was recently out protesting on behalf of Renee Nicole Good, the mother in Minneapolis who was killed by ICE agents in early January. 

“I was out there for her because she’s a mother and she basically was doing something I would have done,” Gonzalez said. “And now I’m Alex.”