Health Care Workers Remember Alex Pretti
In On Freedom, Timothy Snyder writes,
“The German philosopher Edith Stein put her own body forward during the First World War. A graduate student, she took leave to volunteer as a nurse. When she returned to her dissertation, her time with the wounded guided her argument about empathy. “Do we not,” she asked, “need the mediation of the body to assure ourselves of the existence of another person?” [1]”
The German word she used for “body” was “Leib.”
Snyder argues that for freedom to exist, a person must inhabit their living-body (Leib). If you are starving, exhausted, or living in constant fear, you are reduced to a mere body-object (Körper). You cannot exercise sovereignty if your physical self is under siege.
This physicality is also reflected in the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates who describes racism as a visceral experience that “dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, and breaks teeth.” In a letter to his son, he reminds him that in America, his body can be destroyed at any moment with little to no legal consequence. [2]
Alex Pretti put his own body forward. On January 24, 2026, Alex Pretti’s Leib was pinned down and beaten. Ten bullets in under five seconds: his life, his autonomy, his freedom gone.
Some days before he was executed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, The Guardian published a video of Alex Pretti kicking at the taillight of a car being driven by federal agents. Might this diminish the image that we have of Alex as a Gandhian, turn-the-other-cheek pacifist? Hadn’t we learned that he was an ICU nurse? Nurses take care of us when we are sickest, when we are the most vulnerable. Surely nurses are the most humanitarian among us. Perhaps CBP tracked Alex after his outburst, though, and targeted him to be neutralized.
Minneapolis is under siege by masked gunmen, terrorizing its people, seizing them from their cars, detaining and deporting them. People are afraid to leave their homes, to go get groceries, to go to work or school, or go to the clinic for medical attention. When you don’t go to your prenatal care appointment, you risk a poor birth outcome. When you don’t take your child who is wheezing, she might stop breathing. When you don’t get seen for your abdominal pain, your appendix might burst. When you don’t get seen for your chest pain or have trouble talking, you might just die at home of a heart attack or a stroke. ICE tactics are taking its toll on mental health, causing anxiety, depression, and trauma symptoms.
Let us remember that the first Trump administration came up with family separation and kids in cages, and the Biden administration continued to keep kids in cages.
What is happening in Minnesota falls on the spectrum of state-sanctioned violence – at the extreme end of which lies genocide. The Biden administration supported the genocide just as much as the Trump administration has. Most recently, Hawaiʻi’s U.S. Congressional representatives (our whole delegation is Democrats), voted to continue to fund weapons for Israel. Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper about Venezuela, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller said, “we live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” The genocide in Gaza foreshadows the future for all humans that the strongmen deem expendable.
For us, as health care workers, this is unacceptable. This goes against how we understand how our society is supposed to work. We see, however, for those in power, the norms of civil society do not matter. For over two years, we have watched our elected officials support, fund, and provide political cover for a genocide – which we used to think of as the crime of all crimes. We have watched Palestinian hospitals bombed to rubble, doctors tortured to death, toddlers shot by snipers in the head and the chest, children starved to death.
As the surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sitta points out in his conversation with psychologist Lara Sheehi, the targeting of hospitals and health care workers is intentional. Why? Because the clinic is a site of “resistance, refusal, and liberation.” [3] When a patient presents to the clinic, she can tell immediately whether or not the health care workers there have her best interests in mind. All of us as health care workers know what this is about. Without it, there is no healing relationship, because the patient can tell if there isn’t one. Health care is not merely a matter of fixing the biology. It is a moral undertaking between humans who recognize each other as such.
To be truly free, we must not only inhabit our own lived bodies but also recognize the living-body in others. Freedom is not a solitary project. Alex recognized our shared humanity, our collective freedom. Without it, freedom ultimately fails. By turning our bodies against our wills, authoritarianism succeeds. The strongmen in charge, and the brownshirts brandishing their weapons want to destroy our shared humanity, our collective freedom. They want people to cower in fear. They want people to die unseen and uncared for. Alex Pretti did not cower in fear. Alex Pretti confronted the masked men who had descended on his city to pluck his neighbors, haul them off to a detention center, and deport them.
Alex Pretti fought back. Alex Pretti was a warrior for health. This is how we will remember Alex Pretti.
Our demands are simple and human:
First, protection of the dignity and safety of migrants. No one should be abused, neglected, or left to die because of where they were born or what papers they carry.
Second, transparency about what is happening to migrants who are detained. Families, communities, and we as health workers have the right to know who is being held, what conditions they are facing, and what is being done to them in our names.
Third, we insist that migrants are not criminals. We need community solutions, not detention and deportation—solutions rooted in housing, healthcare, language access, and care, not in surveillance, cages, and violence.
As health care workers and community members, we are not powerless. There are concrete next steps we can take together:
At your workplace, push for clear policies that limit and challenge ICE presence and activities in clinics, hospitals, and community health spaces. Ask what your institution’s policy is, and if it doesn’t protect migrants, organize to change it.
Use your professional voice: write medical testimonies for detained migrants, documenting the physical and psychological harms of detention, and supporting their cases for release. Some of us are already doing this. Let us know if you want to get connected about writing medical testimonies.
Write letters to people in detention centers, so they know they are not forgotten, and that there is a community fighting for them on the outside.
As we mourn, we are also choosing to organize. We invite each of you to choose at least one action this week—one policy to push on, one letter to write, one organization to join, one training to attend.
Our collective grief can become collective power. Our love for our patients, our families, and our communities can become a shield for migrants—and a force that makes detention and deportation impossible to ignore, and ultimately impossible to sustain.
+ End detention and medical neglect of migrants in detention!
+ Stop ICE raids in our communities and hospitals!
+ Healthcare, not violence of immigration enforcement!
Notes.
1. Timothy Snyder. On Freedom. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2024.
2. Ta-Nehisi Coates. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015.
3. Psychic Militancy – Ghassan Abu Sittah: Clinic as site of resistance. Jan 6, 2026.https://podscan.fm/podcasts/the-east-is-a-podcast/episodes/psychic-militancy-ghassan-abu-sittah-clinic-as-site-of-resistance
