Nurses remember Alex Pretti and vow to ‘bring the care our patients need’

For Nolan Lee, it felt like Minnesota in Washington DC on Wednesday night. Despite the most extreme cold in 150 years, about a thousand people gathered in front of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) headquarters, a block from the White House, to remember Alex Pretti and demand an end to funding for US immigration and border agencies.

The killings by federal agents of Pretti, an intensive care nurse at a veterans hospital, and Renee Good, a poet and mother of three, rocked Minneapolis and reverberated throughout the nation, with the future of US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) – up for debate as a key funding bill that would increase the agency’s spending failed to pass the US Senate on Thursday.

DC has been locked in ice and below-freezing temperatures after a major winter storm, and the city has been occupied by federal agents and the national guard since August.

Even so, residents gathered to hold candles and lay flowers at a memorial to Pretti in front of the VA building, at one of dozens of events organized by National Nurses United (NNU) across the country this week. On Tuesday, a mid-afternoon vigil in Portland, Virginia, stretched along the road for about a quarter-mile, and there was a candlelight vigil in Eugene, Oregon. On Wednesday, people gathered in Chicago. On Thursday night, people gathered for vigils in New York and San Diego.

People hold candles up during a moment of silence for Alex Pretti at a vigil near a VA hospital in New York. Photograph: Julius Constantine Motal/The Guardian

The crowd in DC chanted, “No more funding for CBP, no more funding for DHS! Stop killing our neighbors!” Some vigil attendees sobbed as they laid offerings at the memorial.

Lee is a college student who grew up blocks from where George Floyd and Renee Good were murdered. He checks with his friends and family in Minnesota every day to make sure they’re safe and haven’t been detained. Both of his parents are nurses who have worked in Minneapolis their entire careers.

“When I got the news on Saturday morning that Alex Pretti had been executed by federal agents on the street as a legal observer, it broke me,” Lee said. “It’s been really difficult and isolating not being at my home right now. Minneapolis is really hurting.”

It’s not only Minneapolis targeted by federal agents in an operation that goes far beyond immigration, he said, adding: “People are going missing in the suburbs. People are going missing in rural communities. It is not isolated to just the city of Minneapolis. It is an attack on the state of Minnesota.”

It felt comforting to be surrounded by Minnesotans and supporters at the DC event, Lee said. “I’m really here right now just to hold community and honestly pray that we collectively do something,” he said, noting that what’s happening in Minnesota is “only a starting point for a total federal takeover”.

A key spending package passed the House but failed to pass the Senate on Thursday after Democratic opposition to funding for DHS. Senate Democrats negotiated a deal to pass five of six spending bills, but the sixth – funding for DHS – has been given a two-week funding extension as negotiations continue. The fight against DHS funding is a key issue for Americans, said James Walkinshaw, a Democratic congressman from Virginia, at the Wednesday gathering.

The agency has “failed to protect the American people from the Trump administration”, said Walkinshaw, who voted against the House bill. “This week, we need the United States Senate to take a stand to protect the American people from the brutality that ICE and CBP and the Department of Homeland Security are engaged in.” The opposition in Minnesota and across the country is a “critical fight” for democracy and American values, Walkinshaw said.

Elizabeth Coughlin, a graduate student at George Washington University who attended Wednesday’s demonstration, said: “People of the US are united in this cause across the country.” She wants to show leaders that “people care and people know that what’s going on in the government is wrong”, she said, adding: “ICE should be abolished … I want them to not give DHS any more money.”

A person places a candle at a memorial for Alex Pretti outside the Veterans Affairs headquarters in Washington DC on 28 January 2026. Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA

College student Lee believes the resistance in Minnesota shows a path for the rest of the nation: “I believe that Minneapolis is leading the way by showing us what we need to do, which is hold community – and a general strike.”

A general strike materialized on Friday, when activists held a nationwide shutdown that advocated “no work, no school, no shopping” in a protest against the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration crackdowns.

Susan Benesch, founder and director of the Dangerous Speech Project, felt an “enormous duty” to protest this week, to mourn Pretti and Good and others who have been injured and killed by federal agents, and to “defend my country”, she said.

“I’m proud of it, still,” she said, but “it feels like the last minute” for American democracy. “These terrible events have galvanized people in a way that, honestly, I’ve been longing to see,” she said.

The Rev Chris Antal, a Unitarian Universalist minister who served as a VA chaplain, led the crowd in a moment of silence on Wednesday, followed by three long mournful keens of a whistle, which has become the nationwide sound of warning about the presence of federal agents. Then the crowd burst into a death wail, the primal keening echoing across the concrete facade of the VA buildings.

Staff at the VA say Doug Collins, the VA secretary, has not communicated with them about Pretti’s killing. He confirmed in a post on X that Pretti was an employee and offered condolences, but he also placed the blame on “state and local officials’ refusal to cooperate with the federal government”.

Doug Massey, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 17, pushed back on Collins’ assertions.

Collins “does not care about VA employees. He does not care about veterans. He is here because he cares about himself,” Massey said on Wednesday. “We need to write our congressmen and let them know that he needs to be fired. He needs to resign.”

Christine Grant, a nurse at the Washington VA Medical Center and a member of NNU, said: “It’s a nurse’s job to ask: how may I serve? It is up to us to extend a hand. We have to stand up and say: enough. This is not who we are! Enough!”

After Pretti’s killing, Daniel Amyx, a nurse at the Minneapolis VA, made hundreds of lapel buttons to commemorate his colleague, and there was “a line longer than the line at Starbucks” to get the pins and share stories about Pretti’s outstanding work in the intensive care unit. But when Amyx offered a button to a senior VA official, he shook his head, Amyx said. The button said “Remember Alex Pretti, RN” but the official told him, “I better not,” Amyx said.

Fighting back tears, Amyx said he wanted to address the nurses in the crowd: “Remember, in our shift work, we do our best to set up our relief for success, but we also know that if we don’t get it done, the next shift will bring the care our patients need. Alex Pretti has been relieved. Those of you standing here are the next shift. We need to get that work done.”