As evening fell on Pittsburgh Saturday, nurses and healthcare workers gathered beside the Fred Rogers Memorial on the North Shore to honor Alex Pretti, the nurse killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, and call for an end to ICE brutality and violations of freedom.
The location was chosen, organizers with SEIU Healthcare Pa. said, because of Pretti and Rogers’ shared values of love for one’s neighbors, empathy, compassion, respect and community.
Pretti, 37, an intensive care nurse at the Veterans Administration, was killed a week before.
“The last thing he said before being held down on the ground and shot over and over was, ‘Are you OK?’” said Theresa Brown, a registered nurse at Allegheny General Hospital. “When the people who only want to hurt start killing the people who only want to help, our government has lost its way.”
The Trump administration initially defended the slaying as justified, but the two federal agents who fired shots have since been put on administrative leave pending an investigation and some Republicans have joined with those questioning their actions.
Brown was one of seven people who spoke Saturday during the roughly half-hour vigil enduring temperatures in the teens.
Monica Ruiz, executive director of Casa San Jose, a nonprofit offering support and resources for Latino immigrants and Pittsburgh’s Latino community, said she wondered if people would come in such cold, but knew that they would.
ICE is in Pittsburgh, Ruiz said, not just in big cities.
“Every day a dad doesn’t come home from work to his family. Every day a parent isn’t there to pick up their child from school,” she said. “This is happening here.”
Many of those Casa San Jose serves take care of members of Allegheny County’s aging population, she said.
“They’re home health aides, they’re certified caregivers. They are afraid to go to work, they are afraid to go take care of the people that we love because of fear of getting pulled over, detained and deported. We have people who are afraid to go to the hospital to get the care that they need,” she said. “This is the reality that we live in. This is not the neighborhood that Mister Rogers envisioned.”
Jen Davison, a nurse practitioner at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital, said she has seen fear among her patients, including a woman who suffered the pain of cancer at home for days because she was afraid to go to the hospital. She is a Mexican woman who legally immigrated to the U.S. years ago.
“Thankfully, her family convinced her to come to the hospital for the care that she needed. We thankfully were able to get her pain under control and send her home to die a dignified death,” Davison said. “No one should be afraid to seek the care that they need.
“We must ask our hospitals, our clinics, nursing homes and other health care organizations to speak up, committing to safe, protected places where anyone can come to receive care.”
Jess Platt, a registered nurse at Allegheny General Hospital, said it took several days before she could bring herself to watch the video of what happened to Pretti.
“The reality is heartbreaking in its simplicity,” she said. “Alex helped someone. He stepped in when another person was being carelessly thrown around, and he chose compassion. Alex did what any nurse would have done and what any human being should do, and for that he was killed.”
Pretti did what nurses do, caring for others, until his last breath, Platt said.
“This is why nurses and healthcare workers across the country are uniting and saying this is not acceptable,” she said. “We do not want ICE agents in our hospitals, we don’t want them in our cities, and we certainly do not want a system that treats compassion as a crime.”
Jess Lott, a registered nurse at West Penn Hospital, said they had pushed hard on Sen. John Fetterman to vote against funding for ICE. After at first saying he would vote to keep the government open without the removal of the provision, Fetterman on Thursday changed his vote to no and the bill failed to get the 60 votes needed to advance.
“The actions that we are taking can feel inconsequential sometimes, but this is proof that our calls, letters and protests do work and that we can’t afford to slow down,” she said. “Call and write Fetterman and keep the pressure on him to stand firm against additional ICE funding.”