I never thought that the United States descent into a police state would involve the extrajudicial killing of a Veteran’s Administration nurse.
It’s particularly terrifying to this nurse that US immigration police have shot to death Alex Pretti, RN. A Veteran’s Administration ICU nurse, Pretti is said to have been volunteering in sub-zero Minneapolis cold because he cared about his neighbors and co-workers as much as he did his critically ill patients.
As with the video of Rene Good not running over an ICE agent but getting shot point blank, Pretti was sprayed with chemicals and tackled by several police who subsequently shot him to death after he was subdued.
Do people believe that killing a VA nurse is justified? It doesn’t matter. People will get the message, regardless. If a nurse that doesn’t follow government orders can be killed, then all residents better look away while their neighbors are sent to concentration camps and deported. Pretti may not have been a Jew, but his killing makes it clear that nurses have now joined non-white migrants and trans people as the “enemy within.”
Nurses are no stranger to violence directed against them. Gun violence is a very poorly controlled epidemic that accounts for a steady proportion of emergency room visits and hospital stays. Nurses care for injured shooters as well as the people shot.
Nurses suffer from violence in the workplace at a depressingly high rate. Whether the police are in the emergency room or the nurse is working in jail, healthcare and law enforcement inevitably meet. We all go to work on the taxpayer’s dime and are supposed to protect the community’s health and safety.
Now that the US attorney general and the president are endorsing brutality against civil rights activists, nurses will have an even more fraught relationship with their public sector colleagues. Alex Pretti’s hospital colleagues now have a rational fear, not paranoia, of violence from police in addition to their patients.
During the first Trump administration, the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services attacked an ethical foundation of nursing by encouraging nurses to refuse care for religious reasons. This was a thinly veiled attack on abortion care and trans people.
If a nurse declined to assist with a termination of an ectopic pregnancy, that person would die. If a nurse didn’t want to call a trans person by their name but insisted on another one that suited their estimation of the person’s gender, then they could refuse.
Nurses, regardless of religion and politics, are taught to respect their patients and not to mock difference of their vulnerable patients. Encouraging individual nurses to choose who is worthy of their care and frame it as freedom of conscience is divisive and destructive. The fact that it directly contradicts nursing’s duty to care is perhaps the point. By prioritizing the opinion of a lazy or mean-spirited nurse, it sends a message that hatred is welcome in hospitals.
Why target nurses? Because they know too much.
Nurses know from their work that there is no racial basis for disease. In my work with people with AIDS, I saw the effects of hatred and fear based on who someone had sex with, how they dressed, and the color of their skin. Fear of contagion was weaponized long before the Trumpocalpyse with the evidence-free claim that Haitians with “voodoo” rituals as well as men who have sex with men were contaminating straight white America.
Now Haitian refugees have been accused of eating American pets and Somali people are “poisoning the blood” of the United States. Trans people are being erased from daily life, and anyone who offers care is participating in child abuse.
Nurses know what nonsense this is. Alex Pretti worked with and cared for the wide cross-section of Americans represented by veterans. The message is clear, caring or advocating for vulnerable patients is punishable by death.
Nurses such as myself and Alex Pretti showed up for all of us throughout pandemic fear, misinformation, and hatred. Now it is time for all of us to demand that the US government stop abusing, incarcerating, deporting and even killing the people who stand in solidarity with immigrants and LGBTQIA people.
Yes, it could have been me or any one of my colleagues, but this time it was Alex Pretti RN.
Sasha Cuttler RN PhD began working at San Francisco General Hospital in 1987 on the AIDS unit and retired from the Department of Public Health during the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and toxic social media. Sasha is currently an honorary associate professor with the University of Nottingham (U.K.) School of Health Sciences.
