Unions in Minnesota and across the country are gearing up for new mass actions after the public execution of one of their own, ICU nurse and American Federation of Government Employees Local 3669 member Alex Jeffrey Pretti. Federal immigration agents shot Pretti in the back ten times in five seconds on Saturday as he attempted to help a woman they had thrown to the ground. His last words were to her: “Are you OK?”
Organized labor responded immediately to Pretti’s execution with rage and anguish, including the National Nurses United (NNU), which said Monday afternoon that it is holding a national week of action, including vigils every night this week.
“ICE messed with the wrong profession,” NNU President Mary Turner said in a statement. Like Pretti, she’s a Twin Cities intensive care unit registered nurse. “Never get between nurses and our patients. We nurses are forever patient advocates, and that means we will fight to protect you at the bedside and we will fight to protect you in the streets—just as Alex was doing when he was executed in cold blood by border patrol. This stops now. Nurses want ICE abolished. Not one more penny for their crimes.”
Coming just one day after 100,000 workers successfully shut down the Twin Cities for a one-day general strike to demand immigration thugs leave town, nurses and other union members described their heartbreak and spoke movingly of the inhumanity of Trump’s terror campaign. One was registered nurse and SEIU National Nurses Alliance chair Martha Baker, who said in a statement, “When a nurse is killed for trying to help others, none of us are safe.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement “must be removed from our communities now,” wrote Baker, who is also the president of SEIU Local 1991. “We will not stop organizing and speaking out. We must ensure that this tragedy is a turning point, and not allow it to break our momentum. Alex was there to help. ICE was there to hurt. We won’t forget him.”
Now union members are organizing to escalate. Over the weekend, workers across sectors met throughout the country to determine their next steps, including striking again for a day, holding an indefinite strike, and building toward a general strike. In 2023, United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain called on unions everywhere to set their contracts to end on May 1, 2028, so that workers across industries could go on strike that day legally. Union contracts often include a no-strike clause that forbids workers from going on strike, forcing workers to strike only after their contract expires. (Workers may also undertake a wildcat strike, which federal law holds is illegal.)
But that’s not soon enough, workers say.
“Clearly, we cannot wait until 2028,” said Emily Woo Yamasaki, a member of the UAW Local 2320, Legal Services Staff Association, and an organizer with the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP), speaking on Saturday night at an FSP forum in New York City. “A general strike can’t be built overnight,” they said, “but it is more urgent than ever” for organized labor to talk about it.
Dan Troccoli, labor branch co-chair of Twin Cities DSA and member leader in the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, was another labor leader who met to discuss escalation with a range of other union members this weekend. The most likely next action is a one-day strike, he said, which will help build strength and labor discipline toward bigger actions. Troccoli knows first-hand what it takes to move people to strike; the public middle school social studies teacher has done it twice before and described it as “a lift.” Like Yamasaki, he noted that it takes time. But he said union leaders everywhere should know that people who showed up to the strike on Friday were mostly non-union workers, and recognize that people are motivated to act now.
“It should give a lot of these union leaders the confidence that we can call for this thing, and it will be responded to en masse,” Troccoli said, adding that the demands of a national general strike must match the enormity of the action.
“If we’re going to do this, and we need support from the rest of the country, then the question becomes not simply ICE Out alone, but also Trump out of the office. We can’t simply go from city to city to mobilize big actions. We have to oppose the entire agenda.”
The call for a general strike should come “because the appetite for it is extremely widespread,” Troccoli added. “Many people are looking at what the Trump administration is doing with horror and this is the answer.”
Speaking at the forum in Manhattan this weekend, John Ferretti, member of Transport Workers Union Local 100, described challenges workers face to pulling off a nationwide strike, including the low support of union staff and leadership, whom he said would prefer to maintain the status quo.
“There’s not going to be any easy next steps that we can plan out in advance. I think that the key is rank-and-file involvement in putting tremendous pressure in the labor bureaucracy to grow a fucking spine to understand the moment we are living in,” he said. “ICE is a haunting reminder,” he added, of pervasive union weakness and low union density across the U.S.
“I’m very much in favor of a line of development where workers begin to take action,” he said, and that will require moving union leadership.
“I’m all for educating workers about the general strike and the lessons of past general strikes,” Ferretti said, “but I’m not for an unprepared general strike. I’m not for a general strike that loses.”
When unions are silent about political issues, “they become weak, and that weakness only encourages the sociopathic violent fantasies of billionaires,” which mirrors exactly the violent practices of immigration agents, he said. Workers must also contend with preparing to defend themselves and their communities, including because Trump has redefined domestic terrorism so that almost any kind of dissent qualifies.
“Unfortunately, love doesn’t win the day,” he added. “It’s about power, and they are showing us that every day.”
Pretti is the fifth person immigration agents have executed since September, according to reported incidents. ICE agent Jonathan Ross executed legal observer Renee Good with four shots to the face on January 7. Just days before that, an off-duty ICE agent killed Keith Porter in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve; the agent claimed Porter raised a weapon at him. In December agents shot to death Isaias Sanchez Barboza in Texas. And before that, an agent shot to death Silverio Villegas González on September 12.
Agents have also shot and wounded eight other people since September: Marimar Martinez in Chicago on October 4, Carlitos Ricardo Parias in Los Angeles on October 21, Jose Garcia-Sorto in Phoenix on October 29, Carlos Jimenez in California the next day, Tiago Alexandre Sousa-Martins in Maryland on Christmas Eve, Luis David Nino Moncada and Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras in Oregon on January 8, and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in Minneapolis on January 14.
Agents have faced zero repercussions for the deaths and injuries. Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and her subordinates routinely spread lies about the people their agents have killed and maimed, including their smear campaign against Pretti.
“This would be a tragedy if it wasn’t a crime,” Troccoli said of Pretti’s execution, and added that he wants to see the Democratic party take stronger action as well as reckon with the fact that prior to Trump, the president with the most deportations to his name was Barack Obama, who ultimately deported 3.1 million people during his eight years in office. He also called on local leaders to undertake a strategy of noncooperation with immigration agents rather than, as Gov. Tim Walz did, mobilize the National Guard to defend the Whipple Federal Building rather than defend Minnesotans. Ultimately, Trocolli said, workers are the ones who will drive out ICE, not elected officials.
“We as the people can’t necessarily look to them as the center of change,” he said. “That has to be with us. That has to be with the mass of people.”
The UAW did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.
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Whitney Curry Wimbish is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes short fiction in a range of literary magazines.
