On our collective Minneapolis grief, resistance, and showing up 

Blog by Ricardo Martinez (he/him), Executive Director

There’s a video of Alex Pretti that’s been making the rounds on social media. In it, he’s delivering final honors for a veteran. He says: “Today we remember that freedom is not free; we have to work at it. Nurture it, protect it, and even sacrifice for it.”  

When he spoke those words, he was honoring someone else’s service. He couldn’t have known that just like the veteran he honored, he would one day lose his life trying to protect others. Alex Pretti was murdered by ICE agents in Minneapolis. He saw a woman pushed to the ground. He stepped in. And for that instinctive act of empathy, care, and protection, he was beaten and executed in the street.  

This is where we are. Where we have been.  

Like many in our community, I’ve lived through the height of the AIDS epidemic, when our government’s indifference was policy and people died by the thousands while officials shrugged. I grew up in Brooklyn when Yusuf Hawkins was murdered in Bensonhurst for being Black in the wrong neighborhood. I’ve carried the names Matthew Shepard, James Byrd Jr., and George Floyd as reminders of the injustice and evil that we are fighting against. And now I will forever carry Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the other seven people killed by ICE in 2026: Keith Porter, Parady La, Heber Sanchaz Dominguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Luis Beltran Yanz-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, and Geraldo Lunas Campos.  

What’s happening right now isn’t new; it’s the same playbook, freshly bound and updated with calculated cruelty and lawless acts of impunity. Our government has deployed an untrained, unchecked, domestic militarized force rooted in white supremacist Christian nationalism to torment communities across this country – to terrorize our neighbors. It started with immigrant communities, scaled to anyone with Brown skin, and now extends to anyone with enough empathy and moral clarity to say what we all know: this is wrong, this is cruel, this is criminal.

We’re also watching targeted kidnapping of Indigenous leaders – continuing the systemic violence against the only people on this continent who aren’t immigrants. We’re watching the same patterns that have played out against Black Americans who have warned us for generations about the abuse of power in law enforcement and who remain disproportionately represented in the machinery of mass incarceration. The evidence has been before us all along.   

But facts don’t matter to power-hungry leaders hellbent on controlling and restricting the freedoms of others. So, we must make the law matter.  

Alex Pretti was an ICU nurse who spent his working life keeping people alive when their bodies were failing them. He was a legal observer who showed up to bear witness, to document, to ensure accountability when power was being abused. He was, by every account, a good person. Protection was woven into who he was – in the ICU, in the streets, at every moment he chose to show up. When he saw violence that day in Minneapolis, he did what came naturally to him. He intervened. He believed his body between them could make a difference. He was right. And they killed him for it.   

The public execution of compassion is designed to frighten us into silence. They want us numb, scrolling past the next beating, the next killing, the next person murdered in broad daylight for the crime of giving a damn. Desensitization is part of the plan. We cannot allow it.  

Here’s what I know: every act of resistance matters right now. Every gesture of care we can muster shapes what comes next. Alex Pretti didn’t ask to become a martyr. But in showing up, in believing that protection mattered more than safety; he embodied the same valor he honored in that veteran. Both understood that freedom requires more than words. It requires us. It required him.  

And it cost him everything. I’m heartbroken, I’m so angry, and so resolute and clear that being in community – pushing back in the way only we can is where I need to be.  

This week, I’m supporting local organizers as much as I can. I invite you to go to Stand With Minnesota or to find local organizations in Maine where ICE activity is also now rampant, or look to organizations in your state, and support however you can. Not because it will bring Alex – or others who have lost their lives to ICE – back, but because the people still advocating in those streets need to know they’re not alone. Because they don’t get to look away. Because this is work and our actions, and kindness could be the spark that keeps them going.