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Will the Death of the VA Nurse After the Twin Cities Strike Became Tipping Point Against Trump?

By Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early

On Veterans Day last Fall, President Trump traveled to Arlington Cemetery to reprise his bashing of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) on the campaign trail a year before and the DOGE-led assault on VA staffing levels throughout 2025.

"We fired thousands of people who didn't take care of our great veterans," Trump told the assembled crowd. "They were sadists. They were sick people. They were thieves. They were everything you want to name... But we got rid of them, permanently…"

Less than three months later, that Veterans Day boast gained new and more ominous meaning in the Twin Cities. On January 24, 2026, Border Patrol agents fatally shot RN Alex Pretti ten times in the back—a particularly brutal way of reducing the head count at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. The 37-year-old member of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) was off duty at the time. He was peacefully filming their activity when he came to the aid of a female protestor who had just been pepper-sprayed. She was his last patient.

The fact that Pretti was legally carrying—but not brandishing—a concealed weapon led the White House to smear him as a "domestic terrorist" who planned to "murder federal agents." That pretext for his summary execution—after he had been disarmed and restrained—unraveled pretty quickly. Along with the earlier murder of ICE protestor Renee Good, Pretti's killing—and resulting protests—became yet another "tipping point" in the ongoing popular struggle to curb and eventually abolish ICE. Even gun owner groups, which backed Trump in the past, went ballistic when leading figures in his administration implied that the VA nurse had misused his Second Amendment rights.

VA Secretary Doug Collins hewed closely to the MAGA party line, as it wavered back and forth. In a social media post, he sent his "condolences to the Pretti family." But who, he asked, was really to blame for "chaos and death in American cities?" In the Twin-Cities, Collins argued, "such tragedies" were actually the result of Democrats (like fellow veteran, Gov. Tim Walz) failing to cooperate with Homeland Security's deportation of "dangerous criminals."

For friends, family, or co-workers of a highly regarded, but now dead, VA caregiver, this was not a great display of the pastoral manner that Collins claimed to have developed in the past while ministering to families of deceased post 9/11 service members. But, even on a bad day, the Air Force chaplain running the VA ranks higher on the empathy scale than the ex-Marine now serving as Trump's VP. During media questioning about his social media smear of Pretti as "someone who showed up with ill intent at an ICE protest," JD Vance was asked if he planned to apologize to Pretti's family. "For what?" he asked.

A Collins Critic

While these two veterans displayed their usual degree of complicity with the violence unleashed by their commander in chief, other past or present federal workers with military experience reacted with courage, compassion, and renewed commitment to resisting Trump. Arlys Herem, a Collins critic who served in Vietnam as an Army nurse and now tries to "Save Our VA" as a VFP member, found her fellow RN's death to be "just devastating." After suffering from anaphylactic shock, Herem once spent four days in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in the VA hospital, where Pretti worked at the time of his death.

"I don't know if Alex was one of my nurses," she told us. "But I can tell you that they were super knowledgeable and competent. ICU staff deal with every organ system in a patient's body. It's such complex work, managing medications, complex technology, and then dealing with patients' families." What Harem does know for sure "is that Alex Pretti died doing nursing work. His last words on this Earth were uttered to an injured woman: 'Are you OK?'"

In Washington, DC, AFGE President Everett Kelley called for an independent investigation into the killing of "a fallen brother from AFGE Local 3669," the "patriotic ICU nurse" who had "devoted his life to serving America's veterans." Kelley also demanded the resignation of one of Donald Trump's favorite cabinet members, Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem. According to the AFGE president, Noem's masked and heavily armed underlings in Minneapolis put "lives at risk"—as she had done previously, with nationwide impact, via her "sustained attacks" on AFGE members providing airport security at the Transportation Safety Agency (TSA) and disaster relief at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

A Pro-Trump Union Affiliate

Left unmentioned was how Kelley planned to deal, then or later, with his National Border Patrol Council, a pro-Trump AFGE affiliate which some AFGE rank-and-filers want kicked out of the union. "We can't have it both ways," said Chicago VA social worker Aimee Potter. "We can't advocate for our communities and for 'ICE Out' and, at the same time, be connected to an organization that is terrorizing our members and our communities."

AFGE's organizational rival as a representative of VA nurses—National Nurses United—responded to Pretti's killing by demanding "the immediate abolition of ICE" as a "violent, racist, and lawless agency that poses a dire public health threat." NNU then organized a "Week of Action in Honor of Alex Pretti" that was not limited to other federal workers. Instead, the union tried to engage 200,000 unionized nurses nationwide—including those in our hometown, Richmond, CA, where Kaiser RNs reminded their bosses that if "you take on one of us, you take on all of us."

AFGE headquarters issued a headquarters call for a national "Day of Remembrance" for Alex Pretti on February 1, 2026. This led to two dozen local vigils, including one at VA headquarters in Washington, DC, where Secretary Collins was not at work because it was a Sunday. AFGE President Kelley flew to Minneapolis to personally address VA workers on their day off.

Always going deeper than the national union officialdom, the Labor Notes-backed Federal Unionist Network (FUN) distributed what it called a "Justice for Alex Toolkit." This workplace solidarity guide included "a sample meeting agenda and facilitation guide to bring co-workers together to plan vigils and other actions." Its emphasis, per usual, was not just on displays of grief and anger, but also on longer-term organizing to build power in federal workplaces temporarily stripped of union contracts.

Responses by any single union paled in comparison to the massive "Day of Action with NO WORK, NO SCHOOL, and NO SHOPPING," organized by the broader Twin-Cities labor movement on Friday, January 23, 2026. In a 21st-century echo of the Minneapolis general strike of 1934, a crowd estimated at 100,000 marched and rallied in subzero temperatures, while tens of thousands stayed home from work, and many small and large businesses closed for the day in solidarity.

CWA Local 7250 president Kieran Knutson, who rallied rank-and-file against National Guard use of the St. Paul labor center for local policing purposes in 2021, now had much more company. Responding to the general strike call were Minnesota Nurses Association members again, along with thousands of others represented by UNITE-HERE, AFSCME, SEIU, the UE, ATU, OPEIU, IATSE, Twin City teacher unions, and the Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL), a workers' center. By coming together in such dramatic, cohesive fashion, these labor organizations and their community allies created a template for similar action by state and local labor coalitions elsewhere, during the final three years of the Trump-Vance regime.

In a post-strike report from the front lines in February, Knutson noted that "we're still learning to use muscles that the labor movement has not used for generations—and we are finding our power against a vicious enemy—but we cannot let up. We cannot accept cosmetic changes. The politicians will not save us—it is up to us!" That was good advice not only for fellow union members and military veterans but for everyone else in the US, fending off the further assaults on democracy and human rights that lie ahead.

This article in The Veteran is excerpted from the Epilogue of a new book by Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon called Courage or Complicity? How Veterans Are Responding to the Assault on Democracy (PM Press, August, 2026), available for pre-order at:https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=2149

Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon are longtime labor and healthcare reform activists who co-authored a book called Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends, and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs (Duke University Press). They can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com.