Health care workers join Oakland vigil to protest ICE fatal shooting of Minneapolis ICU nurse

Registered nurse Silvia Lu was working the day shift at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland when she read about the shooting death of ICU nurse Alex Pretti, who was protesting the ICE immigration crackdown on the streets of Minneapolis.

On a day shift in the emergency department Saturday, where Lu often cares for children recovering from heart surgeries and car crashes, she struggled to hold back her emotions.

“I held my tears back the whole day,” she said.

She carried that pent-up grief outside the hospital Monday evening, where she joined about 200 others, mostly nurses, in a candlelight vigil to remember the 37-year-old Minnesota nurse whose death has become the latest flashpoint in the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement surge.

Just weeks earlier, videos circulating online showed an ICE officer shooting and killing Renee Good, another Minnesota protester and mother of three, as she attempted to drive away during a separate enforcement operation, according to media reports.

“I just felt I needed to do something. I needed to stand up for this and to just make myself present to the horrendous things that are going on in this country,” said Mary Dhont, a nurse in the hospital’s outpatient infusion clinic who joined the vigil organized by the California Nurses Association. “This is just the latest in a string. But it was horrible. The fact that he was a nurse just brought it closer to home.”

The nurses’ vigil came after a weekend of scattered protests in San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland over Pretti’s death.

So far, the Bay Area has been spared the kind of sweeping federal operation underway in Minneapolis. There, videos and news reports have shown ICE agents pulling people from their vehicles and detaining children during enforcement actions. Separate bystander videos captured the shootings of both Pretti and Good.

In October, after President Donald Trump sent 4,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles, he threatened to deploy them to San Francisco as well to clean up the city’s “mess.” But the president backed off after appeals from San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and tech executives, including Marc Benioff, the Salesforce CEO who family name is attached to the Oakland children’s hospital.

Benioff initially suggested Trump deploy the troops during his Dreamforce convention but later reversed course and apologized.

On Monday, in a petition circulating online, a group of tech workers urged Silicon Valley executives to flex their political muscle again and “cancel all company contracts with ICE.”

“This cannot continue, and we know the tech industry can make a difference,” they wrote. “Today, we’re calling on our CEOs to pick up the phone again.”

At the vigil, many attendees expressed concern that the Bay Area — home to nearly 500,000 undocumented immigrants, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates — could be the next target of intensified enforcement.

Nurses said they were especially worried about the families of their young patients.

“We take care of a lot of families, immigrant families, patients that may not have the ability to afford care otherwise,” said nurse Michelle Trautman. “And I’m concerned that they’re going to try and take advantage of that vulnerability to grab some of our patients and send them away when they obviously need care.”

In the hours after Pretti’s death, Trump administration officials said the shooting was justified, arguing that because Pretti carried a legally registered handgun in his waistband, he posed a threat to officers and intended a “massacre.” Trump adviser Stephen Miller called Pretti an “assassin.”

Those characterizations outraged his family and Democratic politicians, who pointed to bystander videos showing Pretti helping a woman who had been pushed by an ICE agent and holding only his camera.

He was pinned to the ground by multiple ICE agents, the videos show, and his gun had already been pulled from his waistband by an agent when he was shot several times.

The Bay Area’s Democratic congressional delegation has responded by voting against a Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill that would provide additional funding for ICE.

“I cannot and will not continue to fund lawlessness or federal agencies that terrorize families in their own neighborhoods and criminalize people for seeking opportunity and refuge,” U.S. Rep. Lateefah Simon, D-Oakland, said in a statement. “What we’re witnessing is cruel, immoral, and completely at odds with the promise of the American dream.”

U.S. Rep. Sam Liccardo, San Jose’s former mayor, also voted against further funding.

“ICE has abandoned its mission of removing violent criminals in favor of detaining children, shooting Americans, and terrorizing our communities,” he said in a statement.

At the busy intersection of 52nd Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way on Monday evening, streams of cars honked and waved as they passed nurses and other supporters holding signs reading “Melt ICE” and “Justice for Alex Pretti.”

Aaron Cortez, 28, of Alameda, said fear drove him to attend the vigil.

His family has lived in California for generations, with relatives who served in the U.S. military, but he still worries about a potential ICE raid.

“They just see me by the color of my skin, and that worries me,” said Cortez, who cares for ailing relatives at home. “And so I decided to come out because I had to, I needed to show that we’re all here together, that no matter what happens, we will all protect each other.”