Honoring Alex Pretti’s Moral Courage and the Cost of Caring; The Hastings Center for Bioethics, February 17, 2026

 Connie M. Ulrich, Mary D. Naylor and Martha A. Q. Curley , The Hastings Center for Bioethics; Honoring Alex Pretti’s Moral Courage and the Cost of Caring

"The death of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who was killed last month in an anti-immigration protest in Minneapolis, is, first and foremost, a devastating loss for his loved ones. But it has also shaken the nursing profession to the core. 

People often encounter nurses at the bedside when they  are ill or someone close to them is ill. But nurses also have a long history of advocating for social justice in their communities, speaking out against unjust policies, challenging unsafe practices, and advancing public health reforms.

The 2025 Code of Ethics for Nurses reflects this activism. It calls on all nurses to be civically engaged and to work toward policies and systems that have positive ends for the communities in which we live and work. Alex met this call. 

Alex used his ICU training to help someone in need; it was second nature to him and reflected his primary obligation as a registered nurse to protect the rights and well-being of patients, families, and communities. He lost his life because he helped a woman during a protest against federal immigration action in Minneapolis. Pretti stepped in front of the woman, who was on the ground, to protect her from being pepper sprayed by U.S. Border Patrol agents. Agents then pinned Pretti to the ground and shot him.

Nurses are no strangers to conflict and moral turmoil. They take a professional and ethical oath to care for anyone — victim or perpetrator — regardless of their identity or ideological belief. But Alex’s death exposes a stark and troubling reality for every nurse and healthcare provider: Immigration enforcement agents are now occupying spaces that should be protected in hospitals, waiting rooms, lobbies, and clinics. These are places where patients must feel safe and trust that they will receive care without discrimination and be protected from intimidation. 

The presence of immigration enforcement agents in these places is creating profound moral distress and a climate of deep fear for all those who deliver care and for the people who need it most within these buildings. Nurses and other healthcare providers are caught in the age-old dilemma between what is ethical and what is legal: They question what they ought to do when faced with immigration enforcement agents standing outside hospital rooms and observing the care they are ethically and professionally obligated to protect.

When nurses and other healthcare providers cannot meet their ethical duties to protect the rights and welfare of their patients, this distress can intensify into a deeper wound with lingering residue of regret and a searing violation of their sense of integrity. 

For their part, patients may withhold critical health information, become afraid to ask questions, and mistrust health professionals when immigration enforcement agents are present. Patients who are immigrants are most vulnerable to these harms, but other patients may also experience them. The harms – to healthcare providers and patients – can ultimately compromise ethical decision-making, patient-and family-centered care, and the overall quality of care that all patients deserve, and healthcare providers are trained to deliver.

The patients and families cared for by Alex will always remember him. Nurses will remember Alex’s sacrifice – that his caring extended beyond the walls of his hospital to the stranger he protected in his community. 

Nurses can honor Alex’s moral courage through our individual and professional resolve. We must say no more to the infiltration of immigration enforcement into healthcare spaces that were previously off limits to them. We must speak out on re-establishing “safe zones,” hospital-wide policies that limit enforcement access, and confidential reporting mechanisms that reflect the humanity of the nursing profession towards those we took an oath to serve. 

May a better and more humane world prevail, reminding each of us that moral courage carries risk, but it also helps us rise to the occasion when change and moral repair are needed most. We are at that moment.

Connie M. Ulrich, PhD, RN, is a registered nurse and professor of nursing and of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and a Hastings Center Fellow. LinkedIn: connieulrich1, X: @cm_ulrich

Mary D. Naylor, PhD, RN, is a registered nurse and professor of gerontology and nursing at Penn’s School of Nursing. LinkedIn: Mary_Naylor,  X: @MaryDNaylor

Martha A.Q. Curley, PhD, RN, is a registered nurse and professor of pediatric nursing at Penn’s School of Nursing.LinkedIn: Martha-a-q-curley, X: maqcurley, Bluesky: @maqc.bsky.social"

Chicago’s faith leaders on front lines of resistance against ICE crackdown; The Guardian, November 28, 2025

 Siri Chilukuri, The Guardian ; Chicago’s faith leaders on front lines of resistance against ICE crackdown

"For weeks, Chicago has been at the center of the Trump administration’s brutal immigration crackdown. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Department of Homeland Security officials have arrested 800 people as of 1 October, while also using violent tactics such as body-slamming and deploying teargas in residential areas.

Amid the raids and arrests, which have created a pervasive sense of fear, faith leaders have stepped up, putting themselves on the front lines of resistance.

“Faith leaders bring a very powerful prophetic and moral compass into the space,” said the Rev Ciera Bates-Chamberlain, executive director of Live Free Illinois, a group that mobilizes Black churches around social justice issues in Chicago. “While many others may be able to argue the economic impact, or argue the law, faith leaders are typically the ones who are arguing and standing on the side of humanity and for people.”

How do we lead moral lives in an age of bullies?; The Guardian, July 28, 2025

 Robert Reich, The Guardian; How do we lead moral lives in an age of bullies?

"We are living in an age of bullies. Those with power are less constrained today than they have been in my lifetime, since the end of the second world war.

The question is: how do we lead moral lives in this era?...

This isn’t a matter of “left” or “right”. It’s a matter of what’s right.

Living a moral life in an age of bullies requires collective action; it cannot be done alone. Each of us must organize and participate in a vast network of moral resistance.

This is what civilization demands. It’s what the struggle for social justice requires. It’s why that struggle is so critical today, and why we all must be part of it."

Library provides essential support to incarcerated students earning college degrees; Yale Library, August 21, 2023

 Yale Library; Library provides essential support to incarcerated students earning college degrees

"In June, the Yale Prison Education Initiative (YPEI) held its first commencement ceremony, which took place at the MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, a state correctional facility in Suffield, Connecticut. MacDougall-Walker is one of two sites where the YPEI program operates; the other site is the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury.

The YPEI—Yale’s joint program with the University of New Haven (UNH)—was founded in 2016 as a program of Dwight Hall, Yale’s Center for Public Service and Social Justice, by Zelda Roland ’08, ’16 PhD. This year, the program awarded the first college degrees. “This year was a significant milestone,” said Emily Horning, the library’s director of Undergraduate Teaching and Outreach, who is also director of library support for the YPEI."

Smithsonian’s Leader Says ‘Museums Have a Social Justice Role to Play’; The New York Times, July 2, 2020

David Gelles, The New York Times; Smithsonian’s Leader Says ‘Museums Have a Social Justice Role to Play’

Lonnie Bunch, who oversees a host of museums and libraries, says the role of cultural institutions is to make people “feel comfortable with nuance and complexity.”

"In your memoir, you recalled when President Trump visited the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. And you shared this detail that the president didn’t want to see anything “difficult.” I feel like that story is emblematic of this broader tendency in American culture where many people, again, simply don’t want to confront the reality of some of the things that have happened in this country. How do we get people to engage with these difficult chapters in our history, especially when the legacy of some of these incidents is still very much with us today?

Americans in some ways want to romanticize history. They want selective history. As the great John Hope Franklin used to say, you need to use African-American history as a corrective, to help people understand the fullness, the complexity, the nuance of their history. I know that’s hard. I remember receiving a letter once that said, “Don’t you understand that America’s greatest strength is its ability to forget?” And there’s something powerful about that. But people are now thirsty to understand history. I hear people all the time saying, “I didn’t know about Juneteenth. Help me understand about the Tulsa riots.”

History often teaches us to embrace ambiguity, to understand there aren’t simple answers to complex questions, and Americans tend to like simple answers to complex questions. So the challenge is to use history to help the public feel comfortable with nuance and complexity."

How Machine Learning Pushes Us to Define Fairness; Harvard Business Review, November 6, 2019

David Weinberger, Harvard Business Review; How Machine Learning Pushes Us to Define Fairness

"Even with the greatest of care, an ML system might find biased patterns so subtle and complex that they hide from the best-intentioned human attention. Hence the necessary current focus among computer scientists, policy makers, and anyone concerned with social justice on how to keep bias out of AI. 

Yet machine learning’s very nature may also be bringing us to think about fairness in new and productive ways. Our encounters with machine learning (ML) are beginning to  give us concepts, a vocabulary, and tools that enable us to address questions of bias and fairness more directly and precisely than before."