The violent death of Alex Pretti on Saturday by ICE agents in Minnesota has become a code blue for America. He was an ICU nurse who cared for military veterans at a Veterans Affairs hospital. He was a U.S. citizen, a Boy Scout, and a beloved son. He definitely was not one of the undocumented people federal agents were sent to detain. Nothing about his life fits the narrative of a lawless person impeding the work of removing violent criminals who are not legally permitted in the United States.
As a physician who also works in an intensive care unit for infants, I recognized the moment that triggered his instinct to care for and protect the injured and vulnerable. Numerous bystander videos show that he came to the defense of two different women who were aggressively assaulted by ICE agents. His actions spoke loudly about his professional training as a critical care nurse (professional training that appears absent from those most recently carrying out ICE raids). As medical professionals, we are charged to “first, do no harm.” So, I know his training as an ICU nurse had taught him to perform his duties in chaotic, complex situations – even when he lacked resources and support to protect himself from harm.
Without question, this was another chaotic and violent incident during ongoing protests in Minnesota. Federal officials immediately took to the airwaves to demonize him. The familiar refrain of “Why didn’t he comply?” is already on repeat in the usual places. Though he exercised his rights to own a weapon and legally acquired a concealed carry permit, federal officials are arguing that anyone showing up to protest peacefully does not bring a gun. But these are not well-reasoned or logical arguments. They are just more examples of people grasping to make sense out of senseless situations. We likely cannot change the perspectives of those who allege that the ICE agents agitating and escalating the situation were in danger and feared for their lives.
For the rest of us, though, this is our moment of moral reckoning.
This is a moment that calls for all of us to act. Watching another video of a person being violently murdered by ICE agents will worsen our national mental health crisis. Our current nursing crisis means we cannot lose another nurse and make access to healthcare even harder to get. With prices for health insurance and groceries soaring beyond what people can afford, we must reject a reality in which we cannot afford to get sick or stay healthy.
Likewise, we cannot deny that America is critically ill and in need of intensive care. The symptoms include a government shutdown that kept babies from receiving SNAP benefits, children again dying from preventable infectious diseases like measles and whooping cough, and federal agents killing a U.S. citizen with no criminal record while exercising his First, Second, and Fourth Amendment rights. When the NRA speaks out against what happened, it shows that everyone understands how sick America really is.
Still, there is hope. With people pushing back against this federal administration’s unprecedented actions, they dropped their legal appeal over anti-DEI funding threats to schools and colleges. When they tried to remove funding for substance abuse and mental health services, that decision was reversed in less than 48 hours. Commander Greg Bovino was just relieved of his leadership over ICE raids in Minneapolis. Yes, elections have consequences, and the consequences demand actions. Keep pressuring elected officials to intervene against ICE agents using unnecessarily harsh tactics. Help your neighbors whose safety has been violated during indiscriminate ICE raids. Tell your local, state, and federal legislators to vote for bills that keep insurance affordable so people can get the care that Alex Pretti dedicated his life to giving. America is coding, and it will take all of us to resuscitate her.
Valencia P. Walker, MD, MPH, FAAP, is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.