ICE Murdered Nurse Jeffrey Pretti

A poem for a martyr who was murdered by Trump's Gestapo

My Fellow Democracy Defenders,

ICE has murdered another American citizen in Minneapolis. Agents executed Jeremy Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse. Like Renee Good, I have written a poem as a tribute to this brave fighter of fascism who gave his life to protect immigrants. Let’s keep singing the NO KINGS ANTHEM together as we protest in the streets. Jesus would also keep going into churches to disrupt Christofascists.

He wore no uniform of olive green,
No rifle slung across the tragic scene.
His weapon was a stethoscope, his shield
The quiet mercy that the weak would wield.
Jeffrey Pretti, a nurse, a man of care,
Who breathed the oxygen of democracy’s air.

But when the black vans came to snatch and steal,
To break the stranger on the federal wheel,
When ICE, that Gestapo of the modern age,
Came roaring in with handcuffs, rage, and cage,
Jeffrey didn’t step aside and bow—
He stood between the badge and the broken brow.

He said, “You touch this family, you touch me.
This clinic is a temple of the free.
You cannot kill the patient, kill the guest,
And say you serve the land you manifest.”
He stood a giant in his paper shoes,
Defending those who had no one to lose.

The fascists fear the healer’s gentle hand,
They fear the moral law across the land.
For caring for the immigrant is treason
To those who hate beyond a passing season.
So steel was drawn where love had been before,
And blood stained white the clinic’s linoleum floor.

They shot him down for doing what was right,
For being a democracy’s light.
They thought they’d kill a man; they didn’t see
They shot the root of every liberty.
For when a healer falls for human kind,
The murderers are the ones who go blind.

So sing it loud, let every voice resist,
The name that’s burned upon the fascist list.
Jeffrey Pretti, martyr, nurse, and friend,
The brave democracy defender, without end.

---