Adriana Negrón (hip@therootsjc.org) is a community organizer with The Root Social Justice Center in Brattleboro, where she leads the Supporting Your Neurodiverse Child (SYNC) and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Thriving Network (BTN) programs. “If you want to get involved, to show up for your neighbors in tangible ways during this moment, I invite you to reach out to us directly,” she writes.
BRATTLEBORO-If you are reading this and feeling grief, rage, fear, or a restless sense that something must be done, I want you to know there is a place to put that energy.
Through mutual aid, rapid response, accompaniment, and collective care, our Ready Response Team at The Root Social Justice Center works to support immigrants and others most impacted by state violence.
We are in a moment charged in grief and sharpened by anger, a moment that asks more of us than words and refuses to let us look away.
Just days ago, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, was shot and killed by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis while protesting the actions of federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Alex spent his life caring for others. He cared for veterans. He showed up for his community. And in his final moments, witnesses say he was doing what he had always done: trying to protect a woman from harm.
His death has ignited protests across this country, but let us be honest: The outrage many feel right now is not because this is unprecedented. It is because it is undeniable.
* * *
This moment demands our attention.
But it also demands truth.
Because while this killing has shocked the nation, Black, Indigenous, Brown, Asian, and immigrant communities have lived under the threat of state violence for generations. This terror did not begin with ICE, and it did not begin with this administration.
It began with the genocide of Indigenous peoples.
With stolen land, nations erased, and survival criminalized.
It continued with slavery, bodies reduced to property, families torn apart by law, violence written into the foundation of this country.
It carried on through Jim Crow, lynching sanctioned by silence, terror enforced by policy, and a justice system that looked away.
It lived in segregated schools, redlined neighborhoods, and over-policed streets.
It lived in forced assimilation, in Indigenous children taken from their families and sent to Christian boarding schools, where language, culture, and identity were beaten out of them in the name of “civilization.”
It lived in forced sterilization and medical experimentation on Puerto Rican women.
It lived in internment camps.
In broken treaties.
In borders drawn through living communities, walls meant to divide families, histories, and futures.
It lives here, in our poor communities starved of resources and flooded with surveillance.
For so many of us, this fear is not new.
It is inherited.
It is normalized.
It is something our bodies learn long before words do, long before headlines catch up.
This is not an isolated incident.
It is part of a long, brutal pattern, one rooted in histories we have refused to fully reckon with.
* * *
And still, even in moments this dark, history offers us something else.
History offers us courage.
It reminds us that ordinary people, when they choose action over comfort, solidarity over silence, can change the fate of all of us.
In Poland, during World War II, when terror was law and cruelty was policy, people like Irena Sendler made a choice. She smuggled food. She forged papers. She carried children out one by one, saving an estimated 2,500 lives, knowing every step could cost her her own.
There were couples like Johtje and Aart Vos, members of the Dutch Resistance, who opened their home and hid people hunted by the state, saving dozens of lives while knowing discovery meant death.
There were individuals who falsified documents, rerouted trains, forged identities, and said, again and again: This ends with me.
And there were countless others whose names we will never know, people who chose life when obedience would have been easier. People who said yes to humanity and no to brutality.
Here in this country, we know these stories, too.
We know Harriet Tubman, born into slavery, hunted by law, called “Moses” by those she led to freedom. After freeing herself, she went back, again and again, through danger and bloodshed, guiding people north through the Underground Railroad.
She never lost a single person. Not one.
* * *
These stories are not distant history.
They are instructions.
They remind us that fear is not new, that oppression has always depended on silence, and that organized, collective action, even by a small number of people, can bend history.
Today, as people fill streets from Minneapolis to San Francisco, New York to Boston, we are watching that courage reappear. People are marching. Organizing. Demanding accountability. Refusing to accept policies that treat human beings as disposable.
We cannot wait for another killing to wake us up.
We cannot convince ourselves that someone else will do the work that is ours to do.
Alex Pretti reached for someone else even when it cost him everything. He did what had to be done: He showed up. He protected. He refused to look away.
May we carry that forward.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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