Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
“Are you OK?”
In video footage, 37-year-old Alex Pretti can be heard asking that simple question after a woman was shoved into the snow by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Moments later, he is tackled to the ground, and an agent appears to remove a gun that Pretti was legally licensed to carry from his waistband. Then federal agents opened fire and killed him.
I didn’t know Pretti, but for years I have researched the experiences, motivations, and attitudes of men like him—men who take care of others in their workplaces, homes, and communities. Pretti was an intensive care unit nurse in a Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis, and in the days since his killing, his parents, friends, neighbors, former patients’ families, and colleagues have attested to his kindness and caring nature.
“Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for,” Pretti’s family said in a statement. “Just the sweetest person you can imagine,” said Mac Randolph, whose father Terry was treated by Pretti through his dying hours. Randolph posted a video of Pretti reading Terry’s final salute moments after his death in December 2024. “Today we have to remember that freedom is not free,” Pretti said. “We have to work at it, nurture it, protect it, and even sacrifice for it. May we never forget and always remember our brothers and sisters who have served so that we may enjoy the gift of freedom.”
The past half a century has seen a near-revolution when it comes to men’s roles in both hands-on and emotional caregiving. According to Pew Research Center, since 1965, the amount of time men spend caring for children has tripled. Research from AARP found that men today make up about 40 percent of family caregivers. While professional caregiving is still dominated by women, those numbers are also improving. Today the proportion of male nurses has risen to 13 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Kyle Kerley is a nurse at the James Cancer Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. He worked an overnight shift on the hospital’s hematology floor, then came home Saturday morning and fell asleep. When he woke up that evening, a friend had texted to tell him ICE had killed another person in Minneapolis, this time a male ICU nurse. “If you haven’t seen the video yet,” his friend had added, “you may want to avoid it.”
Kerley, who has attended anti-ICE rallies in Columbus, decided to watch. He wanted to be fully informed if any of his colleagues asked him for his thoughts about the incident. One of the shocking things about the footage, he said, was how calm Pretti appeared to be throughout the rapidly escalating encounter with ICE agents. “Nurses are trained to act calmly, to respond appropriately in high-stress situations, and if there’s a conflict, to simply step in front and put their bodies in the way,” Kerley said. “I recognized that as a trait of a skilled nurse.”
A 2021 report from my colleagues at New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., analyzed a nationally representative survey and a series of online focus groups to identify some other traits of men who are professional caregivers. Many men in these roles feel a strong sense of purpose and meaning in their jobs. And though some note that the culture around them—and even, at times, their own loved ones—jokes about men in nursing, they also say they are proud of their work and that they would recommend a caring profession to younger men. Many of the men in the study saw their work not as a foray into something feminine or even as a feminist act, but as a profession that transcends gender roles entirely.
Dennis Kosuth, a nurse for Chicago Public Schools and for Cook County Hospital, saw footage of Pretti’s killing on Saturday afternoon. He’d just gotten home from Minneapolis, where he’d been protesting ICE and the killing of Renee Good with members of his union, National Nurses United. Many nurses traveled to Minneapolis because they saw ICE as attacking people who were or could well be their patients.
Cook County Hospital, where Kosuth works, admits patients regardless of their citizenship status. For Kosuth, that makes the protest in Minneapolis an obvious matter of concern for nurses. “ICE were attacking regular, working people who have come here from other countries, fleeing economic, political, and dangerous living conditions. As nurses, we want to stop that harm,” he said.
Even before Kosuth learned Pretti was a nurse, he knew from the videos circulating online that Pretti was not a man who intended to do “maximum harm,” as the Department of Homeland Security contended.
“Alex was clearly out there being a helper,” said Kosuth. “The ‘maximum harm’ that happens in our society is not caused by the helpers. It’s caused by the system. … As nurses, we just try to put a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. We see a need and we want to help.”
Evidence suggests that men who are the helpers or caregivers also benefit from their engagement with those around them. Much has been made of the so-called male loneliness epidemic, the idea that men are uniquely disconnected from others and suffering as a result. But a 2024 report from the American Institute for Boys and Men finds that men and women have experienced comparable increases in the amount of time they spend alone in recent decades. The real difference between men and women is not so much the number of people they interact with or even how satisfied they feel about their relationships, but how they feel about themselves in the world. According to the report, men are more likely to say they do not feel they are “meaningfully part of any group/community,” and that their “place in the world doesn’t feel relevant.”
Caregiving appears to be an activity that can counter those feelings. Research from AARP, for instance, shows that despite the financial, physical, and mental stresses of caregiving, 82 percent of caregivers say the role gives them a sense of purpose in life, and 81 percent say it makes them feel good about themselves. State of American Men, a 2025 report by the international men’s research organization Equimundo, finds that the best solutions to male loneliness are having mentors, being active fathers, and care work.
Jennifer Obel
A Doctor Wanted to Protect Him From ICE. So She Made Up a Diagnosis.
Read More
-
A.I. Is Causing Meltdowns in American Offices. It’s Only Getting Worse.
-
I Study Male Caregivers. I Recognized Something in Alex Pretti.
While the Trump administration has repeatedly cast men, especially white men, as an oppressed and disconnected group, and blamed a so-called attack on masculinity for that, they have offered little in the way of solutions other than the advice that men and women should marry and have kids. How involved those men should be with those kids or how they should relate to their friends, neighbors, and communities is not their concern. Meanwhile the administration has taken a wrecking ball to the country’s care infrastructure, its child care systems, health care, and education, cutting and shuttering the programs that knit America’s communities together.
Pretti’s killers saw his care and concern not as an asset to our society, as the fabric that knits together a healthy community, but as a threat. After Pretti fell still on the ground, one ICE agent was filmed clapping. It’s a stark departure from the reverence, solemnity, and gratitude Pretti displayed in the moments after Terry Randolph’s death.
Kerley has male colleagues who get into nursing out of a sense that good men should protect people, he said. “I guess ICE agents see themselves doing the same thing, but their way of protecting is so distorted, so misdirected—just identify a scapegoat and break everything in their way.”
“Ultimately,” Kerley said, “nurses and ICE agents are polar-opposite professions.”
