National Nurses United

L ike all registered nurses, Chris Rubesch knows that nothing good ever comes from being scared and unpre- pared. "You don't want to be going into an unknown situation when you're afraid," said Rubesch, a telemetry nurse in Duluth, Minn. who is president of the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) and a vice president of National Nurses United (NNU). "Bad things happen. As nurses, we prepare for all of that." So when Donald Trump took office in January 2025, immediately designating spaces like health care settings, schools, and places of worship as fair game for immigration enforcement and ramping up the anti-immigrant rhetoric, Minnesota nurses got busy. Concerned nurses approached the MNA board of directors about mobilizing to respond to potential attacks on Minnesota's immigrant patients and communities, especially the large Somali and Hmong populations, and the union's Immigration Task Force was born. Nobody could have quite anticipated the scale of Operation Metro Surge, federal immigration agencies' war on Minneapolis res- idents and the rest of the state, but at least MNA members were as ready as they could be. "We see our communities at risk, and we identified this as a cri- sis," said Rubesch. "We see what is happening and we protect us." From California, to Illinois, to Minnesota, to Maine, NNU regis- tered nurses have been furiously organizing to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities and to demand that their employers adopt and enforce policies to side with nurses on keeping hospitals and clinics safe sanctuaries of healing and off limits for immigration enforcement. One of the benefits of solidarity as a national RN union is the opportunity to learn from and model one another, to share knowledge about tactics and strategies that work and do not work. We have previously reported on some wins by our affiliates, such as passage in California of S.B. 81, a law sponsored by California Nurses Association, that strengthens privacy provisions for immigrants in health care settings and more clearly restricts access to federal enforcement agents. The greater Los Angeles metropolitan area has been dealing with daily but dispersed ICE kidnappings since last summer, but the "enhanced operations" that cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Portland, Maine, experienced are a whole other beast. In these "surges," thousands of agents invade the city, violently rounding up nonwhite citizens and noncitizens alike in an indiscriminate drag- net. Minneapolis bore the brunt of this approach, Portland suffered for more than a week, and, as of this writing, ICE is expected to surge operations across California with news reports that it is aggressively leasing and opening physical offices in cities like Sacra- mento, Irvine, Santa Ana, and San Diego. NNU has consistently stated that ICE actions pose a major pub- lic health threat on multiple levels to our patients, our communities, and our democracy. That danger was never more apparent than after border patrol agents on Jan. 24 gunned down Alex Pretti, an intensive care unit RN who worked at the Minneapolis VA, for simply observing and filming them. Pretti's murder, on top of Renee Good's killing ear- lier that month, galvanized nurses across the country to hold an entire week of vigils to demand justice for him and all killed by ICE. Pretti's killing further crys- tallized ICE's motives for the U.S. public: People could see that the agency's purpose is not immigration enforcement, but rather to serve as President Trump's paramilitary police—accountable only to him—to quash popular opposition to his fascist, white supremacist takeover of our democracy. Nurses have assessed that ICE is beyond reform, and the agency—which was only created after the 9/11 terror- ist attacks—needs to be abolished. NNU's position has been that it is wrong to steal nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and Medicare through last year's budget bill H.R. 1, just to give billionaires tax cuts and $175 billion to Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and border patrol. Taxpayer dollars should go to provide health care to the U.S. people, not attack them. On Feb. 19, thousands of NNU nurses at more than 55 facilities around the country held a national day of action to demand that Congress stop funding ICE and dismantle the agency. "They picked on the wrong profession," said Mary Turner, an ICU RN in the Twin Cities and also an NNU president. "When we saw people murdered like that, that was a wake-up call. The reality is: No one is safe. No one can say, 'This can't happen to me.' It's official now." B y the time federal agents descended in full force on the Twin Cities in late December in what the government called "Operation Metro Surge," Minnesota Nurses Association had already been educating and organizing nurse members for almost a year on what to do when encountering federal immigration agents, what patients' rights are, and what health care workers' rights and responsibilities are. MNA partnered with all facets of the community, J A N U A R Y | F E B R U A R Y | M A R C H 2 0 2 6 W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G N A T I O N A L N U R S E 19 Nurses mobilize to protect patients, coworkers, and our communities against ICE, with a special look at the work of Minnesota nurses. BY LUCIA HWANG "They picked on the wrong profession. When we saw people murdered like that, that was a wake- up call. The reality is: No one is safe. No one can say, 'This can't happen to me.' It's official now."

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