Announcing our 2026 legislative priorities!
This session, we’re fighting to protect programs that help people heal, stay housed, and reunite with their families.
At Partnership for Safety and Justice, we believe safety is created through care, accountability, and policies that protect life — not through fear, force, or punishment. Right now, we are grieving, outraged, and exhausted.
The killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse in Minnesota, and the killing of Renee Nicole Good weeks earlier are devastating reminders of what federal immigration enforcement has become. These deaths were not anomalies. They are the predictable result of a system designed to criminalize, cage, and separate people, rather than keep communities safe.
What we are witnessing is a crisis of cruelty — and a deepening expansion of mass incarceration and family separation under the banner of immigration enforcement.
Cruelty looks like armed federal agents flooding civilian spaces and turning everyday life into a source of fear.
Cruelty looks like families detained while seeking medical care.
Cruelty looks like people being killed — and then smeared or dismissed for exercising their constitutional rights.
This cruelty is not abstract.
In Gresham, a family with a pending asylum claim was detained by immigration officers in a hospital parking lot while trying to get urgent medical care for their 7-year-old daughter, who had been experiencing a severe nosebleed for hours. In Minnesota, a two-year-old was detained with her father and transferred to a Texas detention facility even after a judge ordered her release, while a five year-old was apprehended by ICE shortly after arriving home from preschool. Children are being used as leverage. Families are being torn apart.
We know this is not new. ICE has long functioned as a pipeline into detention and incarceration – separating families, terrorizing communities, and normalizing harm. People have died in ICE custody for years. What is escalating now is the speed, scale, and brutality with which this system is being unleashed.
This is not public safety.
It is incarceration.
And it is cruelty.
At PSJ, we know safety comes from keeping families together, ensuring people can seek medical care without fear, and allowing communities to live, gather and speak out without the threat of violence.
In this moment of grief and anger, we join Minnesota leaders in urging people to assemble peacefully. Peaceful protest is a constitutional right and a powerful expression of collective care and resistance to injustice.
ICE is not keeping us safe. It is expanding a system of mass incarceration and family separation that harms all of us.
We stand with grieving families.
We stand with communities under threat.
And we will continue to fight for a vision of public safety rooted in care, community, and the protection of life — not cages or fear.
What you can do now:
With care and resolve,
Safety and Justice