Defending the Right to Bear Witness: Philanthropy’s Responsibility to Uphold Justice and Safety

“Are you okay?” These were Alex Pretti’s last words, said to a woman after ICE agents had tackled and pepper-sprayed her. Videos from bystanders show Pretti holding up a phone, attempting to document what was happening before he himself was pepper-sprayed, wrestled to the ground, and killed by those officers. He lost his life not for committing violence, but for documenting it, and stepping in to protect someone facing it, showing the urgent importance of defending the right to bear witness.

The killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Macklin Good, among others, are not isolated tragedies. They are part of a larger pattern—one in which protest, documentation, and dissent are increasingly treated as threats to the current administration’s racist agenda, rather than constitutionally protected rights. It is a stark illustration of what happens when the act of protest and bearing witness becomes not only dangerous but life-threatening.

The Trump administration’s intimidation and violence against ICE protesters are meant to have a chilling effect, to send a warning to others that they should stay home. Instead, more than 34,000 Minnesotans have signed up to defend their immigrant neighbors, with a surge of new “ICE watchers” joining after the fatal shootings of Good and Pretti.

We must catalyze this moment of reckoning into actual justice and safety for our communities. Videos of ICE agents wreaking havoc in our communities have spread widely on social media, eroding the agency’s standing in the eyes of the public and contradicting the Trump administration’s version of events. To date, video of the shooting of Renee Good has been viewed by 70 percent of Americans, underscoring how vital this form of documentation has become in the age of social media and smartphones.

Read the full article about defending the right to bear witness by Vina Kay and Melissa Rudnick at Nonprofit Quarterly. Read the full article