When Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, University of Minnesota graduate and U.S. citizen, was killed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in Minneapolis last weekend, it was a shot heard round the country. He was the second U.S. citizen to be killed by federal agents this month, after Renee Good was shot and killed by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on Jan. 7. Pretti and Good were killed while bearing witness to the harassment, raids and illegal detentions of immigrants in Minneapolis and across the state.
As I watch masked federal agents rip apart Minneapolis and the social fabric of our country, I wonder how we will recover. Pretti and Good were shot trying to protect their neighbors. But will the bridges that community leaders, college outreach programs and policymakers built between immigrant communities and their adoptive homes crumble under the weight of the federal government’s crackdown?
It brings to mind my own experience serving as a trustee for a charity working to improve the lives of Black and ethnic minority women in east London for a few years after the pandemic. Through that work I saw higher ed’s community outreach in a new way. As a higher ed journalist, I had covered this part of universities’ missions before, but I had never seen it from the community perspective. Queen Mary University of London works with the charity Women’s Inclusive Team on a range of health-care projects with the goal of using research and policy to address health equity gaps—a pernicious problem in the U.K., as it is here.
The partnership also serves to build trust in mainstream medical services among Somali and Bangladeshi communities in the borough of Tower Hamlets. This work has ripple effects. These women and their families felt more integrated into the community and were more likely to seek help from public services in other areas of their lives, such as escaping domestic violence or accessing job support from the council.
This network of university researchers and local clinicians also helped systems of power see these women. The charity’s CEO worked tirelessly to be a voice for the community. She served as inequality commissioner for the local council and as an independent adviser to the Metropolitan Police. As in many U.S. cities, Black youth in London are more likely to be stopped and searched by police than their white peers. Keeping the lines of communication open between law enforcement and the Somali-majority Black community in Tower Hamlets was imperative for their safety and gave people a voice in how they were policed.
Universities in Minneapolis are doing similar work to build partnerships in their communities. For more than 16 years, the University of Minnesota’s Somali, Latino, Hmong Partnership for Health and Wellness—SoLaHmo—has conducted nearly 50 health research studies and trained over 1,000 community members, students and faculty in research.
The University of Minnesota Public Safety Network has partnered with organizations like the Somali Youth Link to train young people in conflict resolution and how to administer lifesaving medication in the case of overdoses. UMN Public Safety even partnered with the organization to host a community iftar during Ramadan last year, and Augsburg University engages with its immigrant neighbors in Minneapolis through its Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship and trains young people to participate in its East African Policy Debate League.
But no matter how tightly connected immigrant communities are to their neighbors and the institutions of power, once trust is broken, it is hard to regain. That’s why Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara apologized to the Somali community for comments he made connecting “East African kids” to crime last November. The city’s latest horror is that on steroids.
Universities and colleges can be anchors for their communities, but the partnerships that researchers at the University of Minnesota, Augsburg University and others across Minneapolis have built are being tested. The two CBP officers who killed Pretti have been placed on administrative leave, and the agency’s “commander at large,” Greg Bovino, has been demoted back to his old job in California. It feels like a turning point in this dark chapter for our country, but the full damage won’t be clear until communities and neighborhoods in Minneapolis have time to heal. Hopefully the foundations the researchers and community leaders have laid mean residents won’t be starting from square one.