Columbus Circle Vigil for Alex Pretti | Multifaith Mondays NYC

Sunita Viswanath Speaking at the Rally

Yesterday, Monday, January 26, 2026, we gathered at Columbus Circle with the Interfaith Center of New York and partners for Multifaith Mondays: Moral Witness for Democracy—a weekly vigil space that has met since March 2025 to counter isolation with community, and fear with moral clarity.

This week, we stood in vigil for Alex Pretti of Minneapolis.

Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and U.S. citizen, was fatally shot by U.S. Border Patrol officers in Minneapolis on January 24, 2026, during a federal immigration operation. Multiple reports note that bystander video appears to show Pretti holding a phone moments before he was shot, even as federal authorities claimed he posed a threat.

At Columbus Circle, people of many faiths and none brought candles, prayers, silence, song, and the plainspoken grief that arrives when state violence is treated as normal background noise. We did not gather because we imagine a vigil is “enough.” We gathered because public mourning is also a form of public truth-telling. When power depends on intimidation—when it depends on the quiet message that anyone can be harmed and nothing will happen—then witness becomes a refusal to cooperate with that message.

Some people call what happened to Alex Pretti a shooting. Others call it an execution. What’s undeniable is that a person who showed up—by many accounts, trying to help and documenting what was unfolding—was killed, and the first official story told about their death has been widely contested by video and witness accounts.

We held Pretti’s loved ones in our hearts, and we held Minneapolis close, too—because grief spreads across distance, and so does responsibility. The demand here is not abstract. It is concrete: transparent accountability, independent investigation, and an end to enforcement practices that treat communities as battlefields and neighbors as collateral.

Multifaith Mondays reminds us that democracy is not only ballots and institutions. It is also the everyday safety required to speak, to assemble, to observe, to record, to object, and to remain fully human in public without being marked as a target. We returned home from the circle changed in the small way that matters: more determined to keep showing up, and less willing to accept fear as the price of civic life.

May Alex Pretti’s memory be a blessing—and a summons.