Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse and former researcher at the University of Minnesota, was killed by ICE agents this morning while acting as an observer of ICE activities a little more than a mile from where I write this (Biesecker et al., 2026). It’s the second killing by ICE in 24 days after Renee Good, also 37 and a mother of three, was shot and killed two weeks ago, representing 67% of the homicides in the City of Minneapolis so far in 2026 (City of Minneapolis, 2026). It is likely to happen again.

Renee and Alex were people, not political tools or statistics. Renee dropped her 6-year-old off at school shortly before her life was taken. Alex was directing traffic around ICE vehicles and had just helped woman stand back up after an ICE agent had pushed her down while they filmed before he was wrestled to the ground and shot. These violent losses rend friends and family, and shake our community. My dear friends and colleagues have reached out to hear what’s happening here and learn more about what they can do to support us, and I thought that perhaps I would put together my thoughts for all of my fellow HRD scholars about what we can and, in fact, must do.

HRD is, at its heart, a moral discipline, and it does not exist outside history, violence, power, or governments, but within them. Our discipline has long positioned itself as concerning human dignity and development, rather than performance evaluated from an objective, neutral position (Kuchinke, 2010; Kuchinke, 2013). When human development is disrupted by fear and violence driven by social injustice, HRD’s relevance becomes more urgent, not less (Byrd, 2018). We face such a moment now in Minnesota.

The idea of neutrality suffuses our research, and many incredible HRD scholars use objectivist frames to interrogate phenomena crucial to human development. I am not suggesting this is not true or in conflict with morality; it’s simply a question of levels, as the view is focused instead at the level of HRD as a discipline. At this level, the field is driven by ethical paradigms that compel us to engage in the environment in which we find ourselves (Armitage, 2018; Kim et al., 2014). These ethics require HRD practice to apply practical wisdom and moral judgment, not simply rule-following (Kuchinke, 2017), and utilize these paradigms as ethical lenses within HRD scholarship. We cannot outsource our ethical responsibility to law, policy, or “context,” and must ask not only what works, but what harms, what corrupts, who bears the cost, who is silenced, and why.

The field has consistently recognized that learning and development are shaped by systems of power and governance, and the social context that binds them together (Fenwick, 2005; Fenwick, 2004). Here in Minnesota, as we wake to another senseless killing marked by fear and distrust, another in a line of signs of violence visited upon us by federal agents who contest visible truth with pre-written narratives, our context directly shapes workplace learning, psychological safety, voice and silence, and even trust in institutions once thought to be gold standards of trustworthiness. HRD scholars cannot be passive observers to this reality, and ignoring this context undermines HRD’s own epistemological commitments.

My HRD colleagues, who are far less privileged than I am, have helpfully and rightly reminded me that this is the same United States as it was before, but the state feels a little more comfortable visiting these injustices on people like me. Who can speak, and at what cost, is still unequal and unforgiving. I am a middle-aged, straight, white, male U.S. citizen. Each of these identities affords me a cumulative reduction in personal risk in speaking up or speaking out. I have colleagues and friends in my community for whom saying anything at all would shift their risk to an unacceptable level. They are braver and infinitely better scholars than I, but I and others who may be able to bear the risk have a duty to investigate and report because they cannot. I acknowledge my positionality, not as a confessional aside, but to elevate the rigor of the discourse needed to grow the field. Truth is at a premium, and HRD discourse requires positionality and the awareness of both silence and distortion to reveal it (McGuire & Nachmias, 2023).

So what can we do? We can first acknowledge the harm state- and organization-enforced silence plays. This silence and the fear it perpetuates suppresses learning, destroys psychological safety, prevents shared meaning-making, and extinguishes ethical correction (Morrison, 2023; Morrison & Milliken, 2000), harming many foundational elements that HRD has repeatedly found necessary for human development. Second, we can ameliorate this harm by subverting silence with voice. Ethically driven HRD research is both documentation and sensemaking, a way to resist erasure and a prerequisite for learning and accountability. For those who document in this way under risk, the act itself constitutes moral courage, and the field should honor and amplify those acts. This requires truth-telling in context, positionality and reflexivity that elevate voices that may not be able to speak and support for those bearing disproportionate risk when doing so, and above all a commitment to human flourishing over institutional comfort. It aligns us directly with the moral agency, social justice, care, and community that underpin the discipline.

To all HRD scholars, and especially to my fellow Minnesotans, let me close by saying hope is not blind optimism, but instead it is a commitment to give truth to those who cannot find it, voice to those who cannot speak, willingness to stay present when ease would make it easier to be anywhere else, and to learn from the moment and the people who create it. This discipline is made of sterner stuff than the forces arrayed against it, and we have the fortitude to face it together.

References

Armitage, A. (2018). Is HRD in need of an ethics of care? Human Resource Development International, 21(3), 212-231. https://doi.org/10.1080/13678868.2017.1366176 

Biesecker, M., Sullivan, T., & Mustian, J. (2026). The man killed by a US Border Patrol officer in Minneapolis was an ICU nurse, family says. Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/immigration-enforcement-minnesota-protester-alex-pretti-15ade7de6e19cb0291734e85dac763dc

Byrd, M. Y. (2018). Does HRD have a moral duty to respond to matters of social injustice? Human Resource Development International, 21(1), 3-11. https://doi.org/10.1080/13678868.2017.1344419 

City of Minneapolis. (2026). Crime dashboard. https://www.minneapolismn.gov/government/government-data/datasource/crime-dashboard/

Fenwick, T. (2005). Conceptions of critical HRD: Dilemmas for theory and practice. Human Resource Development International, 8(2), 225-238. https://doi.org/10.1080/13678860500100541 

Fenwick, T. J. (2004). Toward a critical HRD in theory and practice. Adult Education Quarterly, 54(3), 193-209. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741713604263051 

Kim, T., Park, J.-Y., & Kolb, J. A. (2014). Examining the AHRD standards on ethics and integrity using a multiple ethical paradigms approach. Human Resource Development Review, 13(3), 293-313. https://doi.org/10.1177/1534484313513952 

Kuchinke, K. P. (2010). Human development as a central goal for human resource development. Human Resource Development International, 13(5), 575-585. https://doi.org/10.1080/13678868.2010.520482 

Kuchinke, K. P. (2013). Human agency and HRD: Returning meaning, spirituality, and purpose to HRD theory and practice. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 15(4), 370-381. 

Kuchinke, K. P. (2017). The ethics of HRD practice. Human Resource Development International, 20(5), 361-370. https://doi.org/10.1080/13678868.2017.1329369 

McGuire, D., & Nachmias, S. (2023). HRD: Truth, linguistic warfare and positionality. Human Resource Development International, 26(4), 353-355. https://doi.org/10.1080/13678868.2023.2228067 

Morrison, E. W. (2023). Employee voice and silence: Taking stock a decade later. Annual review of organizational psychology and organizational behavior, 10(1), 79-107.