Logan and Anita were among the 60 or so people who came to the corner of Colonial Drive and Hancock Road Thursday evening for a demonstration and candlelight vigil to mark the death of Alex Pretti, the Veterans Affairs intensive-care nurse killed by ICE officers in Minneapolis last Saturday.

The event was organized by Lake County Indivisibles and drew people not only from Clermont but Gainesville, Leesburg, Winter Springs, Groveland and Winter Garden.

“We’re showing our support for Minneapolis, going against what the government is doing with ICE. It’s the Gestapo, and they’re uncontrollable. It’s uncontrolled terror on ... people in the United States” said Cyn Doyle, the Lake County Indivisibles organizer who put together the vigil. “They shouldn’t treat any of us, American or not, the way that they are.” She added that the group held a similar event two weeks ago for Renee Good who was killed by ICE on Jan. 7. “It’s Pretti’s turn today, unfortunately for us,” she said wryly.

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"I thought by this time I would not be doing this anymore," said a woman named Judy, who did not want to share her last name. She told VoxPopuli her first protest was the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam in 1969. She said she came from Leesburg to support Minnesota and "to stop what's going on in this country. I dunno what else to say."

Holding a sign that read ICE OUT FOR PRETTI GOOD, with two flag-draped hands flipping the bird, Colleen Lovejoy from Groveland did not mince words: “We're paying these ICE agents to kill us. We're paying with our taxes, our money, [they are] using our money to kill us and to kill the people we love and the people that we care about,” she said. "I don't want to live in this world. I want to cry."

“I’m out here because one day my kids are gonna ask me what I did when there was a fascist takeover of America, and I want to say that I was on the right side of history,” said Fahad Kahn as he held up his sign that read Love Thy Neighbor in multi-colored script. He said he’d driven an hour from Winter Springs to be at the demonstration.

Dan Williams, a Democratic candidate for Congress in District 11, which includes Orange and Lake counties, was also on hand for the vigil, as his partner and publicist Rei Montalvo collected signatures to get Williams on the Aug. 18 primary ballot.  

“ I think protest is always gonna be vital for any kind of democracy, so I'm glad that people are showing up to support kind of what we're doing here, and what we're doing is we're trying to say that ICE in its current form can’t exist, and it has to change because I think that the one thing that they're missing is compassion,” Williams said.

“ I think if we have compassion that makes the whole thing work,” he continued. “For example, like Obama deported tons more people than [Trump] did, but they did it in a compassionate way. And I think that's the big difference. And I think that's why everyone is so against what's happening now and the lack of accountability for anything.”

Indeed, President Obama earned the moniker “deporter-in-chief,” as his administration deported about 3.1 million people over eight years; meanwhile President Trump deported around 932,000 in his first administration. To date, the Department of Homeland Security reports that since Dec. 19, 2025, 622,000 noncitizens have been deported — still less than the 778,000 deported in President Joe Biden’s last year in office.

Williams said he also wanted the federal government to cop to facts that citizens can plainly see for themselves.

“The government is trying to say that one thing happened where everybody else can see exactly what happened, and I don't understand what they're trying to do because it just comes across as confusing for everyone involved,” he said. “So I wish they would just take the time and actually just do the investigation and come out with actually what happened and just admit to it. And that's all we need.”

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Eric, a senior at an area high school — he didn’t want to be too specific about where — said that he was at the demonstration because his two younger brothers, one in middle school, the other in elementary school, “are afraid" their mom, an immigrant, like many of his family, may be detained by ICE. There have been numerous reports of ICE detaining people with no criminal records or pending asylum claims as well as naturalized and U.S. citizens.

"It’s for them, so they can live safe in the county [where] I had to say the Pledge Of Allegiance every day — And justice for all. Every day I had to say it. And that’s what I’m fighting for. So they get to live in what I was forced to recite.”  

Congregants from two United Methodist Churches turned out to show support for Alex Pretti and protesters in Minneapolis.

Patti Aupperlee, pastor for the Edge United Methodist Church in Groveland urged people to let their their legislators know whether they support the ICE activities they’re witnessing. “The people we vote for, who make the laws can change what’s happening,” she said. “Our representatives need to hear that.

“ Because all human beings matter, and it is not okay to be treating people [with] less than the dignity that God created all people to have, and we need to do better,” she continued. “The personal attacks and assassinations against people's characters, much less the horrific things that are happening to people physically, that’s not who we are. That's not who God created us to be. We can do better. It's not about party. It's about people. And if people stand up for people, history has shown us we can do better.”

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Laura, carrying a sign that read 1933 Germany Dèjá Vu and who did not want to share her last name, was at the demonstration with a few members of the First United Methodist Church of Winter Garden. She said the church is "really trying to get involved in justice work.”

Nyah, also a member of the group, who likewise did not share his last name, explained that the church was working to figure out what Scripture says about relating to the the sojourner and the immigrant.

“A lot of church life is providing charity," he said. "But as individuals who are citizens in a country and a democracy, we also want to figure out how do we advocate, you know, in our own times? ... We're trying to figure out together, like how do we go from charity to justice? … How do we go from charity to advocate in a way that the disciples were in early Christian communities?

"You know, they showed up to council meetings, or what were called the council meetings," he continued. "They built mutual aid societies. They advocated for relating differently to slaves, relating differently to women who were oppressed, to foreigners who were oppressed by Roman rule and Pharisees. So we're trying to understand if that's how early Christians lived, if that's how Jesus lived, how should we relate to government and society today?”

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Around 6:30 p.m., Indivisibles' Doyle, who had earlier passed out electric tea lights, gathered the demonstrators together, on the grass, for a candlelight vigil.

Williams read the statement Pretti’s parents had released in the wake of the government’s narrative about his killing, which subsequent videos belied. He asked for a few moments of silence for both Pretti and Good, whose deaths, polling from YouGov suggests, galvanized a nationwide backlash against ICE as a majority of Americans recoiled from their tactics as "too forceful" and "unjustified."

Then the demonstrators returned to the street to continue waving their signs.