2 Pinays in fight vs Trump plan to close their hospital
GLENDALE, California—The news spread like wildfire. It was as raw as the blood that spilled on fresh snow that Saturday morning in the faraway American city of Minneapolis, away from here, where Evelyn Exevea and Jessica Calosa are now huddled in a crowd of protesters.
Hearing the news that her fellow intensive care unit (ICU) nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents last Jan. 24 in that midwestern city, Exevea felt a certain numbness she had never felt before.
“That (killing) should never have happened. He (Pretti) was there to help and he died because of it,” Exevea told this reporter.
Looking wan, and holding a big, red placard that read “Don’t Close our Hospital,” Exevea is here today, standing in front of Glendale Memorial, the hospital in the corner of Los Feliz and Central streets in this city of 200,000, where a good part of the population is Filipino American.
Drastic budget cuts
As a top official of National Nurses United (NNU), the biggest union of nurses in America, Exevea, 47, is warning her community about the possible closure of their 334-bed hospital because of the drastic budget cuts to health care of about $1 trillion by President Donald Trump and the Republican Congress in their so-called Big Beautiful Bill.
Just a few steps behind Exevea, her fellow Filipino American Calosa, a Democrat representing the 52nd district that includes this city, was also processing her emotions about Pretti’s killing.
“As a proud daughter of nurses, I will not let Donald Trump terrorize our communities,” the 37-year-old Calosa told the crowd, some of whom were openly cursing Trump and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), two agents of whom pumped 10 bullets into Pretti, the 37-year-old ICU nurse who, several videos show, was only trying to help a woman assaulted by the ICE, before he was shot by the same agents.
“To tell anyone not to help when someone is in need is just plain wrong,” said Exevea who has been an ICU nurse at Glendale Memorial for 20 years.
‘Abduction’
Last summer, Calosa and Exevea had their first brush with the ICE at the same hospital. Instead of nurses manning their stations, masked ICE agents sat on the reception desks for two weeks before they abducted an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador.
That surreal image haunted Calosa and prompted her last month to file a proposed law she calls “Slam the Brakes on ICE Act” in the California assembly in Sacramento. It seeks to prevent businesses from helping the ICE in its anti-immigrant operations.
The “abduction” also alarmed Exevea and her colleagues at Glendale Memorial as they experienced firsthand how funds for health-care programs are now being diverted to militarize ICE operations.
Immigrant parents
“They (ICE) came like thieves in the night,” said one nurse who requested anonymity.
By breaking the proverbial glass ceiling, Calosa became the first Filipina elected to the California legislature in the November 2024 elections, when Los Angeles residents also elected Ysabel Jurado as the first Fil-Am woman to sit on the city council there.
Calosa and Exevea both arrived in California as toddlers, brought by their immigrant parents from the Philippines, dreaming of a better life for their families.
Now the veteran nurse and freshman politician are thrust into the spotlight, leading the campaign to protect their city’s only rural hospital, threatened by closure by Trump and his billionaire friends.
Both Calosa and Exevea have experienced firsthand how their immigrant families benefited from the care and healing touch provided by the community hospitals.
It was in an emergency room in San Diego, on her 21st birthday yet, where Calosa was saved from pneumonia and exhaustion in 2010. She was then a working student at the University of California in San Diego, juggling two jobs and student loans.
It was at Glendale Memorial in the 1990s that Exevea’s grandfather Benjamin, got a new lease on life after a lifesaving heart surgery to remove blockages.
Lifeline for working class
During the same protest rally, NNU officials revealed what they claimed to be the “true motives’’ behind Trump and his billionaire friends, who are now trying to cash in by privatizing rural hospitals, to the detriment of the working class, who see them as their only lifeline when they go there for treatment.
“Make no mistake about it! We are experiencing a class war, and this has now become a matter of life and death!,” warned NNU executive director Puneet Maharaj.
With the shooting death of nurse Pretti that morning, her declaration could not have been more prescient.
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