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Shortly after 9 a.m. Saturday, my wife, Julia, woke up from a nightmare that federal agents were trying to break into our home, one of many nightmares she’s had since I was arrested by ICE, detained for 8 hours, then released without charges. I had been peacefully observing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents when it happened, like so many Minnesotans have over the past weeks and days. That morning, she instinctively checked our neighborhood group chat. For the third time this month, someone in Minneapolis has been shot by federal agents. This time it had happened a mile from our home, to a man I would learn was Alex Pretti.

We haphazardly dressed in our cleanest warm clothes. As we opened our car doors, we saw neighbors of ours, whom we’ve never spoken to, doing the same. The entire neighborhood was converging. As we approached the intersection where Pretti was shot 10 times, we heard chants of “ICE out” ringing out on Nicollet Avenue, known locally as “Eat Street” because of its dozens of globally minded restaurants.

What normally would have been an intersection full of chilly Saturday-morning brunchgoers had become something akin to a war zone, as federal agents tried to break up the protesters gathered as close as they could to the site of the shooting, at the intersection of Nicollet and 27th Street.* Our presence and our bodies were the only sign of solidarity and resistance we could offer, so that’s what we did. Agents assembled with weapons of war, and all we had were our outrage and our cameras.

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We stood in the cold for a couple of minutes as the crowd swelled. At one point, someone threw a snowball at an agent. Two agents started chasing the man who’d tossed it westbound down 27th Street. I tried to follow but then heard an explosion from behind me. Flash-bangs and chemical weapons were being shot or thrown into the crowd. I fled.

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My sister-in-law Eva Rose,........

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