Five days after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot activist Renee Good, tensions were running high in the Minneapolis neighborhood where she was killed.
As federal immigration agents surrounded and questioned a man whose car they had stopped, people emerged from their homes onto the snow-lined sidewalks and street. They shouted obscenities, told the agents to leave and filmed what was happening on their phones.
A crew from FRONTLINE and ProPublica was filming, too.
The man being questioned, a U.S. citizen named Christian Molina, told ProPublica reporter A.C. Thompson that federal agents had followed him and rammed his car: “They looked at me and they decided to pull me over for no reason,” Molina said.
What happened next can be seen in footage from FRONTLINE and ProPublica’s new documentary “Caught in the Crackdown.”
Someone threw a snowball in the direction of the agents — and one of them responded by tossing a tear gas canister into the crowd.
“You’re tear-gassing a fucking neighborhood,” a protester yelled. “People live here.”
As the toxic haze rose, an agent pepper-sprayed protesters and a news photographer at close range. Another agent fired pepper balls into the crowd, hitting Thompson three times. One shot struck him above the right eye. Federal use of force guidelines generally instruct agents not to target people’s heads and faces with these weapons.
Then, as the agents drove away, one of them shot pepper spray from a car window, hitting others on the film team, including FRONTLINE’s director Gabrielle Schonder and director of photography Tim Grucza, who was sprayed in the face.
Watch Agents Use Tear Gas and Other Weapons on a Minneapolis Crowd
Footage of the confrontation was captured for “Caught in the Crackdown,” a new documentary from FRONTLINE and ProPublica.
The Jan. 12 confrontation is one of many chaotic clashes documented in “Caught in the Crackdown.” Premiering April 14, the joint investigation examines how federal agents handled protesters and bystanders during the Trump administration’s immigration sweeps in major cities across the U.S., from Los Angeles to Chicago to Minneapolis — including by using tactics that experts say violated officers’ own rules.
As the documentary explores, President Donald Trump’s administration said its immigration crackdown was protecting U.S. citizens by targeting criminals and people who had entered the country illegally. Through on-the-ground reporting and interviews with officials, experts, insiders and eyewitnesses, “Caught in the Crackdown” traces how federal forces arrested hundreds of U.S. citizens who were protesting or observing the raids, routinely portrayed those citizens as domestic terrorists or extremists, and repeatedly deployed weaponry like tear gas and pepper balls.
The man heading the enforcement operations was unapologetic about his agents’ approach.
“We’re here to conduct that Title 8 mission,” Greg Bovino, then-commander-at-large for Border Patrol, told a local TV station, referring to immigration enforcement. “It won’t stop despite rioters, agitators, and vast amounts of violence against federal officers. We’re not going to stop.”
But when Thompson shared the footage from Jan. 12 with former law enforcement officials, they expressed concern.
“We see, just, use of excessive force after use of excess force,” said Christy Lopez, who spent years investigating law enforcement misconduct for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “In no scenario is it OK to be pepper-spraying people as you’re leaving the scene.”
“It’s pretty awful,” said Chris Magnus, a former head of Customs and Border Protection who once oversaw Bovino. Magnus, who served as a police chief in multiple cities, pointed to the principle of proportionality when using force in law enforcement: “People may well get under your skin under a lot of circumstances,” he said. “You don’t like it, but professionals don’t react to it.”
As the documentary reports, ProPublica and FRONTLINE found that legal cases against many protesters have been falling apart, as the accusations against them have been contradicted by video evidence and witness testimony.
Bovino was ultimately moved out of his role after federal agents shot and killed a second protester in Minneapolis — Alex Pretti. The Trump administration said it “recognized that certain improvements could and should be made” to its immigration enforcement operations. Bovino has since retired, but many of the questions raised on the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis under his watch remain unresolved.
“Even if Gregory Bovino is gone, I wonder if his imprint will last through all the federal agencies that are continuing to go out on the street,” journalist Sergio Olmos, who reported on Bovino for the nonprofit news outlets CalMatters and Evident Media, says in the documentary. “I wonder if anything will change, really. He was the one who was the tip of the spear for this new type of immigration enforcement across the country.”