A Protester Threw a Snowball. Federal Agents Responded With Tear Gas and Pepper Balls. |
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.
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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........