On the streets of Minneapolis, protesters call out ICE forces. Cellphone videos are a powerful ally.

Federal agents spray demonstrators at close range with irritants after the killing of Renee Good by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Jonathan Ross on Jan. 7, 2026, in Minneapolis. Since July 2025, there have been at least 17 open-fire incidents involving federal immigration agents, according to data compiled by The Trace, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news outlet investigating gun violence. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

In 1974, I was covering the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. The Irish Republican Army was fighting against the British occupation of Ulster (Belfast) meant to hold the violence down. Patrols of uniformed British troops walked the streets, entered shops and sent young protestors to internment centers.

One of the leaders of the IRA’s political arm thought I needed some experience in real Irish culture to round out my story. There must have been 400 people crowded into a community facility. The smoke was heavy and the music rollicking as only Irish flutes, drums and whistles can produce.

The crowd was obviously enjoying a respite from the “troubles.” Let’s call it a weekend blowout with an Irish accent.

Suddenly, the music stopped cold. All eyes turned toward the back. A British patrol was slowly walking through the crowd, arrogance displayed in their eyes and manner as if challenging the crowd to make a move on them. It was occupier versus home guard.

It took a few moments until the crowd erupted in shouts against the Brits, knowing they couldn’t arrest everyone. Some were standing yelling, “Get out, British pigs!” I felt the deep hatred of a thousand years boiling up like fountains of bile.

I didn’t have that feeling again for 50 years, until the citizens of Minneapolis stood face to face with their own occupying force, a federal army sent to patrol the streets and enter the day care centers and stores and high schools and even churches on the suspicion there might be an undocumented immigration there.

At least that was the excuse for sending federal troops into an American city. The stated truth for their mission was closer to a personal payback against the state of Minnesota for not voting for Donald J. Trump for president.

The incidents are bone chilling. One militia mob held a 5-year-old preschooler outside a residence as leverage to force the father to come protect his child — and then be arrested. Children were left in cars as their mothers, picking them up from school, were taken away. The images include ICE officers smashing car windows, then opening the car door and dragging the driver into the snow. One officer reaches in to cut the seat belt while a mob of them puts the driver on the ground.

In this case, the driver is a woman screaming: “I’m pregnant going to the doctor.” She left a child in the car.

An officer is shouting: “Where were you born?”

If it was not the United States, she could be thrown into a van and transported to a detention center. The observers — press and citizen volunteers — lost track of what happened to her because they have no access to the Homeland Security data.

The siege of Minneapolis differed from the Irish “Troubles” in one important respect. Day after day, each scenario was recorded on a device in the hands of every observing citizen. The camera in a mobile phone records footage that is unfiltered, unedited and therefore quite truthful.

Law enforcement officers had been expected to wear a body cam to record every move they made in an arrest. They did it to protect themselves and as proof their actions are seen as legal. But when a phone camera is in the hands of third parties, the effect is also illuminating — often more so.

These videos record actions from the point of contact and becomes a record of the origin of an event, something television news crews are rarely able to do since they can’t be everywhere at once. Phone videos became the ultimate evidence of truth.

It was just the beginning. An impromptu documentary by citizen protesters followed every move of ICE, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. The first thing I do in the morning is scroll my Instagram feed for the latest scrum showing burly ICE officers, surrounding a city resident to apply zip ties or spraying chemicals into protesters’ faces.

The phones follow the masked, helmeted, and armed federal militia walking into hospitals and schools hunting individuals on a list. Even pedestrians who spoke with an accent were challenged to prove their citizenship. The targets were mostly Hispanic.

It became so frustrating for the ICE officers that the Department of Homeland Security subpoenaed the Minnesota governor, attorney general, Minneapolis mayor and three others for interfering with federal authorities.

The phones — some call them a new set of eyes — reached a summit on Jan. 7, when several people recorded ICE officer Jonathan Ross shooting and killing 37-year-old Renee Goode as she attempted to drive through a traffic stop. The shooter was not wearing a body cam but was holding his personal phone, recording as he walked around Goode’s SUV.

He captured an almost a 360-degree sweep until he reached the front of her car. At that point, his camera was either dropped or hit the front of the vehicle and stopped recording. Goode began pulling away slowly, and several cameras recorded Ross pulling his weapon out of its holster and firing three shots into the driver’s side of the SUV. Goode was killed by two shots to the chest.

In this case, the phone camera showed everything except the apparent contact between Ross and the car. He said it hit him. Homeland Security and President Donald Trump jumped on the opportunity to claim that Goode was a paid agitator or observer who was trying to get away. Videos of the confrontation spread across the country so the public could judge for themselves.

The ensuing firestorm of controversy pitted the official explanation by the Justice Department and FBI against the public, who watched various phone videos play back again and again.

After the killing, officials called for anyone who might have taken a phone video to turn it over to police. Such videos have become that important as evidence.

The video sparked demonstrations across the United States. It has given the public an interpretation closer to the truth than the official explanation of the federal government. Truth is in the balance and will likely turn on the best evidence available — from cellphones.

On Jan. 23, I turned on the television set to see a fullscreen image of a 5-year-old boy, Liam Conejo Ramos, standing outside his home in Minneapolis getting ready to be loaded into an SUV by border patrol officials. The headline in the Guardian read: “What images of a detained five year old boy reveal about Trump’s draconian crackdown.”

The government spin on a news release characterized it this way: “Parents hid behind their five-year-old child so they could run away.” Once again, a mobile phone visual carried nationwide struck at the heart of a vicious federal operation.

I was going to end my story at this point, but soon after an even worse example took over the headlines and inspired mass demonstrations across the country. Alex Pretti, a U.S. citizen who worked as a nurse in the Veteran’s Administration hospital in Minneapolis, was using his cellphone to film ICE officers in the street. When one of them pushed a woman to the ground, Pretti tried to help her, still holding his phone in his left hand.

Six ICE officers threw him to the ground and were wrestling him when a shot was heard, then another from an officer firing at point blank range into Pretti’s body. The others pulled back, as if startled, while the officer fired 10 shots into Pretti’s body.

The official government explanation was that Pretti was a domestic terrorist and was brandishing a pistol with intent to “massacre ICE officers.” Pretti was carrying a pistol, legally licensed in Minnesota, but he did not touch it during his struggle.

The incident was captured from several angles by nearby protestors, and once again those videos contradicted the government account. The truth was obvious to the thousands of protestors who braved near-zero temperatures to make their objections known. They had seen the mobile phone video as the truth.

Bill Kurtis is the president of Kurtis Productions and official judge and scorekeeper for NPR’s “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” He lives in Chicago with his wife, Donna. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.