Agency & Resilience

Witnessing the aftermath of the Alex Pretti shooting

To witness is to refuse the easiest option available to any of us: looking away. It costs nothing to not be there. It costs nothing to let an enforcement operation unfold in someone else’s neighborhood, to let a killing become a news cycle, to let a news cycle become last month. Witnessing interrupts that drift. A person who stands on a sidewalk and watches — who films, photographs, or simply remains present — converts an event the powerful would prefer to pass unrecorded into something that now has to be answered for. In a moment when federal immigration enforcement has moved into American cities with unprecedented force, and when Operation Metro Surge brought that force to the streets of Minneapolis, presence itself became a civic act. Sometimes a dangerous one.

The book is the culmination of nine years and 60,000 photographs — a record of protest and presence that began in 2017 and arrives, finally, at Operation Metro Surge.

Susan Sontag argued that we should let the most terrible images stay with us — that we should allow them to haunt. She understood that a photograph is only a fragment, a token of a reality far larger than any frame can hold. But she insisted the fragment still does vital work. An image of violence testifies to what human beings are capable of doing to one another — not reluctantly, not by accident, but willingly, sometimes eagerly, often convinced of their own righteousness. And the image carries a demand along with its testimony: do not forget.

In the four months that followed Alex Pretti’s death, something shifted in the Twin Cities. Operation Metro Surge had brought an intensified federal ICE and CBP presence to the Minneapolis area as part of a broader pattern of immigration enforcement playing out in cities across the country. Pretti’s killing turned that operation from a policy story into something a neighborhood could no longer hold at arm’s length. Vigils formed on the sidewalk where he died. Protests grew. A memorial was built, cleared, and rebuilt. Ordinary citizens who had never stood on a corner with a sign in their hands were doing exactly that. By March, the response had grown large enough to fill a concert hall — musicians and organizers gathering for a benefit in his memory on March 6.

Agency & Resilience documents what those four months looked like from the ground. Organized chronologically and thematically, it traces how a single act of violence moved through a community — how movements gather, fracture, adapt, and persist. Photographs from the scene sit alongside primary documents: transcripts, 911 calls, press conference statements, and official communications, left as much as possible to speak for themselves.

At its core, this is a book about visibility — about the insistence that democracy is lived in streets and public squares as much as in institutions. It documents not only opposition, but participation. Not only grief, but the determination that grief not be wasted.

The heartland is often stereotyped as politically dormant. What these images reveal is something else entirely: a region that is active, vocal, and deeply engaged — shaped, day by day, by those willing to stand within it.

Agency & Resilience affirms that history is not abstract. It is embodied. It unfolds in the open air. And it is made, photograph by photograph, by those who refuse to look away.