Truth is our most powerful weapon

Eric Ortiz lives in the Wedge with his family. He is executive director of the Strong Mind Strong Body Foundation, a nonprofit youth and community development organization based in Minneapolis.

The first casualty of war is truth. Unless truthtellers are on the ground. Minneapolis has an army of them. And they've been relentless.

Over the past several months, residents across the city have documented federal immigration enforcement operations as they unfolded. Phones, cameras, and livestreams captured actions before official statements could be issued.

What happened next revealed something important about the modern information landscape: Truth now moves through communities as fast as it moves through institutions.

Since December 2025, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) launched Operation Metro Surge, thousands of federal agents (more than 4,000 at its peak in early February 2026) have operated across Minnesota. The operation, which the federal government called the largest immigration enforcement effort in American history, turned ordinary streets into scenes resembling a military occupation.

But from the start, people in Minneapolis documented what they saw. They built a public record in real time.

This isn't just about immigration enforcement. It's a lesson in how truth spreads when gatekeeping collapses. 

Information now flows through a dense network of independent journalists, community media outlets, and residents with phones and platforms. The monopoly on narrative control is gone.

This shift matters because documentation changes how accountability works. Traditional journalism is often reactionary. Something happens, officials release a statement, and reporters follow up. 

Community documentation collapses that delay. It captures events as they happen and creates evidence before narratives harden into "fact."

Community documentation has become a form of civic infrastructure. Minneapolis is a real-time example of how that infrastructure works. 

Whether protesting, observing, or just trying to get home after dropping the kids at school, residents have given the world firsthand accounts of what is really happening on our streets.

I witnessed this shift toward crowdsourced accountability firsthand.

On Jan. 13, around 10 a.m., my wife — a former journalist — and I encountered an active ICE operation in Minneapolis while driving home after dropping our kids at school. 

Traffic on the one-way Park Avenue was backed up at 34th Street. We were stopped, unable to drive, with roughly 20 other cars. About 40 ICE agents were present. More than 100 neighbors, protesters, legal observers, and press filled the area.

Over the next 30 minutes, we documented what unfolded. 

ICE agents surrounded a woman's car, broke her passenger-side window, cut her seatbelt, and forcibly pulled her from the vehicle as she repeatedly told them she was disabled and on her way to a doctor’s appointment. 

The next day, the Department of Homeland Security released a statement describing the woman as an “agitator” who had ignored commands to move her vehicle and was arrested for obstruction. 

But the evidence on the ground told the full story.

Maria recorded more than 11 minutes of continuous video. Her recording began minutes before agents approached the vehicle and continued until after the woman (later identified as Aliya Rahman) was taken into custody. The footage showed she was stuck in traffic, not obstructing an operation. 

The video provided context missing from the official account.

What happened on Park Avenue was not unique. We saw the same dynamic in the murder of Alex Pretti.

Pretti was killed by federal agents while legally observing ICE activity in Minneapolis. Within hours, federal officials publicly characterized him as a "domestic terrorist" and an "assassin" who intended to kill law enforcement with a gun he had on him. 

That account traveled quickly. The video documentation traveled faster.

Multiple bystander recordings showed Pretti holding a phone, not a gun, while helping a woman who had been pushed by a federal agent. He checked on her and asked if she was OK.

Moments later, he was pepper-sprayed, taken to the ground, and shot 10 times.

Federal officials claimed Pretti raised a gun. Multiple videos from multiple angles contradicted that account.

The footage showed a human being intervening to help another person. 

Alex Pretti was not a "domestic terrorist." He was a 37-year-old ICU nurse with the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Health Care System. He was a Minneapolis resident and a U.S. citizen with no criminal record beyond parking tickets. He was a legal gun owner with a permit to carry.

In every clip, he posed no threat. He should still be alive.

Pretti’s death may mark a turning point, not because of outrage alone, but because of evidence. His case shows how real-time documentation can challenge false or incomplete narratives before they become the official story.

Across the United States, independent recordings have reshaped how events enter the public record. Videos shared online often surface moments that institutional reporting cannot reach quickly or would never publish unedited.

As Joohn Choe, a media scholar, explained:

"The information war is not a spectator sport, and it never has been. Every single one of you reading this has a phone that records video, a social media account that can amplify truth, and a network of people who trust what you share. That's not nothing. That's actually the infrastructure that makes legal resistance possible, because lawyers need evidence, and journalists need sources, and legislators need constituents who are paying attention." 

That raw documentation does not replace journalism. It strengthens it. Independent recordings provide evidence reporters can verify, contextualize, and preserve. 

Together, they form a civic record that outlasts press releases and outrage. 

As photographer Timothy Benston wrote: “Record is a civic verb. … The state can survive outrage. … What the state cannot so easily survive is a stubborn record that circulates, persists, and reappears when officials would rather move on."

Recording public interactions is legal. It is protected by the First Amendment. In moments of crisis, it has become one of the most powerful tools communities have to ensure accountability.

Emotion fades. But records remain. When communities document what happens in front of them, they create evidence that can outlast denial, delay, and revision.

Truth, once recorded, resists erasure. When recording becomes a civic habit, truth does more than survive. It endures.

Eric Ortiz lives in the Wedge with his family. He is executive director of the Strong Mind Strong Body Foundation, a national youth and community development nonprofit based in Minneapolis, and associate director of research for The Pivot Fund, a venture philanthropy organization that invests in community newsrooms serving underserved communities.