The Intercept reports:

Less than 40 minutes after federal immigration agents shot and killed 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti on Nicollet Avenue in south Minneapolis, Clayton Kelly was thrown face-first onto the sidewalk, tasting snow and street grime as a federal agent’s knee drove into his back.

The incident, a video of which The Intercept reviewed and corroborated with an independent eyewitness, occurred not long after Kelly and his wife arrived in the area where Pretti was killed. With protesters amassing and agents from Customs and Border Protection as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement flooding the area, the couple told The Intercept, they just wanted to observe the scene.

“All of a sudden,” Kelly said, a federal agent “started running toward me, pointing and yelling, ‘That’s him. Get him.’”

Ten days earlier, Kelly had watched as an immigration agent shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg during a federal enforcement action in north Minneapolis. As Kelly told the local outlet Sahan Journal, an SUV with police lights chased another vehicle, and then, “They went into a house. … I heard two shots before the area was just being swarmed by ICE immediately.” Sosa-Celis was injured — and Kelly’s account contradicted the official narrative released by the Department of Homeland Security.

At the scene of Pretti’s killing, Kelly told agents they would find themselves “on the wrong side of history,” he recalled. After the exchange, he and his wife, Alana Ericson, began walking toward another section of Nicollet Avenue where people were congregating, and as soon as Kelly turned his back, that was when agents began shouting and running toward him.

“I had my hands up. I kept saying, ‘I’m leaving. I’m leaving,’” Kelly said.

Kelly is far from the only civilian to be brutalized by federal agents in Minneapolis this month. But his detailed account of his beating and detention offers a clear example of how the agents, ostensibly deployed to carry out immigration enforcement, have instead shifted their purpose to encompass a crackdown on dissent. In Kelly’s case, it raises the question of whether he was facing retaliation for acting as a witness.

In December 2025, a group of Minnesota residents and the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota filed a federal class-action lawsuit, Tincher v. Noem, alleging that federal agents participating in Operation Metro Surge used excessive force, intimidation, and arrests to deter civilians from observing, recording, or protesting immigration enforcement.

The complaint alleges retaliation against people engaging in constitutionally protected conduct, including arrests of observers who were not interfering with federal operations. In January, a federal judge issued a limited injunction barring agents from retaliating against peaceful protesters and observers.

While federal agents pinned Kelly down, given Pretti’s recent shooting, Ericson feared they could kill her husband.

“I kept telling them he’s a U.S. citizen. They said, ‘We don’t give a f—,’” she said.

Kelly had previously undergone fusion surgery in his thoracic spine, a procedure that permanently joins vertebrae to stabilize the back. “Several agents piled on top of me,” Kelly said, and one put his knee on the site of his surgical wounds. “They were sitting directly on my spine.”

“I was screaming that I couldn’t breathe, but I had almost no air left,” Kelly said. “An agent pushed the pepper spray nozzle right into my left eye and sprayed. I turned my head so I wouldn’t get it in both eyes, but my left eye was completely burned.”

Pinned beneath multiple agents, Kelly said panic quickly gave way to fear that he might not survive. He said he was unable to catch his breath and felt his limbs go limp beneath the weight on his body. [Continue reading…]