When the artist Isabelle “Izzy” Brourman arrived in Minneapolis in January, with her partner Peter Hambrecht and her best friend Jeannette Berlin, the trio planned to continue documenting the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration tactics as part of their long-term project Starring America News. But on 24 January, the same day the hospital nurse Alex Pretti, 37, was killed by federal agents, the three were on the scene, capturing the protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) violence in drawings and video—when they all became part of the story.
A masked agent spotted Brourman sketching, dropped to one knee and fi red pepper balls at her at point-blank range, she recalls. Somehow sensing thedanger—which the artist attributes to her time spent recording the recent raids at immigration courts, where she would keep an ear trained on the hallways, listening for agents who would ambush people arriving for hearings—Brourman raised her drawing board just in time and blocked the projectile.
“I looked up and saw him looking right at me, and I’m just glad I moved right, because moving left would have basically sent me into the centre [of the shot],” she says. “I had been shielding myself from pepper balls with the board for a while at that point, and it just left a little dust on the back of the board.” This time, there was a hole and a jagged dent through the wood and paper. That same damage could have easily been inflicted on her body. “Just thinking about what could have happened, my faculties are really important to me and should be for everyone. It’s such a callous thing to do, that lack of empathy or humanity.”
Berlin and Hambrecht, who have both worked as news journalists, captured the scene on video from different angles, showing that Brourman had done nothing to provoke the agent. “What people need to understand is that what happened to Izzy is happening every single day to people holding protest signs,” Berlin says. “We happen to have two cameras on it, and Izzy happens to be well regardedand people happen to care what happens to her. But this was not the first time that we saw someone be purposefully shot by a federal offi cer with a ‘less lethal’ round that could have blinded them.”
While they are still processing what happened, the experience has not cowed them. They plan to continue drawing attention to government abuses and delivering the truth about what is happening to the public, both through Brourman’s somewhat abstracted drawings, which carry a sense of immediacy and touch of chaos, and through short-form video “portraits” that are posted on their website and Instagram account. They are also working on a longer-form documentary, with footage they have been collecting since Donald Trump’s fraud trial in New York in 2023.
“People are so hungry for an alternative image making that isn’t contrived, and that is reflective of reality,” Berlin says, particularly at a time when trust in the media has been eroded and newsrooms have been decimated by profit-focused ownership. “Izzy’s art has never pretended to not be subjective.”
Brourman says she is a “changed person” since covering the Trump trials and immigration court cases, and making art has become “a survival tool”, a way for her to ensure her perception of increas ingly unbelievable events is preserved on paper.
‘Working to fill gaps’
Berlin stresses that local news is doing “the best job covering the tentacle-like impacts of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign”, and that without it the public would not have reliable sources of information at a time when such necessities can save lives. But a new generation of bootstrap independent media, like Starring America News, “is working to fi ll gaps”, Berlin says. “People are looking for coverage that refl ects their reality, and they are fi nding that coverage in new places.”
Brourman says the trio has also started to discuss the idea of touring the country and screening some of the drawings and videos they have made in a makeshift gallery in a rental van or other vehicle. “If we can put together different local organisations where people can get that information, in small towns or cities, it seems like a nice way to do what we have dreams of doing.”
The group is now hoping to raise funds so they can go to places where their artistic and visual coverage is needed. “People need new ways to look at what’s happening because of how exhausted everyone is and how distrustful of one another people are,” Berlin says. “Izzy and her openness, authenticity and willingness to see, and the work that she makes, what it looks like and feels like, that is a new entry point for people and it’s something that any other presentation doesn’t offer.”
