Famed Indigenous chef Sean Sherman: My employee was taken.

“We were just trying to get him medication… But he was already gone.”

Last week, the internationally renowned Indigenous chef Sean Sherman told reporter Nate Halverson that federal agents detained one of his employees on his way to work. The agents said his co-worker matched the description of someone they were looking for, and asked for documents to confirm his identity. By the next day, Sherman said, his employee was already out of Minnesota. He was discovered to be in Texas.

“Our employees are not criminals,” Sherman told Nate in the Twin Cities. “They don’t have police records and they’re just here to come to work. We’re literally a nonprofit trying to serve healthy indigenous food to people. We shouldn’t have to worry if we’re going to have guns pulled on us on the way to work at all, but this is our reality.”

Sherman said his team tried to intervene. “We were just trying to get him medication,” he added. “But he was already gone. And like, how do we get his medication to Texas now?”

Sherman also pointed to a troubling historical resonance at Fort Snelling—the area where people are now being brought and detained in the Twin Cities: This is not the first time it has been used as a detention site. Fort Snelling is where Dakota prisoners following the 1862 Dakota uprising were brought and detained before being forcibly relocated down the river to the Crow Creek Reservation in what is now South Dakota.

“It’s just more salt in the wound,” Sherman said.