West Chicago teens on ICE watch in Minneapolis: ‘This is nothing like Chicago. This is so much worse.’
On Jan. 24, 17-year-old Ben Luhmann was behind the wheel with his 16-year-old brother Sam in the passenger seat, like they had been countless times before. As they drove through frigid Minneapolis to yet another scene where federal immigration agents had taken over the streets, their phones went off, alerting them of pepper spray being deployed.
Then another alert came through. Shots fired.
They pulled up to the scene, greeted by a swarm of federal agents, anguished neighbors and flashing lights. The brothers watched as paramedics unloaded a stretcher from an ambulance.
Sam asked someone on the scene if the person who was shot had died.
“He said ‘There were so many shots,’” Sam recalled. “‘I don’t know how somebody would live through that.’”
The man was Alex Pretti.
Pretti, a VA nurse, was shot and killed by Border Patrol agents as he recorded them and then tried to help a woman who was shoved to the ground.
As protesters converged on the scene, the boys kept recording before eventually heading back to their Airbnb that evening.
“I took a shower just because I was covered in tear gas, and then I immediately went to my phone … to watch every angle I could find,” Sam said. “And I was terrified. There’s so many people out here that are doing exactly what he did that day.”
Like Pretti, the Luhmann brothers observe and document immigration agents’ actions. They had traveled from their home in West Chicago to Minneapolis the day after an agent shot to death Renee Macklin Good on Jan. 7, not far from where Pretti was later killed.
Since then, they have gathered footage of top Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino throwing a tear gas canister into a crowd, immigration agents slipping and falling on ice, and an agent pepper spraying a man inches from his face while other agents pin him to the ground.
Some of their clips have gone viral, but the boys aren’t seeking clicks on their own social media channels. Instead, they upload all of their footage to a publicly accessible Google Drive folder for anyone to use.
To read the full report, visit chicago.suntimes.com.