Last Saturday, 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 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 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.
While some of their clips have gone viral, the boys aren’t looking for 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.
‘It was just basic morals’
The brothers, who were born in Minneapolis and are now home-schooled, said it was an easy decision to throw themselves into the thick of a situation that has left immigrant communities traumatized and scared.
“It was just basic morals,” Sam said. “It was so obviously not OK and not right — the conditions in these detention facilities, the way people were being taken on the streets and torn apart from their families.”
They remain gutted by federal agents’ actions last fall in the Chicago area, including the fatal shooting of Silverio Villegas Gonzales at a traffic stop, and the subsequent shooting of Marimar Martinez which left her with five bullet wounds.
The boys may have different interests — Ben is drawn to music production while Sam likes to go fishing surrounded by nature — but their parents, Audrey and Andrew Luhmann, describe them as a “yin and yang” pair. They say Sam’s commitment to integrity and rule-following coupled with Ben’s innate loyalty and desire to help people make them ideal rapid responders to observe and record ICE.
But they also worry about their sons’ safety.
Last fall, Sam and Ben were pulled over by masked federal agents in Elgin, pressed against their car and questioned, they said.
I told one of the agents, ‘Hey, I’m legally allowed to record you guys. Can you please give me my phone back? And his exact words were, ‘Shut up,’” Sam remembered. “So I was scared, like they could have done anything in those moments, and no one would have known what happened.”
They eventually got their phones back, were given a warning and were told to stop following the agents. The brothers say they’re aware that their racial identity offers them a certain level of privilege and protection.
“When they see white people doing this, they know that they can’t illegally disappear them,” Sam said. “They’ll still detain white bystanders, but they won’t actually … abuse them as much as they will a brown person in their detention facilities.”
When the federal government’s focus shifted from Chicago to Minneapolis, the brothers figured they could use what they learned to help others in Minneapolis document ICE activity.
But the show of force in Minnesota is nothing like what they saw in their home state, they say.
“I don’t think people realize how much of an insane step up Minneapolis was, how much more violence and aggression and how many more agents doing completely illegal things was becoming so normal for this operation,” Ben said.
‘Chicago almost needs to be shaken awake’
The brothers have been patrolling nearly every day since they arrived, couch surfing at the homes of relatives and family friends or staying in Airbnb rentals. They’re still doing schoolwork, but it’s been harder to keep up with, they said.
It helps that their mom is a teacher who values the experience they’re getting in Minneapolis as much as a formal education.
“We, without meaning to, have made this be like a life test,” Audrey said. “I’m the parent and the teacher. I’m like, ‘Oh, they just passed their final that I didn’t plan on giving them.’”
Amid the large-scale invasion of Minneapolis, the brothers found a robust system of community organizing, mutual aid and residents patrolling the streets in a city that is no stranger to high-profile killings at the hands of law enforcement.
The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020 “shook these people awake,” Ben said, sparking a wave of large-scale conversations around race, policing and how to support communities of color.
The brothers, in middle school at the time, remember seeing the news as their mom changed their homeschool curriculum to focus more on Black history.
“Eleven or 12-year-old Ben was seeing how big the protests were in Minneapolis, not the riots, but the regular peaceful protests, and I wanted to be there so bad,” Ben said. “I wanted to know what it was like, to be somewhere where it felt important.”
Fast-forward to 2026 and Ben and Sam have gotten their wish. And they said Chicago organizers can learn from what’s happening in Minneapolis, if and when, more agents return.
“Chicago almost needs to be shaken awake,” Ben said.
The boys said their experiences contradict the Department of Homeland Security’s claims that they’re arresting the “worst of the worst.” Ben recalled the screams of a child he estimated to be between five and eight years old after his dad was detained.
“They had just taken this kid’s dad in front of him with [weapons] pointed at every window in the house,” he said. “[He] was just screaming over and over for his dad and screaming at the ICE agents, just crying.”
‘Where are your boys?’
The brothers debrief each day with their parents. Some calls are emotional, the boys shaken up by what they have seen, telling their parents: “I don’t know how we actually fight against this,” Ben said.
“I remember being overwhelmed when they said that, just thinking ‘What do we do?’” Audrey said. “My very next thought was, ‘The world has to know. This has to be shouted so loudly — that Chicago was terrible and this is worse.’”
Ben echoed his mother. “I just …think of Alex Pretti, who was trying to pull a woman back who had just been pepper sprayed in the face,” he said. “I’ve done that, we’ve both done that.”
On the day Pretti was killed, Audrey’s phone pinged with a text from a friend in Minneapolis.
“Where are your boys?” her friend asked.
Audrey checked the location of the boys’ phones. They were near 26th Avenue and Nicollet Street, she told her friend.
Audrey then scanned the internet and found reports of a shooting near that intersection.
“It was like that moment where you feel a shock go down your spine,” she said. “At that moment, my whole body started to shake because I looked at the intersection again, they were in the exact same spot. They weren’t moving.”
The boys were safe, she soon learned, but it was yet another reminder that her kids were putting themselves in harm’s way every day.
Still, the brothers are adamant that amid all the pain, they’ve also found moments of joy. The way they see it, they’re helping neighbors and they’re heartened by watching others do the same.
“I think that level of empathy and that level of care is like the peak of humanity, and the peak of who we could be as a people,” Ben said.
