#43 ¿Que pasó? with Señor B - week of 1/19

By now, I am sure many of you have seen the horrifying images of what happened to Alex Pretti.

Alex wasn’t a threat; he was an observer. He was doing what so many in our community have had to do for years: he was filming. He was bearing witness. But as he stood there with his camera, ICE agents approached him, pepper-sprayed him, and, while they held him down, shot him multiple times.

The evidence is undeniable. There are videos from multiple angles, captured by several witnesses, showing exactly how this went down. Yet, despite the receipts, DHS and ICE leadership are looking the American people in the eye and lying.

They are following an old, tired playbook. First, they claimed Alex was violent. Then, they claimed he approached them with a gun drawn. They are trying to criminalize a victim to justify a killing. It is a blatant attempt to make you reject what you are seeing with your own eyes in real time.

Familia, we cannot let them rewrite this story. When these agencies feel they can ignore video evidence, they are testing us. They want us to be too afraid to look. They want us to put our cameras away and accept their "official" narrative without question. But we owe it to Alex, and to every person vulnerable to this system, to keep watching and keep recording.

Please, be careful out there. If you are documenting these interactions, stay at a distance and use apps that sync your footage to the cloud immediately. Never observe alone; use the buddy system so someone is always watching your back.

These agents and the leaders covering for them must be held accountable. We don’t just need an internal review; we need an independent investigation and we need the truth. La verdad siempre sale a la luz, but only if we refuse to stop looking.

While we are seeing the direct, violent consequences of ICE’s actions in our communities, we are also seeing a rare shift in the political landscape.

This week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani appeared on The View and was asked a question that most politicians spend their entire careers dodging: "Are you in favor of abolishing ICE?"

We’ve seen others, from Gavin Newsom to Cory Booker, skirt around this, leaning on safe words like "reform" or "restructure." But Mamdani didn’t flinch. He gave a straightforward "yes."

His reasoning was simple and undeniable: ICE has no interest in fulfilling its stated mission. While they claim to exist for national security and public safety, their daily operations tell a different story. To our community, they are an entity that terrorizes and executes people, regardless of their legal status or the facts of the law.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. It is incredibly moving to see an elected official center the humanity of our people and emphasize that the raids we see every day are not normal. We cannot "reform" a system that is fundamentally broken. It needs to be torn down and rebuilt with humanity as its foundation.

Mamdani didn't try to play it safe or avoid the question; he made his stance clear. In a time where so many leaders are choosing silence or half-measures, I am grateful for a leader who isn't afraid to demand a future where our families can live without fear.

If you thought the stories couldn't get more heartbreaking, this week in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, we saw a new low.

Five-year-old Liam Ramos was returning home from preschool with his father when they were swarmed by ICE agents in their own driveway. What happened next is something out of a nightmare: agents took Liam out of the car and directed him to knock on his own front door, essentially using a five-year-old child as "bait" to lure his mother out of the house so they could detain her too.

When his mother didn't come out, agents refused to leave Liam with a nearby adult relative who begged to take him. Instead, they detained both the father and the five-year-old. They have since been flown 1,300 miles away to a detention facility in Dilley, Texas.

The Department of Homeland Security is already trying to spin this, claiming the father "abandoned" the child and that they kept Liam for his own "safety." But the school superintendent and witnesses on the scene saw the truth: the car was still running when they were swarmed, and masked agents used a preschooler as a tactical tool.

This administration and these agencies constantly tell us they care about "the children" and "family values," but apparently, those values don't apply to our community. There is no world where detaining a five-year-old and using him to hunt his own mother is "public safety." It is state-sponsored trauma, plain and simple.

Liam should be in his classroom with his stuffed turtle and his friends. Instead, he’s in a cell in Texas. We should all be absolutely ashamed that this is happening in our name.