When I saw the photo of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos wearing an oversize bunny hat and a Spider-Man backpack as he was being detained by federal immigration agents after arriving home in a Minneapolis suburb, I thought about my own son, now a young adult, when he was that age. Every father fears that moment when their child is terrified and they are unable to make it right. It punches you in the gut and sends you into a state of panic.
Every father fears that moment when their child is terrified and they are unable to make it right.
I don’t know what was going through the mind of Liam’s father, Adrián Alexander Conejo Arías — Liam’s school district disputes the Department of Homeland Security’s claim that the father fled on foot — but it pains me to imagine the terror Liam must have been feeling next to bigger, taller federal agents. They must have looked especially scary with their faces covered.
A statement from the superintendent of Liam’s school district says the father was bringing his son back home when federal agents “took the child out of the still-running car, led him to the door and directed him to knock on the door asking to be let in in order to see if anyone else was home, essentially using a 5-year-old as bait.” Then agents detained him and eventually took him to a detention center in Texas along with his father, according to the family’s lawyer and his school district.
DHS said in a statement that it didn’t use the child as bait and that Conejo Arías abandoned his child by fleeing. But the school official said both father and son were driven away together.
We should all agree with Kelly Albinak Kribs of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, who said in a statement, “What happened to Liam should shock our conscience as a nation. A child’s safety is not negotiable. No government action should ever place a child at risk or treat them as a means to an end.” Little Liam apparently isn’t the only small child in his suburb who’s been detained in such a manner.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement was bad under previous presidents, but the agency and its agents have never been like this. Liam and his father have pending asylum claims and are in the middle of a legal process to remain in this country. What kind of peace can they find in a country that treats human beings — preschoolers, even — so cruelly?
Vice President JD Vance has a 5-year-old. Because he does, you might think he’d break out of his routine of reflexively defending the awfulness of ICE’s actions and put himself in little Liam’s shoes or even Liam’s father’s shoes. But as usual, Vance leaned into gaslighting and tried to convince us that we didn’t see what we saw and shouldn’t feel the disgust we feel.
Vance leaned into gaslighting and tried to convince us that we didn’t see what we saw and shouldn’t feel the disgust we feel.
“So the story is that ICE detained a 5-year-old,” Vance said Thursday in Minneapolis. “Well, what are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to let a 5-year-old child freeze to death? Are they not supposed to arrest an illegal alien in the United States of America?”
Not surprisingly, Vance chose to ignore the report from Zena Stenvik, the superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools, who said another adult inside Liam’s home “begged the agents to let him take care of the small child and was refused.” Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino claimed that immigration agents are “experts in dealing with children … not because we want to be, but because we have to be.” Bovino also said Liam was never separated from his father and “remains with his family.” Yes, in a Texas detention facility! Shame on him for suggesting that Liam is fine with being there because he is with his father. The remarks from Vance and Bovino are obscene. What we are witnessing is state-inflicted trauma on vulnerable children. Not that it’s the first time. I’ve been thinking about why Liam’s photo has hit me so hard, beyond the obvious fact that he’s 5 and could be my son, and I think it’s because it’s a reminder of a willingness on the part of society and the government to inflict cruelty upon children to keep in place a racial hierarchy. From white parents yelling at children around Liam’s age as they integrated schools, to officials in Birmingham, Alabama, turning on their firehoses and siccing dogs on kids, we’ve seen sickening historical photos of children being subjected to shocking levels of trauma by adults trying to uphold a benighted position. We can now add the photo of Liam to the list of those that show our government at its worst.
Julio Ricardo Varela is the founder of The Latino Newsletter. 
That is what I cannot shake: This image is now traveling far beyond Minnesota, far beyond our borders, because it captures something we should all be ashamed of. It’s not just that a child was caught up in an arrest (don’t call it detention), it’s that some of the most powerful people in our country looked at that photo, shrugged and seem to have treated it like a PR crisis, and not an illustration of metastasizing depravity.
