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?”








