Minneapolis: The power of a boy’s photo

ICE agents use 5-year-old Liam Ramos as "bait" in Minneapolis

Liam Conejo Ramos outside of his Minneapolis home

(Image credit: Rachel James via Reuters)

“When I first saw the photograph of Liam Conejo Ramos,” said Ka Vang in The Minnesota Star Tribune, “my breath caught.” The 5-year-old Ecuadorian boy, detained last week by federal immigration agents on his way home from school in suburban Minneapolis, is seen wearing a “blue bunny hat with floppy white ears” and a Spider-Man backpack while “surrounded by ICE agents twice his size.” The Trump administration claimed Ramos’ father had “abandoned” him when ICE agents tried to arrest him, “and that ICE merely stepped in to help.” But this was “cruelty cloaked as concern,” and agents shipped the boy along with his father to a detention center in Texas—1,300 miles from his mom and home. In 1972, the “Napalm Girl” photo of “a child running naked in the street” helped pull Americans out of their “indifference” to the Vietnam War, said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. Will the image of the downcast little boy in the bunny hat “shock Americans into demanding an end to this cruelty?”

Sorry, but the media’s version of this story strains “credulity,” said Noah Rothman in National Review. Activists and school officials claimed ICE agents stole Ramos from his family. But the Department of Homeland Security said the officers stayed with the child for his own safety, after his father fled from them. Once Ramos’ father was apprehended, the pair “reunited in DHS custody,” per the agency’s protocol. The official version is “hardly nefarious.”

The official version is filled with lies, said Lisa Jarvis in Bloomberg. First of all, Ramos’ father was in the U.S. legally, on an active asylum claim, and had no criminal record. Secondly, why wasn’t the boy turned over to his mother or other family members? DHS claims that Ramos’ pregnant mother and other relatives “refused” to take him, but witnesses said ICE agents tried to use the boy as “bait” to lure them out of the house. They were too terrified to go outside. So agents took the 5-year-old as punishment, traumatizing him and his mom. In Minneapolis and other cities, many children are now living with constant anxiety about coming “home from school to find that someone in their family has disappeared,” or that they, too, will be grabbed by scary masked men. “What are we doing to our kids?”