Liam Ramos is five. In photographs of his arrest on Tuesday, released by the school district where he is enrolled as a preschooler, he is wearing a large blue hat with a bunny face and ears. According to the superintendent, Liam had just arrived home from school with his father when ICE agents apprehended the two and arrested them. Allegedly, one of Liam’s relatives, who was outside at the time, begged for the little boy to be allowed to stay there in their care; instead, both father and son were captured by the federal agents and quickly transported to a detention camp in Dilley, Texas. Liam’s father has no apparent criminal record; he has a pending asylum case. Does it need to be said that the child does not have a criminal record, either? In one picture, a white man’s hand clutches, claw-like, on to the back of Liam’s Spider-Man backpack. In another, a masked man stands behind Liam, stooping slightly to reach the small child, as the boy stands at the front door of his home. According to school officials, the agent instructed Liam to knock on the door and ask to be let into the house “in order to see if anyone else was home – essentially using a five-year-old as bait”.
Liam is the fourth child from his Minneapolis-area school district to be seized by ICE agents since the surge of federal immigration forces in the city. According to school officials, two 17-year olds were also taken – one snatched alone from their car, another captured at home with her mother. Another child, a 10-year-old girl in the fourth grade, was allegedly also taken by the federal forces – while on her way to school with her mother.
Liam was bundled up for school against the frigid Minnesota winter. Someone – was it his father, who was captured along with him, or his mother, who must now be wondering when she will see her child again – pulled him into his plaid jacket, and packed a lunch into the Spider-Man backpack that is nearly as big as he is. In a school picture released by his school district, Liam has the fat cheeks of a baby, and a smile that reveals a row of square milk teeth. It is unclear whether, at the detention camp in Texas he was quickly spirited away to, he has been allowed to stay with his father, or whether the boy is imprisoned alone.
But it is likely that he is not being treated well there. A report on detention camps holding children – including the one in Dilley, Texas – from the non-profit newsroom the Marshall Project, reveals claims of dirty conditions, overcrowding and inadequate food. Detained families said “the food was contaminated with mold and worms”. Children suffered “so much psychological stress that parents said they were hitting their own faces or wetting themselves despite being potty-trained”. It is due to the sadism and capriciousness of ICE that Liam, a child, must now face conditions like these, instead of returning home after school to the family that loves him. “He is so kind and loving,” Liam’s preschool teacher said of the boy in a statement. “His classmates miss him.” Whatever Liam is experiencing now, in an ICE detention camp, it is likely that he is very scared.
There is a certain cynical worldliness that you have to develop to write about the Trump administration. Over the past decade, those of us who cover or monitor Trump and his movement have been disabused – repeatedly, if need be – of the notion that there is a limit to their cruelty, a point at which their appetite for sadism or displays of domination will be satiated. Weary explanations of the movement’s conduct have acquired the wan familiarity of cliché: the cruelty is the point. Shock, surprise – these are not things we feel anymore.
Still, I confess that I am shocked now. Liam’s plain blamelessness, his innocence, the useless cruelty of his capture, the bald, shameless cynicism of his use as “bait” to capture the adults who love him – these evidence an evil I was naive enough not to know about. I am not so naive anymore.
It need not detract from the specificity of Liam and his suffering to say that his arrest and the photos of it that were released by the school that wants him back, are a potent symbol of what Trump’s ICE raids are doing, both to Minneapolis and to the country as a whole. The images of the shocked, small Liam – bundled up by loving parents against the cold – flanked by armed, masked men give the lie to the administration’s claim, long transparent and cynical, that the raids are targeting criminals. But they also make plain the sheer sadism of ICE and their agenda, the smallness, cowardice and moral degeneracy of people who would arm themselves to the teeth and cover their faces in order to attack a child not yet big enough to tie his own shoes. ICE is the worst of America, indeed perhaps the worst of humanity – a window into the corruption that is possible in the human soul. They are animals with the gall to call themselves men.
But what the images of Liam also do is show the reality of the immigrants that ICE is spiriting off to faraway prisons, where the detained have few rights. In the pleading tone of the officials at Liam’s school – who had to tell an ICE vehicle to leave them alone while they were giving their press conference about his arrest – I can hear the reality that so many native-born Americans are now confronting: that the immigrants that ICE is stealing belong to us. Liam belongs to us the way that every child belongs to us – the way that their innocence and vulnerability make them our responsibility. But the adult immigrants who are being stolen belong to us, too – they belong to us in the sense that proximity, and familiarity, and regular interaction bring us all into a community of principle and mutual care, make us all our brother’s keeper, and calls on us to love our neighbors.
Liam’s loved ones miss him as their friend, their son, and their student; we are enraged and scared for him as a child and as a fellow human being. It is the guiding philosophy of the white supremacists shaping immigration policy in the Trump administration that mankind is not one community, that we must not care for all of our fellows equally. The wrongness and evil of this idea is evident in Liam’s face.
On Friday, just days after Liam’s capture, thousands of his neighbors in Minneapolis took to the streets to protest ICE’s presence in their city. In them we can see a noble, even heroic counterexample, the other side of America: they hate ICE in proportion to how much they love their fellow man.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
