As symbols of the indiscriminate disproportionality of the Trump administration’s militant anti-immigrant crusade in Minneapolis, the images are hard to surpass.
One recent image shows the innocent figure of Liam Ramos, a five-year-old preschooler wearing a blue bobbled winter hat, standing next to a black vehicle with a dark-clad adult figure standing behind him, whose hand is proprietorially placed on his backpack.
A second picture depicts the same child at the door of a house, with what appears to be a masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent standing behind him.
The exact circumstances of the photos – or their provenance – remains unclear. The homeland security department has insisted that Liam was being held for protective purposes after his father absconded when agents tried to detain him.
Yet officials from the Columbia Heights public school district, which circulated both pictures, say the latter conjures a dark and disturbing reality – of an unsuspecting Liam being exploited as bait to lure adults in his family home to open the door so ICE agents can arrest them.
In the two weeks since the shocking killing of Renee Good by an armed agent, footage of violent arrests and assaults by ICE operatives deployed to Minnesota by an administration claiming it is seeking to restore “law and order” have become grimly commonplace.
Yet the dystopian optics of a small child being caught up in Donald Trump’s dragnet approach to mass deportations has the power to shock the conscience as much as the footage of Good, a 37-year-old woman and mother of three, being shot and killed as she attempted to drive away from ICE agents on 7 January.
The pictures of Liam recall those of Alan Kurdi and Elián González, two other children whose images conveyed a stark message when they were captured on camera in circumstances of extreme drama.
Alan Kurdi was a two-year-old Syrian boy whose body was pictured washed up on a Turkish beach in 2015 after he drowned when a boat in which his family had been attempting to flee Syria’s civil war capsized in the Mediterranean.
The harrowing shot crystalized the plight of refugees fleeing mortal dangers in their homeland but faced with potentially insurmountable barriers when they tried to seek safety.
Elián González was a six-year-old Cuban boy who became embroiled in an international custody battle in 2000 after being rescued when a boat in which his mother had tried to take him to the US sank. His mother died in the episode.
After his Miami-based relatives defied an immigration court ruling that he should be returned to his father in Cuba, armed federal agents stormed the house where he was being held – resulting in a famous Pulitzer prize-winning image by the Associated Press’s Alan Diaz, that showed a border patrol officer pointing a gun at the terrified boy and a man holding him.
An even more extreme precedent may be the famous photo of an unnamed Jewish boy surrendering to Nazi soldiers during the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943. The picture, now displayed at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official museum of the Holocaust in Jerusalem, shows an SS soldier, Josef Blosche, pointing a gun at the boy and those around him.
The boy’s fate is unknown, although accompanying narratives suggest he and others in the picture were transported to a Nazi extermination camp.
Liam, by contrast, has been taken to a homeland security detention center in San Antonio along with his father, later identified by officials as Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, an asylum seeker from Ecuador.
The family’s lawyer, Marc Prokosch, said the family did not arrive in the US illegally and entered at an officially designated crossing point. They were not subject to any deportation order and were following a recognized asylum process.
Zena Stenvik, the superintendent of Columbia Heights public schools, suggested the pictures of Liam represented a wider reality in Minneapolis after he became the fourth child in the area to be taken by ICE agents in the past three weeks. Others include a 10-year-old girl, who was detained on her way to elementary school with her mother on 6 January.
This week, a 17-year-old student was taken by “armed and masked” agents without the presence of their parents, Stenvik told journalists. In another case on 14 January, agents had pushed their way into an apartment and detained another female student, also aged 17, and her mother, she said.
“Our children are traumatized. The sense of safety in our community and around our schools is shaken,” Stenvik said. “I can speak on behalf of all school staff when I say our hearts are shattered. After our fourth student was taken yesterday, I just thought someone has to hear the story. They’re taking children.”
The Department of Homeland Security has generally been unapologetic and defiant in the face of criticisms of ICE’s actions in Minneapolis – not least after the shooting of Good, who was labelled a terrorist by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary.
But the department’s spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, limited her comments to Liam’s father, who she called “an illegal alien” who had “fled on foot – abandoning his child.”
“ICE did NOT target a child,” she said. “For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended [his father].
“Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children, or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates.”
