Letter to the editor: Judge frees five-year-old ICE used as bait

BrunswickDems
16h
2 min read

That photo of a child wearing his Spider-Man backpack and blue bunny hat, surrounded by ICE agents, is gut-wrenching. It so shocked a Texas judge that he attached it to his order that freed the boy.

Liam Conejo Ramos attends Valley View Elementary School in Columbia Heights, Minnesota — “ground zero” in Trump’s “Operation Metro Surge.” 25 school families have had a parent or primary caregiver arrested. Three students were taken: a fifth-grader, a second-grader, and Liam, who attends pre-K.

School Superintendent Zena Stenvik said, “ICE agents have been roaming our neighborhoods, circling our schools, following our buses, coming into our parking lots, and taking our kids.”

Liam and his father were taken in their driveway after returning from school. ICE agents made Liam knock on his own front door, asking to be let in. Terrified they would take her other child too, Liam’s anguished mother locked the door. Sobbing, she said, “They used my boy as bait.”

Father and son were locked in a Texas detention center for 13 days. Liam’s heartbroken classmates recorded these messages for ICE:

“You are scaring schools, people, and the world. You should be kind, helpful, and caring like normal police — not dangerous, scary, and stealing people.”
“Liam was wearing a bunny hat. His name was ‘Conejo,’ which means ‘bunny’ in Spanish. That’s what the bunny represents — him.”

Liam’s family are asylum-seekers, here legally. The judge ruled that ICE violated Liam and his father’s Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable seizures and released them. He condemned “the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.”

The judge continued: “Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.”

He closed with John 11:35: “Jesus wept.”

Janine Sacramone

Leland