Detention of five-year-old child by ICE adds fuel to the fire in the streets of Minneapolis

The image captures the cruelty of Donald Trump’s immigration policy. The five-year-old boy, dressed in a black-and-white checkered jacket and a blue hat, is escorted by an immigration agent, who is holding him by his Spiderman backpack. Fear is visible on his face. His name is Liam Conejo Ramos. He and his father, both asylum seekers, were detained at the entrance to their home in a Minneapolis suburb this week. The photo of little Liam has once again shocked a country that already saw a U.S. citizen shot and killed by another agent in the same city in early January.

Another round of protests is planned for this Friday in Minneapolis in response to the massive deployment of federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol that the Trump Administration has maintained in Minnesota’s most populous city for weeks. This time, organizers have called on residents to stay home from work and school as part of a massive walkout that will see more than 500 businesses and restaurants closed in solidarity with the state’s immigrant community. The day will also include a march in downtown Minneapolis, and similar actions have been organized in New York, Chicago, and Seattle, among other cities.

Today’s protests add to those that have been taking place daily in Minneapolis since an ICE agent killed Renee Good on January 7 during an immigration operation. The constant clashes between protesters and immigration officials, who have attempted to quell the protests with tear gas, led President Trump to threaten to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to use the military to suppress an internal uprising or invasion. Currently, the Pentagon has more than 1,500 troops on standby for a possible deployment to Minnesota.

On Thursday, Vice President J.D. Vance visited the city that has become the epicenter of the resistance against the White House’s anti-immigrant crusade. In a brief appearance, flanked by ICE and Border Patrol agents, Vance defended the officers’ actions, including the detention of the five-year-old boy and the death of Renee Good. “The men behind me are doing an incredible job, and frankly, much of the media is lying about the work they do every day,” he stated, adding that “many of them can’t do their jobs without being harassed, doxxed, and sometimes assaulted.”

Just as Trump has done, Vance blamed state and local officials for the chaos that has gripped the city. “The reason why things have gotten so out of hand is because of the failure of cooperation from state and local authorities,” he said. The vice president added that both the state governor, Tim Walz, and the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey—both Democrats who are being investigated by the Justice Department for allegedly interfering with the federally ordered immigration operation—could “do a much better job of making life a little easier” for ICE agents.

Regarding the detention of young Liam, Vance acknowledged that he was shocked to hear the news, but that after investigating the matter, he found that “his dad was an illegal alien. And when they went to arrest his illegal alien father, the father ran. So, the story is that ICE detained a five-year-old. What are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to let a five-year-old child freeze to death?” If the argument is that you can’t arrest people who have broken our laws because they have children, then all parents would be granted total immunity from any law enforcement action and that makes no sense, he argued.

According to a statement from Columbia Heights Public Schools, north of Minneapolis, Liam and his father, Adrián Alexander Conejo Arias, originally from Ecuador, were detained outside their front door Tuesday afternoon, just as they were returning from the boy’s preschool. After detaining the father, ICE agents asked Liam to knock on the door to see if anyone else was inside the house, “using a 5-year-old as bait.” Another adult who lived in the house and was not home at the time “pleaded with the agents” to let Liam stay with them, according to the school district, but they refused.

According to sources cited by CNN, Liam and his father are being held at a family immigration detention center in Texas. In addition to Liam, immigration authorities have detained at least three other children from the same school district, including a 10-year-old girl.

A “multilayered” tragedy

Although Vance did not address Good’s death at the hands of an ICE agent during his remarks on Thursday, a reporter asked him if he still believed the officer who shot him enjoyed “absolute immunity,” as he asserted after the shooting. The vice president maintained that no one in the Trump administration said that agents who commit wrongdoing would enjoy immunity. “That’s absurd,” he stated, despite the fact that the administration has used those exact terms in recent days.

“Sometimes they’re accused of wrongdoing and it turns out when you learn the context they didn’t actually do anything wrong. But of course we’re going to investigate these things. Of course we’re investigating the Renee Good shooting, but we’re investigating them in a way that respects people’s rights,” he added. The vice president called the woman’s death “a tragedy” but repeated the official line, that “she rammed an ICE officer with her car.”

“The tragedy here is multilayered. The tragedy is there was a misunderstanding, the tragedy is that Renee Good lost her life, and the tragedy is that there are ICE agents entering communities where they are worried that if they call 911, no one will come to their aid,” the vice president emphasized.

An autopsy commissioned by Good’s family determined that the poet and mother of three suffered three gunshot wounds, including one to the head, according to her lawyers. One of the wounds affected Good’s left forearm, while another bullet struck her right chest. A third bullet entered the left side of her head, near her temple, and exited on the right side.

The shooting more than two weeks ago, along with another one that took place on January 21, just a week after Good’s death, as well as the constant raids, which, according to the Department of Homeland Security have resulted in more than 3,000 arrests, have brought Minneapolis to a breaking point. While the city awaits Trump’s decision regarding the troops he is keeping on standby for possible deployment, a federal appeals court has authorized officers to use force in response to protests.

In a one-sentence order Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit granted the Republican administration’s request and suspended a district judge’s ruling last Friday that restricted actions officers could take against protesters. Judge Kate Menendez ordered them not to retaliate against people engaging in peaceful protest activities, and prohibited them from using pepper spray or other crowd dispersal tools, or from arresting individuals who are not “obstructing or forcibly interfering.”

The government argued in its appeal that Menendez’s order harmed the ability of (Department of Homeland Security) agents to protect themselves and the public in “very dangerous circumstances.”

Circumstances like those that occurred last Sunday in St. Paul, a city neighboring Minneapolis, when a group of protesters disrupted a church service, believing the pastor to be an ICE agent. The Justice Department announced Thursday that three people were arrested in connection with the incident. Authorities also attempted to file charges against former CNN journalist Don Lemon, who was working as a freelance reporter alongside the protesters at the church. But according to national media reports, a federal judge refused.

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