By Noah Rothman
Friday, January 23, 2026
Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s latest offense
against decency, as described by New Jersey Senator Andy Kim, sure does sound
unspeakably cruel:
Kim was hardly alone in expressing outrage at the ICE
agents who absconded with a child only to use him as “bait” to lure
unsuspecting deportation targets into the open. That is the version of events
that just about every mainstream media outlet is promulgating today.
“There is no justifying this,” read the title of USA Today columnist Rex Huppke’s column. “A family
separated, a child traumatized: The cruelty of ICE knows no bounds.” ICE’s
tactics “can only be described as pure evil,” Minnesota Senator Tina
Smith averred. Donald Trump and company “don’t see these families as
people, and that’s exactly how they’re treating them,” California Congressman Jimmy
Gomez concluded. “How many children is ICE doing this to?” Virginia
Representative James Walkinshaw asked. “We need an investigation, now.” The
Democratic Party’s official social media organ agreed. “These monsters are
sick,” read its denunciation of the law enforcement officers who
used a child as “human bait.”
It’s no coincidence that the high-strung language about
this incident that we’re seeing from Democratic activists and politicians
mirrors the emotionally triggering verbiage deployed by so many mainstream news
articles. Unsurprisingly, it’s the very language used by the activists who
accused ICE of using the five-year-old as “bait” in the first place.
That word – “bait” – became ubiquitous after it was used
by Minnesota’s Columbia Heights Public School District officials to describe
the ICE operation in question.
“Why detain a five-year-old? You can’t tell me that this
child is going to be classified as a violent criminal,” school superintendent Zena Stenvik emoted. According to school officials,
five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was detained after arriving home from preschool
while his father was in the driveway. The father spontaneously disappeared. ICE
agents seized the boy.
“Another adult living in the home was outside and begged
the agents to let them take care of the small child, but was refused,” another
unnamed school official told ABC News. Indeed, the Washington Post added, locals “begged the agents” to
leave the child with them, but ICE impassively refused. “Instead, the agent
took the child out of the still-running vehicle, led him to the door, and
directed him to knock — asking to be let in to see if anyone else was home —
essentially using a 5-year-old as bait.”
That’s the school’s version of events. And, according to
the institution’s activist administrators, it fits a broader pattern. “ICE
agents have been roaming our neighborhoods, circling our schools, following our
buses, and coming into our parking lots multiple times and taking our kids,”
Stenvik said of ICE’s deliberate efforts to “induce trauma” in children.
This is the story that made the headlines. Despite its
discrepancies (why would ICE use the child as “bait” but then fail to detain
those who “begged” for his release?), it has become the accepted narrative. The
official story, however, is quite different.
“ICE did NOT target a child,” a spokesperson for the
Department of Homeland Security wrote. “The child was ABANDONED.” According to
the federal government, ICE agents approached the boy’s father, who
subsequently “fled on foot,” leaving his child behind. The father was later
apprehended, but ICE officers stayed behind with Liam Ramos, per policy. The
child and father were subsequently reunited in DHS custody, again in accordance
with the agency’s protocol.
And if you read beyond the garment-rending appeals to
emotion from the activists who apparently run Minnesota’s public schools, it
seems that the media outlets that retailed their version of events know that
the whole story is more ambiguous.
“DHS said that it was not targeting Liam and that ICE’s
policy is to ask parents if they want to be removed with their children,” the Post conceded, “or ICE will place the children
with a safe person designated by a parent.”
The simplest explanation for the behavior of federal law
enforcement in this case is hardly nefarious. “For the child’s safety,” the DHS
spokesperson added, “one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the
other officers apprehended” Ramos’s father.
In fact, it’s not even clear that the school officials
who managed to set the record on this case have the slightest idea what they’re
talking about. “The school officials also said they don’t know what happened,” CBS News admitted. “They want the public to get involved as
this is happening to students all across the state of Minnesota.”
So these school officials weren’t dispassionately
describing the events they witnessed. They were issuing a call to action, one
that mainstream media outlets laundered into the national conversation to
buttress Democratic talking points about ICE’s tactics.
There is some dispute over whether the Ramos
family was a legitimate deportation target at all, but that’s a different
matter from the charge that ICE treated a small boy inhumanely. But
discrepancies like that are unlikely to agitate the public and foment unrest.
And that was the goal here – not honest reporting but instigation on behalf of
Democratic messaging shops, even if that enterprise wrecks national comity in
the process.
The activists are right: This was a shameful
episode. But the shame in this case doesn’t fall on ICE’s shoulders.
No comments:
Post a Comment