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 carries him by his Spiderman school backpack. On his face, the fear is palpable. His name is Liam Rabbit Ramos. He and his father, asylum seekers, were detained in the driveway of their home in a Minneapolis suburb this week. has once again shocked a country that already saw a US citizen shot dead by another agent in the same city in early January.
This Friday, two days after Liam’s arrest, the streets of Minneapolis have once again been filled with protests against the enormous deployment of federal agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) and the Border Patrol that the Trump Administration has maintained in the most populous city in Minnesota for weeks. Thousands of people have gathered at the downtown of Minneapolis in the midst of 20 degrees below zero temperatures, waving American flags shouting “ICE Out!” The day also included a massive strike in which people were absent from work and schools and more than 500 businesses and restaurants remained closed in solidarity with the migrant community. In addition, actions have been called in New York, Chicago and Seattle, among other cities.
Before this afternoon’s march through downtown Minneapolis, hundreds of people protested inside the city’s international airport, the largest in Minnesota. At least a hundred members of the clergy were detained during the demonstration, which demanded that airlines, in particular Delta, not participate in the deportation of migrants.
Today’s protests add to those that have been taking place daily in Minneapolis since an ICE agent murdered Renee Good on January 7 during an immigration operation. Constant clashes between protesters and immigration officials, who have attempted to quell protests with tear gas, led President Trump to threaten to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows him to use the military to quell a domestic uprising or invasion. At the moment, the Pentagon has more than 1,500 soldiers on alert for a possible deployment to Minnesota.
This Thursday, Vice President JD Vance visited the city that has become ground zero of the resistance against the anti-immigrant crusade launched by the White House. In a brief appearance, flanked by and from the Border Patrol, the Republican defended the officers’ actions, including the detention of the five-year-old boy and the death of Good. “The men behind me are doing incredible work and, frankly, much of the media is lying about the work they do every day,” he said, adding that “many of them cannot do their jobs without being harassed, doxxeados and, sometimes, attacked.”
Like Trump has done, Vance blamed state and local officials for the chaos that has engulfed the city. “The reason things have gotten so out of control is because of the lack of cooperation between state and local authorities and what these men are trying to do,” he said. The vice president added that both the state governor, Tim Walz, and the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey,—both Democrats and who supposedly intervened in the immigration operation ordered by the federal government—could “do a much better job of making life a little easier” for ICE agents.
Regarding the arrest of little Liam, Vance acknowledged that he was shocked to hear the news, but that, after investigating the matter, he discovered that the agents “went to arrest his father, an illegal immigrant.” “The father fled. So the story is that ICE detained a five-year-old. Well, what were they supposed to do? Let a five-year-old freeze to death?” “If the argument is that people who have violated our laws cannot be arrested because they have children, then all parents would be granted complete immunity from any police action. That makes no sense,” he said.
According to a statement from the Columbia Heights Public Schools, north of Minneapolis, Liam and his father, Adrián Alexander Conejo Arias, of Ecuadorian origin, were detained at the entrance of their home on Tuesday afternoon, just as they returned 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 child as bait.” Another adult who lived in the home and was away at the time “begged the officers” to leave Liam with them, according to the school district, but they refused.
According to sources cited by CNN, Liam and his father are being held in an immigration detention center for families in Texas. In addition to Liam, immigration authorities have detained at least three other minors from the same school district, including a 10-year-old girl.
A tragedy with “multiple layers”
Although Vance did not refer to during his speech this Thursday, a journalist present asked him if he still believes that the officer who shot enjoys “total immunity,” as he claimed after the shooting. The vice president maintained that no one in the Trump Administration said that agents “who commit improper acts would enjoy immunity.” “That is absurd,” he said, even though the Administration has used exactly those terms in recent days.
“Sometimes they are accused of misconduct and it turns out that, when you know the context, they didn’t actually do anything wrong. But, of course, we are going to investigate these things. Of course we are investigating the shooting of Renee Good, but we are investigating it in a way that respects people’s rights,” he added. The vice president described the woman’s death as “a tragedy” but repeated the official line, that “she rammed her car into an agent.”
“The tragedy here has multiple layers. The tragedy is that there was a misunderstanding, the tragedy is that Renee Good lost her life and the tragedy is that there are ICE agents who are entering communities where they are worried that if they call 911 no one will help them,” highlighted the Republican.
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 attorneys. One of the injuries affected Good’s left forearm, while another shot hit his right chest. A third shot entered the left side of his head, near the temple, and exited the right side.
The shooting more than two weeks ago, along with another that took place on January 21, just a week after Good’s death, and the constant raids, which, according to the Department of Homeland Security, now total more than 3,000 detainees, have brought Minneapolis to a point of maximum tension. As the city awaits Trump’s decision on the troops he keeps awaiting possible deployment, a federal appeals court gave the green light for officers to use force to respond to protests against them.
In an order on Wednesday, the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit granted the Republican administration’s request and stayed the ruling of a district judge, who last Friday imposed restrictions on the actions that officers could take against demonstrations. Magistrate Kate Menendez ordered them not to retaliate against people “engaging in peaceful and unobstructed protest activities” and prohibited them from using pepper spray or other “crowd dispersal tools” or arresting individuals who are not “forcibly obstructing or 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 such as those that occurred last Sunday in St. Paul, a neighboring city of Minneapolis, when a group of protesters interrupted a religious service believing that the church pastor was an ICE agent. The Justice Department announced Thursday that three people were arrested in connection with the incident. Authorities also attempted to press charges against former CNN journalist Don Lemon, who had been working as a freelance reporter alongside protesters at the church. But according to reports in the national press, a federal judge refused.
