When I saw the photo of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos wearing an oversize bunny hat and a Spider-Man backpack as he was being detained by federal immigration agents after arriving home in a Minneapolis suburb, I thought about my own son, now a young adult, when he was that age. Every father fears that moment when their child is terrified and they are unable to make it right. It punches you in the gut and sends you into a state of panic.
A statement from the superintendent of Liam’s school district says the father was bringing his son back home when federal agents “took the child out of the still-running car, led him to the door and directed him to knock on the door asking to be let in in order to see if anyone else was home, essentially using a 5-year-old as bait.” Then agents detained him and eventually took him to a detention center in Texas along with his father, according to the family’s lawyer and his school district.
Vice President JD Vance has a 5-year-old. Because he does, you might think he’d break out of his routine of reflexively defending the awfulness of ICE’s actions and put himself in little Liam’s shoes or even Liam’s father’s shoes. But as usual, Vance leaned into gaslighting and tried to convince us that we didn’t see what we saw and shouldn’t feel the disgust we feel.
This is a preview of Julio Ricardo Varela’s latest column. Read the full column here.
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