ICE Snatches Up 5-Year-Old To Use As ‘Bait’ To Arrest Father In Minnesota, Superintendent Says
In today’s episode of ICE Doesn’t Think People Are People When They’re Black And Brown People, federal immigration agents in Minnesota conducted an operation in which they lured a family out of their home for arrest by using a five-year-old child they snatched out of a running car as bait.
According to the Associated Press, Minnesota preschool student Liam Conejo Ramos was taken out of a car that was running in his family’s driveway by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Tuesday. During a Wednesday news conference, Columbia Heights Public Schools Superintendent Zena Stenvik said the agents then instructed the child to knock on the door to his home, located in a suburb of Minneapolis, to see if other people were inside, “essentially using a 5-year-old as bait.”
“Why detain a 5-year-old?” asked Stenvik, who said the family has an active asylum case and had not been ordered to leave the country. “You cannot tell me that this child is going to be classified as a violent criminal.”
Yeah — as we’ve reported numerous times, federal agents are demonstrably not prioritizing the “worst of the worst” in “criminal illegal aliens” the way the Trump administration repeatedly claims they are.
But beyond that, there’s just no practical or ethical reason to target a five-year-old child this way. If what the superintendent says is true — and the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t appear to be denying it, exactly — what the agents did was immoral and repugnant, and it certainly would make it difficult to convince anyone their target was a dangerous criminal, because they would need to explain why they had a small child lure them out if that was the case.
According to DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, “ICE did NOT target a child.”
McLaughlin said in a statement that ICE was targeting the child’s father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, who she said is from Ecuador and in the U.S. illegally. She also claimed he fled on foot, “abandoning his child.”
“For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended Conejo Arias,” McLaughlin said, not directly mentioning whether the claim that they used the child as “bait” was true.
McLaughlin also noted that parents are given the choice to have their children removed or placed with another adult of their choosing, which suggests that Conejo Arias was given that option, but according to Stenvik, he was not.
More from AP:
Stenvik said another adult who lives at the home was outside when the father and son were taken, but agents wouldn’t leave Liam with that person. DHS didn’t immediately to respond an email Thursday asking if Conejo Arias had asked to keep his son with him.
Liam and his father were being held in a family holding cell in Texas, Marc Prokosch, the family’s lawyer, said during the news conference.
“Every step of their immigration process has been doing what they’ve been asked to do,” Prokosch said of the family’s asylum claim. “So this is just cruelty.”
According to the Washington Post, Liam is one of at least four preschoolers from the same school he attends who have been detained by ICE. Imagine this being your job, and yet you’re still taken aback by how many community members loathe you.
Anyway, the father and son were both taken to a detention center in Texas. Their attorney said Wednesday that they were being held in a family holding cell.
At what point can we all just acknowledge that the cruelty is the point? The Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda isn’t about making America safe again; it’s about racism, xenophobia, and a disregard for basic humanity being reinforced by the might of the federal government.
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