ICE agents in Minnesota have taken President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown to a shocking new low, detaining a 5-year-old boy after using him as “bait,” according to school officials.
Preschooler Liam Ramos and his dad were picked up by agents in a Minneapolis suburb after arriving home from school on Tuesday. They were apprehended and then transported all the way to a Texas detention center, according to Zena Stenvik, the superintendent of Liam’s school district in Columbia Heights. The family’s lawyer, Marc Prokosch, told The Washington Post the two are now in the custody of Homeland Security in San Antonio.
It comes amid the Trump administration’s deployment of over 2,400 Department of Homeland Security agents to the state of Minnesota. Trump officials have only doubled down on raids there in the wake of the fatal shooting of 37-year-old mother Renee Good by an ICE agent.
Stenvik said she drove to the scene as soon as she heard what was happening with Liam, and she arrived to find Liam’s father’s car still running after he had just returned home following school pick-up.
In a statement, she said the child, who just turned 5, was taken from the car by an ICE agent and told to knock on his front door to be let into his home “in order to see if anyone else was home–essentially using a five-year-old as bait.”
ICE agents did not allow another adult from the home, who was outside at the time, to take care of the child, she added. Liam’s older brother, a middle schooler, came home just after the child and his father had been taken away, Stenvik said.
The family’s attorney said they arrived in the U.S. at an official entry point and “have been following the legal process perfectly,” with a pending asylum case and no orders against them.
“The family did everything they were supposed to in accordance with how the rules have been set out,” he said. “They did not come here illegally. They are not criminals.”
Photographs released by the school district capture the horror on the child’s face. Liam, wearing a blue beanie with flappy ears, looks confused and terrified as an agent, holding onto a superhero backpack, loads him into a vehicle to be taken to Texas.
Another shows a masked agent leading him through a yard. “Why detain a five-year-old? You cannot tell me that this child is going to be classified as a violent criminal,” Stenvik said at a press conference.
Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the pair was picked up during a “targeted operation.”
“ICE did NOT target a child,” she said. McLaughlin also alleged the father “fled on foot–abandoning his child.”
She claimed that the agent was actually protecting the child. “For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended [his father],” she said.
“Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children, or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates,” she added.
Prokosch, the family’s attorney, said the detention will affect other kids. “Once his classmates learn the government took him away … I’m not qualified to talk about how much damage that is going to cause. It’s not just the family, it’s the entire community and all of those kids who are now going to be facing secondary trauma,” he said.
A 17-year-old Columbia Heights student was also taken by “armed and masked agents” without parents present on Tuesday, Stenvik said. ICE agents “pushed their way into an apartment” and detained a 17-year-old high school girl and her mother last week, too, she added.
Earlier this month, a 10-year-old fourth-grade student was also allegedly snared by the immigration task force on her way to elementary school with her mother.
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