There Is Nothing Humane About This
A Child Welfare Reckoning with a Barbaric Deportation Campaign
“The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.”
A week or so ago, a federal judge wrote the above as part of a scathing court order releasing a five-year-old boy and his father from immigration custody. While the judge largely confined his opinion to issues pertaining to the rule of law, I’ll say plainly what the order largely only implies: the case of Liam Conejo Ramos is emblematic of the cruelty, recklessness, and moral bankruptcy that define this deportation campaign.
This wasn’t the newsletter I intended to send. I was about three-quarters finished with something else. But then I saw the images of Liam, and I couldn’t unsee them. My heart broke, my blood boiled, and my conscience wouldn’t let me write about anything else. So, I left the other in the drafts and started writing this one.
As an aside, I often hesitate to write about in-the-news issues. I know this runs counter to everything they say you need to do to go viral or to grow your following. But when people are hurting — and when children are being mistreated — we should be more mindful with our words, more exact about the facts, and more attentive to the moral weight of the language we use. To take seriously the pain and the dignity of the people I write about requires writing slowly and carefully, and being honest about whether I’m up to the task of doing it justice in that moment.
But there are moments when the obligation to speak outweighs the desire to say it perfectly. And, folks, this is one of those moments. The moment is grave.
Before I start writing, some disclaimers are in order:
I have very strong opinions about immigration policy more broadly. There is much more I could say — and perhaps will say elsewhere — about the larger moral and political failures embedded in this campaign. But this is a child welfare newsletter, and so I am keeping my focus squarely on how these policies impact children and families.
The fact that I am not detailing every tragedy, every abuse, or every excess associated with ICE’s operations should not be mistaken for indifference. It is not. My silence on those broader harms here is a matter of scope, not of conviction. I find much of what is happening deeply troubling, to say the least. But this piece is about children and families, and that alone is more than enough to confront.
A Policy of Terrorizing and Traumatizing Children
Liam Conejo Ramos, five-years-old and decked out in his winter coat and his blue knit bunny cap, was walking home from his prekindergarten class with his father, Adrain, when they were approached by masked ICE agents. There are two versions of what happened next. According to neighbors and school officials, the ICE agents used Liam as ‘bait’: they told a five-year-old to go knock on his door so his mother, pregnant, could answer the door.
The Department of Homeland Security disputes this account, claiming instead that Liam’s father “fled on foot” and left the boy alone in the driveway. Given DHS’s well-documented record of misstatements (or outright fabrications) in high-profile enforcement cases — documented by outlets across the ideological spectrum — I treat official narratives from DHS, ICE, and CBP with deep skepticism. A photo of Liam’s detainment went viral, and while there are several elements of it that boil your blood, one that stands out to me is the ICE agent gripping the child’s backpack, as if he was flight risk.
ICE eventually took Liam and his father to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, in Texas. Twenty minutes after they left, Liam’s older brother returned home and discovered that both his father and younger brother and been taken.
There may be readers who conclude, ‘hey, this is simply the price that must be paid to curb illegal immigration.’ I reject that conclusion on moral grounds, but even setting morality aside, the facts don’t support it.
According to the family’s attorney, Liam’s father entered the United States legally from Ecuador through a port of entry, using a CBP app. The family had a pending asylum application and was following established legal protocols. And to date, no evidence has been offered — or uncovered — that Liam’s father had any criminal history, either in the United States or in Ecuador. He was not ‘illegally’ here, nor was he by any reasonable definition one of the “worst of the worst” that this deportation campaign claims to target.
That context matters. It is likely why the federal judge referenced above ruled that Liam and his father could not yet be removed from the United States, finding that the government’s actions raised serious constitutional concerns.
But Liam’s case is not an aberration. It is one of many in which children have been swept up by what the federal judge described as an ‘ill-conceived’ immigration apparatus. The Marshall Project analyzed data and found that ICE has held around 170 children a day on average under the current administration, up from 25 children a day during the last 16 months of the previous administration.
The Marshall Project’s analysis also found that over 1,300 children have been held in detention for over 20 days last year, in violation of a 1997 legal agreement that has been interpreted to mean that keeping a child (with their family) in custody by ICE for more than 20 days is excessive.
These detention facilities are not great places to live, needless to say:
In court documents filed this month as part of ongoing civil litigation, families described brutal conditions while detained with their children. Parents said it was difficult to get bottled water to mix with formula for babies and that the food was contaminated with mold and worms. Education and recreation were extremely limited, with some parents reporting that their children were desperate for toys and they’d resorted to playing with rocks, according to legal filings. Children were under so much psychological stress that parents said they were hitting their own faces or wetting themselves despite being potty-trained.
One mother spoke about her efforts to make detention bearable for her eight-year-old daughter. Deprived of games, paper to draw on, or a television to watch, she resorted to only thing available to them: “There was a piece of glass in our room and you could draw with a finger on it. I tried to show her how to do it, and the guards yelled at us.”
On the morning of February 9, ProPublica published new reporting from inside Dilley — the same facility where Liam was sent — including letters and drawings from detained children (shared with their parents’ consent). The reporter spoke with more than two dozen detainees, about half of them kids, and invited children to write about what they were living through. What follows are a few excerpts that speak for themselves (each in their own words):
A 14-year-old Colombian girl (“Gaby M.M.”) wrote that guards “have bad manner of speaking to residents,” adding: “The workers treat the residents unhumanly, verbally and I don’t want to imging how they would act if they where unsupervised.”
Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya (9), from Colombia, described how detention reshaped her sleep, her emotions: “I am in a jail and I am sad and I have fainted 2 times here inside, when I arrived every night I cried and now I don’t sleep well.”
Kheilin Valero, detained with her 18-month-old daughter, described her baby’s illness and what she believes worsened it: “Because she went so many days without treatment, and because it’s so cold here, she developed pneumonia and bronchitis…She was malnourished, too, because she was vomiting everything.”
Let me pause and widen the lens for a moment: before children ever reach a detention facility, many are first introduced to this system through a raid. And many of these ICE operations aren’t calm or careful; they’re carried out violently, with little regard for who is inside the home. A recent raid in Chicago offers a stark illustration of how this looks in practice.
Officials described the operation as a targeted effort aimed at dismantling a violent Venezuelan gang, asserting that the apartment building posed a serious public safety threat. The raid itself was executed as a show of force: heavily armed agents entering apartments in the middle of the night, residents detained en masse, and dramatic footage later circulated to the public. Here was the view inside the apartment complex:
Norelly Eugenia Mejías Cáceres (37): She told the reporter she collapsed and passed out in the hallway as heavily armed agents took her husband and her barefoot 6-year-old son away.
Johandry José Andrade Jiménez (23): He said his three little girls, all still in diapers, wailed as agents threw him to the floor.
Naudelys Yeyes (20): She pleaded with agents to stop hitting a man she knew — “There are children here,” she kept saying, because her 4-year-old son was watching.
Again, some might say ‘hey, when you’re dealing with gangs and violence, there isn’t a pretty way to address it.’ But its been four months and “federal prosecutors have not filed criminal charges against anyone who was arrested.” Translation: all those kids were traumatized for absolutely no reason.
Something crazier: these ICE agents are armed to the teeth. In Minneapolis, masked agents with rifles swarmed a home with children inside and smashed the door open with a battering ram. The man’s wife recorded a video pleading for the agents to put their guns down as there ‘are kids in the house.’ Days later, a federal judge ordered the father — who had been living in the United States under ICE supervision for years, following a prior conviction that had since been dismissed — returned and released after finding that the raid violated the Fourth Amendment.
All I can say at this point — and excuse my language — but what the hell are we doing? Reasonable people can differ on the proper amount of immigration enforcement or immigration policy broadly, but there is nothing reasonable about this barbaric approach. There is nothing charitable, nothing humane, nothing defensible, and nothing civilized about siccing gun-toting federal agents on families, terrorizing children in their homes, and then shoving them into shoddily constructed, prison-like environments. And it’s especially indefensible when the claims used to justify this — that these families were harboring dangerous, violent criminals — have not been substantiated, and no criminal charges have been filed.
Nothing is more antithetical to child welfare than our country’s moronic and malicious mass deportation regime. The public is with me on this: according to a recent poll, 65% of Americans (and 71% of independents) say ICE has “gone too far.”
This ‘Ill-Conceived Government Pursuit’ is Incompatible with Child Welfare
When I wrote about this last year, I spelled out the obvious implications this campaign could have for the foster care system. Unfortunately, some of those warnings are already bearing out. There are now reports of detained parents being given an impossible choice: either have their school-aged children detained alongside them, or risk separation. Advocates have began to urge that immigrant families identify folks in their lives who might be able to care for their children at the drop of a hat. Unfortunately, some extended family members are avoiding calls from children’s services, afraid that they (or a member of their family) might come to the attention of ICE should they step forward to care for a relative.
Some parents state that foster care is even being invoked as a threat, as a disciplinary tool: “We are scared to ask for anything, because the officers start threatening us that they’ll put us in different detention centers and put our children in foster care.”
This mass deportation campaign has already had catastrophic consequences for children and families, as the above makes clear. But this is just the beginning. Even if we stopped this campaign now, the children who saw their parents thrown to the ground, who saw gun-toting agents breaking down their front door, who might’ve been snatched by federal agents on their way home from school, who might’ve been shoved into a lifeless detention facility, or who might’ve had a parent deported without so much as receiving a hug goodbye, will struggle with trauma for the remainder of their life.
The very chemistry of their brains will have been altered. And for what? For an ‘ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas.’
If you claim to care about children, then this mass deportation campaign should enrage you. It is our government and our tax dollars being used to wage war on children, families, and communities. If we can watch this all and chalk it up as politics as usual — as a difference of policy — then we have truly and tragically lost the plot.
If you find any disagreement with what I wrote above, please reach out to me. I would relish the opportunity to talk.
Thank you so much for reading.
Current Read(s):
I am currently reading To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. MLK Jr is known for a lot: as a civil rights leader, a Baptist minister, a spellbinding orator, and a writer, to name a few. But what he’s less often recognized as is a political philosopher and serious thinker about power, justice, and democracy. This collection of essays brings those ideas into focus, tracing the arguments and principles that make up King’s political philosophy.
What’s going on in the world of child welfare?:
EXCLUSIVE: Photos Reveal First Look at Christian Bale’s $22 Million Foster Care Village in California (Realtor) — I’ve been keeping an eye on Together California since I first heard about it, and I was very excited to see some photos of the development!
Georgia Child Welfare Cuts Called ‘Unacceptable,’ House Proposed Budget to Relieve Foster Care Deficit (The Imprint) — Georgia’s child welfare system’s financial crisis might be addressed soon.
New York Proposes Assigned-Risk Market to Rescue Foster Care Agencies from Insurance Collapse (Insurance Business) — A growing issue in child welfare has prompted New York to attempt a fix.
Foster Child Bill of Rights Fast Tracked in West Virginia House (WOWK) — A Bill of Rights written by foster youth themselves? Very cool to see!
On Your Dime: Rhode Island Spends Millions Sending Foster Children Out of State (WJAR) — “Those out-of-state placements cost Rhode Island nearly $23 million in 2024, a 19% increase from 2023.”