A viral image of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos shows the boy in a blue knit hat with white bunny ears and pompoms, standing with a blank look on his face, staring at the back of a truck. Liam and his father were captured by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Minnesota on Tuesday, and both are now detained in San Antonio, more than 1,200 miles from Liam’s home, his school, his friends and most of his family.
School officials in Minnesota say that the prekindergarten student was used “as bait” by ICE, in an apparent attempt to gain access to the adults inside the private house where he once lived. That act, the use of a boy too young to understand the political game in which he became a pawn, mirrors in a perverse and deeply disturbing way the power of the photograph. The photograph stirs empathy and compassion, the same emotions that ICE agents apparently used to entice adults into making themselves vulnerable to capture.
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A universal moral image works because at some level we share a universal moral conscience. There are certain things that, when seen, compel us to action in a way that transcends all other concerns.
It is universal because the suffering of a child cuts across race, nationality and ideological divisions. It is universal because it takes precedence over all other concerns. A child in distress demands action now. The world stops for a moment, and decent people do what is absolutely, immediately necessary.
Among the most deeply distressing things this image represents is the instrumentalization of compassion. ICE didn’t place a box of candy or a $100 bill on the front stoop of the house, hoping to tempt people out. They used a child to appeal to the most innate and essentially human impulse to show care, concern and protect — to capture those who care for him. They weaponized decency, the last incorruptible defense we have against absolute misery and evil.
PURE, ABSOLUTE EVIL AND IT’S ALL ON DONALD TRUMP’S HEAD
