Rex Huppke: ICE detained a 5-year-old child. There is no justifying this. | Opinion

When President Donald Trump promised Americans a new Golden Age, I didn’t expect it would involve low-rent-mall-cop Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents nabbing angel-faced 5-year-old children off the streets of Midwestern cities and using them as bait.

But here we are, in the America that, I assume, Republicans wanted. If you haven’t seen pictures of little Liam Conejo Ramos, bundled against the winter cold in a blue bunny hat, a tiny backpack over his plaid coat, you have a moral obligation to find one and look at it closely.

Liam was nabbed on Tuesday by masked ICE agents continuing their terror campaign in and around Minneapolis. The 5-year-old is a student at Valley View Elementary in Columbia Heights, just north of Minneapolis.

A 5-year-old used as bait by masked ICE agents? Is this your Golden Age?

Columbia Heights Superintendent Zena Stenvik said masked agents descended on Liam and his father as they were returning to their home from the boy’s school.

“Another adult living in the home was outside and begged the agents to let him take care of the small child, and was refused,” Stenvik said. “Instead, the agent 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.”

Marc Prokosch, a lawyer representing the Ramos family, said they have an active asylum case and have been following the immigration process and “doing what they’ve been asked to do.”

The father had no order of deportation and no criminal record in the United States, and the Department of Homeland Security has not alleged any criminal record.

A family separated, a child traumatized: The cruelty of ICE knows no bounds

The boy and his father are now in a detention center in Texas, and the mother and brother are left in Columbia Heights in the Upper Midwest, broken.

Imagine the wholly unnecessary trauma that child has now experienced at the hands of our government. And take a look at that photo of Liam, and ask yourself, is this your idea of a Golden Age?

The Trump administration has tried to paint its draconian deportation surge as ridding America of violent criminals, but the facts show most of the people arrested have no criminal record at all. Even after an ICE agent shot and killed a mother of three in Minneapolis, the administration tried to paint anyone who opposes these bands of poorly trained federal goons as the enemy.

And now we have Liam Ramos – innocent beyond measure – being led to knock on the door of his home by a masked agent clad all in black, then shipped across the country and caged.

Liam Ramos was a threat to no one and his capture won’t help a soul

That little boy wasn’t going to hurt anyone, but he is now, undoubtedly, hurt. And our government did this to him.

Trump promised his voters lower food prices, the return of manufacturing and more affordable health care. He has delivered on none of those things.

But he has driven Minneapolis into a state of siege. He has blown off the killing of an innocent American mother as if it were nothing. He has given us these pictures of Liam Ramos, and in that 5-year-old’s eyes, we see the kind of fear and confusion no child should ever experience.

Is this what you wanted, Republicans? You need to answer.

So I ask Republican voters, is this the Golden Age you wanted? When you hoisted “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” signs at the Republican National Convention, did you not foresee the frightened eyes of a child in a bunny hat dragged from his family? Can you still contort your morality to justify a world where monsters are real?

Look at that photo of that sweet little boy. Allow yourself a moment of compassion. Then take a hard look in the mirror and a hard look at your grocery bill and ask if this horror is worth all the nothing you’re getting in return.

Follow USA Today columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @rexhuppke.bsky.social and on Facebook at facebook.com/RexIsAJerk.