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Liam Conejo Ramos. We have all seen his picture, or by now we all should have seen the image of the adorable five-year-old in his bright blue hat, its floppy bunny ears so appropriate for a child whose middle name means “rabbit.” In the photo, he is wearing his Spider-Man backpack, which, like so many kids his age, he loves and is very proud of. And we know – or we should know – what happened to him.
On January 20, 2026, the pre-K student was seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on his way home from school in Columbia Heights, Minnesota. His family, which had emigrated from Ecuador in 2024, had applied for political asylum. No order of deportation had been issued against them, nor had any of them –obviously, not little Liam– been accused of a crime.
He and his father, who had come to pick him up at school, were taken to Dilley, Texas, not far from San Antonio, where they were held in a facility that houses many child detainees. Unsurprisingly, Liam had a difficult time adjusting to life in prison. Visitors reported that he seemed pale, lethargic and depressed. A photo of him lying with his eyes closed in his father’s arms was immensely alarming.
He had been sleeping a lot and – like many kids at the center – had trouble eating the vile prison food. He kept asking what happened to his blue cap and his Spider-Man backpack, which had been taken from him and not returned by Ice officers. He missed his mother, his classmates, his friends. He longed to be back in school. You can watch, on YouTube, a moving video of reporter Lilia Luciano’s visit to Liam’s classroom, where she recorded his fellow students telling him how much they loved and missed him, waving and blowing him kisses. His teachers decided not to remove Liam’s things from his cubby because they had faith that he would return.
Two Democratic US congressional representatives from Texas, Joaquin Castro and Jasmine Crockett, visited the Dilley facility and were profoundly concerned about the condition of Liam and the other kids imprisoned there. Hundreds demonstrated at the facility during the representatives’ visit, and one could hear the children begging to be freed.
Partly because of the congressional representatives’ intercession and the public attention that Liam’s suffering attracted, his case came before Federal Judge Fred Biery, who ruled that the detention of Liam and his father was unconstitutional – and both father and son have now been released.
In his statement, Judge Biery stated that the case “has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently implemented of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children … For some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency.”
He accused our government of ignoring the Declaration of Independence and “that pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment,” which protects individuals from “unreasonable searches and seizures” without probable cause. The judge concluded his ruling with the now familiar photo of Liam and with a quote from the New Testament: “Jesus wept.”
Of all the acts of brutality and senseless violence committed by the DHS and Ice during the past year, the arrest and incarceration of Liam Ramos and the other children who still remain in custody is among the most sickening and heartbreaking. Do the people abusing and imprisoning these kids have no children of their own? Do they have no “human decency,” no compassion? Have they forgotten that they were once children themselves?
One conclusion reached about the rituals of slaughter at Auschwitz, Treblinka and other concentration and death camps—stripping the prisoners naked, making them run to the gas chambers—is that they were designed not to make the victims suffer but rather to dehumanize them in the eyes of the guards, who would then find it easier to murder their less-than-human captives. Is something similar occurring in our country? Did the agents who seized Liam Ramos not see that he is a human being, a child like their own kids, their family members, their former selves?
Liam Ramos’s arrest – and the continuing incarceration of children in his situation – should be as much of a rallying point as the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The Democrats who called for Liam’s freedom should demand the release of the other children in DHS internment facilities. Ideally, Liam – unlike Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the others murdered by ICE – will recover from the trauma inflicted on him through no fault of his own.
Our nation can never sufficiently apologize or make up for what was done to Liam Ramos. But there a few potential outcomes that I would like to see in the aftermath of his ordeal.
The first is that his story inspires a massive rethinking and overhaul of the way in which we the treat people who have come to this country to escape persecution and to live a more peaceful life.
The second is that every US government official advocate for the children left behind at Dilley and similar detention centers.
And my third hope is that Stephen Miller, the principal architect of our sadistic, racist, monstrous immigration policy, be kept awake, night after night, by the sweet face of Liam Ramos, floating above him in the darkness, so that Miller suffers the fate to which Shakespeare doomed Macbeth: sleep no more.
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Francine Prose is a former president of the PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
