On Tuesday, some number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents camped out near Liam Conejo Ramos's home in the Twin Cities suburb of Columbia Heights and waited for him to return with his father, so they could ambush them. According to news reports, agents grabbed Liam out of a car that was still running in the driveway, with one agent leading him to the door of his house in an effort to draw out any other family members at home. ICE then took Liam and his father into custody; their lawyers believe they are now likely being detained in Texas.
Liam is 5 years old. He was on his way home from pre-kindergarten, where he was doing all the things that other 5-year-olds do, like learning how to trace letters and learn words. A group of grown men in tactical gear, working under the auspices of the federal government, bum-rushed a kid in a bunny hat with a Spider-Man backpack on his way home from doing those things and then tried to use him as bait in the president's ongoing siege against the country he leads. Once again, the Department of Homeland Security deployed lies to justify its actions:
ICE did NOT target a child. The child was ABANDONED. On January 20, ICE conducted a targeted operation to arrest Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias an illegal alien from Ecuador who was RELEASED into the U.S. by the Biden administration. As agents approached the driver Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, fled on foot—abandoning his child. For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended Conejo Arias.
It goes without saying that a federal agency heatedly and unconvincingly denying that it "targeted a child" suggests that, whatever the stated goals of the ever-expanding immigration dragnet that has consumed Minnesota for weeks, that agency is very far from any conception of public service or law enforcement. It has been barely a week since ICE agents shot and killed Renee Nicole Good while she was driving her car on the streets of Minneapolis. In the days since, ICE has repeatedly lied about its crimes and secreted away the agent responsible for killing Good; it has not slowed down or shown any greater discretion in how it disposes of the people whose lives lie in the way of their nebulous mission. These agents shot a man in North Minneapolis during an "enforcement" effort that turned out to be a case of mistaken identity and racial profiling. That same night, during a protest following that shooting, they threw a can of tear gas under a minivan carrying an uninvolved family with six children, including a 6-month-old baby who was left unconscious but would later recover.
To watch ICE in Minnesota is to see a domestic military operation working entirely without morals or limits of any kind; whatever the original stated objective was, the result from one moment to the next has been an indiscriminate and uninhibited campaign of terror. Increasingly that has meant targeting kids. According to the Columbia Heights School District officials, at least four students have been detained by ICE in the last two weeks. ICE was laying in wait after Roosevelt High School released students early on the day when Good was killed just three miles away. Snatching up a 5-year-old and using him as a human shield is not in any meaningful way a departure from this behavior.
In the face of growing national disgust and vehement local resistance, and seemingly at least in part to spite it, the agency has continued to flout its disregard for the basic rights afforded to Americans. On Sunday, armed ICE agents broke into the home of ChongLy Thao on St. Paul's east side. They handcuffed him while his grandson slept nearby and paraded Thao out the door wearing only Crocs, shorts, and a blanket on a day when the highest recorded temperature was 14 degrees. Thao, a U.S. citizen, had his house ransacked and was arrested without a warrant; he was returned home later that day with no explanation or apology. It would turn out that, once again, the DHS's oafish racial profiling backfired; the agency claimed it was looking for a sex offender with deportation orders, but that man hadn't been living at Thao's address for years.
Because all of this is happening so fast and so violently, it's worth stopping to take stock of how we got here, to masked agents smashing through the door of a middle-aged grandfather, or ambushing and arresting a 5-year-old child. To get to this point, you would need individuals devoid of empathy or morals, nearly illiterate to the law and willing to blindly throw their bodies into an obscene war of another man's making. You would need bureaucrats and leaders who think reckless violence supersedes any existing regulations or procedures for keeping officers or the general public safe. You would, ideally, also want to find some way to do all this with the blessing of the Constitution.
According to a report from the Associated Press this week, ICE officers believed they had exactly that, as an internal memo that the agency first circulated in May 2025 authorized officers to use whatever force was necessary to enter a home to arrest someone with a final order for deportation. Instead of taking the normal step of going before a judge for approval and a warrant, the agency said a simple administrative warrant would suffice. Decades of case law on the basic protections provided by the Fourth Amendment contradict that, but the agency's lawyers called bullshit on that precedent and provided no real justifications:
“Although the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has not historically relied on administrative warrants alone to arrest aliens subject to final orders of removal in their place of residence, the DHS Office of the General Counsel has recently determined that the U.S. Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the immigration regulations do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants for this purpose.”
The agency was so confident in this unsound and untested legal footing that it effectively hid the memo, choosing instead to distribute it to a limited number of individuals and verbally briefing agents on the new thinking before they went into the field. Considering that so many of their officers choose to hide their faces, it only follows that they would cover up their justifications. As self-righteous as the agency reliably is in its public communications—"ICE did NOT target a child" and all that—its behavior suggests that it knows it is operating outside the law. The gamble, here as in so many other places, is that consequences no longer exist.
Perhaps this should not be entirely surprising, given that the previous season of the Trump administration gave us child separations and kids literally shoved away in cages. Since his restoration, Donald Trump has graduated to abducting children and state-sponsored killing. No policy documents or bug-eyed, bad-faith legal arguments will change what most Americans can see with every new cellphone video. It is the "American Carnage" that was promised, a war against Trump's every real and imagined enemy, waged by people who believe that or just behave as if they will not be held to account for anything they do in waging it.
Every action from this administration becomes a justification in search of a question, and a reflection of the dangerously undercooked strategy of a state waging war on its own people with no clear strategy or identifiable mission. The laws meant to constrain the government or protect the people from it have been rendered more pliable or simply too weak against a blitz of aggression from a thin-skinned, loose-brained authoritarian. In Minneapolis and elsewhere, Donald Trump is deliriously horny for conquest, but absolutely willing to settle for violence.
