"As symbols of the indiscriminate disproportionality of the Trump administration's militant anti-immigrant crusade in Minneapolis, the images are hard to surpass. One recent image shows the innocent figure of Liam Ramos, a five-year-old preschooler wearing a blue bobbled winter hat, standing next to a black vehicle with a dark-clad adult figure standing behind him, whose hand is proprietorially placed on his backpack."
"A second picture depicts the same child at the door of a house, with what appears to be a masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent standing behind him. The exact circumstances of the photos or their provenance remains unclear. The homeland security department has insisted that Liam was being held for protective purposes after his father absconded when agents tried to detain him."
"Yet the dystopian optics of a small child being caught up in Donald Trump's dragnet approach to mass deportations has the power to shock the conscience as much as the footage of Good, a 37-year-old woman and mother of three, being shot and killed as she attempted to drive away from ICE agents on 7 January. The pictures of Liam recall those of Alan Kurdi and Elian Gonzalez, two other children whose images conveyed a stark message when they were captured on camera in circumstances of extreme drama."
Photographs of five-year-old Liam Ramos place a child at the center of aggressive ICE activity in Minneapolis, raising alarm about tactics used during raids. Homeland Security describes the child as held for protective reasons after his father allegedly absconded, while local school officials contend the image suggests exploitation of the child as bait to draw relatives out of a home for arrest. The images arrive amid footage of violent arrests and the killing of Renee Good, and they evoke comparisons to past widely circulated child images that jolted public conscience during migration crises.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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