The image of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos being detained outside of his house upon arriving home from school has gone viral. Wearing a blue fuzzy hat and Spiderman backpack half his size, he faces the bed of a black truck, a white hand holding his backpack.
According to the Columbia Heights Public School District in Minnesota, federal agents have detained four students that attend their schools four separate times over the course of two weeks. Conejo was one of them, and he was used as “bait” to draw family members out of their home for them to be arrested and detained. Conejo was apprehended in his driveway when he returned home from school with his father.
According to Columbia Heights superintendent Zena Stenvik, “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.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents then took the father and child away to ICE’s South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. Marc Prokosch, a lawyer representing the family, said that the family had been following everything they were asked to do, “so this is just … cruelty.”
A judge issued a stay Monday on their deportation order. Liam’s father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, told Rep. Julian Castro that Liam has been “depressed and sad.” Liam’s mother, Erika Ramos, told MPR News that her son “is getting sick” and not eating due to the poor quality of the food at the Dilley center.
Conejo is not the only recent example of child abduction. Earlier this month, 5-year-old Génesis Ester Gutiérrez Castellanos and her mother were deported to Honduras. Both of them are U.S. citizens.
Echoes of Christian Boarding Schools
The forced abductions of these two children are deeply reminiscent of the forcible abduction of Indigenous children in the 19th century. Under the guise of child welfare (enabled in the U.S. by the 1887 Dawes Act), Indigenous children were often taken from their families and communities without their family’s consent, sometimes with military or police presence if parents resisted. Sometimes parents were tricked or coerced into sending their children, especially if the parents were threatened with criminal charges or violent repercussions.
The children were moved to boarding schools as part of “re-education” campaigns, where they underwent forced white Christian assimilation — their hair was cut and they were forbidden to speak their native languages. Many of these schools were run by the Catholic church or other Christian institutions, and under their care, children suffered sexual and other forms of physical abuse. Almost a thousand children died at boarding schools, according to a recent federal investigation, but an investigation by The Washington Post found that the number was much higher — more than 3,000 Indigenous children died in the custody of the U.S. government.
From “Kidnapping Clubs” to the Modern Family Policing System
Liam Conejo Ramos’s kidnapping also recalls another despicable chapter of U.S. history, when people who bought, sold, and traded enslaved individuals as well as professional “kidnapping clubs” abducted both free and enslaved Black people off of the street, including children, and then sold them into slavery. Many kidnappers worked under the guise of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act that allowed people to capture and return escaped enslaved individuals, but oftentimes, kidnappers abducted any Black child or adult, even if they did not match the escaped enslaved individual. In order to cover their tracks, kidnappers destroyed freedom papers that would confirm a Black person’s freedom in a court.
Even Black Americans who knew the abducted person could not testify to their freedom because Black Americans were not allowed to testify in most courts. Even white witnesses to the kidnapping, friends, or acquaintances often refused to testify that a free Black person was unjustly abducted because they feared retribution from both their neighbors and from the kidnappers themselves. While white and Black abolitionists alike raised concerns about the kidnapping, many white people who lived in the North did not pay much attention because they did not “own” enslaved people.
Children were often targeted by “slave catchers” and kidnapping rings because they often did not have the ability or awareness to assert their rights or the strength to fight back. They were sometimes lured with promises of food and apprenticeships. Richard Bell’s book Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home charts how five Black boys were kidnapped from Philadelphia in 1825. Four of the boys were raised free and one had just run away from a slaveholding plantation in New Jersey. While the boys were cautious around white men, they were tricked by John Purnell, a “mixed-race” man who went by the fake name John Smith, into an interstate kidnapping campaign run by a man named Joseph Johnson.
Sometimes the children were abducted directly from the street or playground, while traveling to and from school just like Conejo. Historian Jonathan Daniel describes in The Kidnapping Club how a kidnapping ring targeted Black children in New York City in order to sell them into slavery in the 1830s.
And it didn’t stop when slavery was abolished. In the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras in the South and other parts of the country, as many Black Americans migrated to North, Black children were targeted by lynching gangs. Enforcers of sundown towns, or towns where Black Americans were targeted and attacked after dark, targeted children with impunity.
And the history of child snatching continued into the 20th century with the “Baby Scoop Era” from the 1940s to the 1970s, when young, largely unmarried mothers were tricked or coerced into placing their babies up for adoption. To this day, children put up for adoption during this period are still searching for their birth parents and unpacking the legacies of harm and abuse.
Today, the family policing system perpetuates racism and colorism through practices and policies that mean that Indigenous and Black children are significantly more likely to have their homes investigated, be taken from their homes and placed into foster care than white children. According to a study published in 2017 in the American Journal of Public Health, over half of Black children will experience contact with child protective services by the age of 18. Child abuse and neglect is real, but a system that fails to confront and abolish its own racist and colorist practices perpetuates histories of child snatching.
And now, with the enormous increase in funding for ICE alongside the white nationalism emanating from key Trump advisers like Stephen Miller, ICE looks much like a white supremacist employment program for bodysnatchers, to the benefit of private prisons and other carceral institutions.
Liam Conejo Ramos and Génesis Ester Gutiérrez Castellanos are victims of the latest iteration of this violence, of a cruelty descended from federal agents forcibly abducting Indigenous children, “slave catchers” and kidnapping clubs, lynching mobs and family policing officers disproportionately targeting and removing Black children from their homes.
I call out these histories because ICE is not the reflection of a foreign evil. It is the product of escalating white nationalism and a long history of state-sanctioned kidnapping and disappearance of adults and children of color.
Yes, ICE officials are using strategies and aesthetics that are most often associated with the Nazi Gestapo, but in reality, these aesthetics and their associations with “racial hygiene” largely drew on what was happening in the eugenics movement in the United States in the early 20th century, when poor, disabled, and BIPOC women were forcibly sterilized; when “unsightly beggar” laws barred disabled people from public streets; and when disabled, poor, or so-called “undesirable” people were institutionalized en masse.
ICE uses similar Gestapo tactics of surprise abductions of people from homes, worship spaces, and schools — but these tactics are homegrown.
As Holocaust scholar Daniel H. Magilow wrote this past July, “I believe that comparing ICE to the Gestapo is less a historical judgement than a reflection of modern anxiety — a fear that the U.S. is veering toward authoritarianism reminiscent of 1930s Germany.” He highlights how other comparisons also ring true, from the Soviet Union’s KGB to Iran’s former secret police and intelligence agency SAVAK. And of course, there are many, many examples from U.S. history.
This tragedy is one that the U.S. has built itself, and sometimes by leaning too much into analogies or conflating it with a foreign evil, like the Nazi Gestapo, we overlook its deep roots in our own society. Seeing how Liam Conejo Ramos and Génesis Ester Gutiérrez Castellanos’s kidnapping and disappearances are connected to a long history of child snatching is vital to understanding where ICE agents got their playbook. The call to “Abolish ICE!” could then be regarded as the minimum demand for a deeper reckoning. To truly root out the evil, we may need to dismantle far more than a 23-year-old federal agency.