By Philip Kennicott

 

WASHINGTON, 24 Jan. - (ANA) - A viral image of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos shows the boy in a blue knit hat with white bunny ears and pompoms, standing with a blank look on his face, staring at the back of a truck. Liam and his father were captured by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Minnesota on Tuesday, and both are now detained in San Antonio, more than 1,200 miles from Liam’s home, his school, his friends and most of his family, writes Philip Kennicot in the Washington Post.

 

School officials in Minnesota say that the prekindergarten student was used “as bait” by ICE, in an apparent attempt to gain access to the adults inside the private house where he once lived. That act, the use of a boy too young to understand the political game in which he became a pawn, mirrors in a perverse and deeply disturbing way the power of the photograph. The photograph stirs empathy and compassion, the same emotions that ICE agents apparently used to entice adults into making themselves vulnerable to capture.

 

In the photograph, the hat functions the way toys or pets function in classic portraits of children, such as Dirck Santvoort’s portrait of a small girl with a goldfinch in London’s National Gallery or the tiny lapdog in Mary Cassatt’s “Little Girl in a Blue Arm Chair” in Washington’s National Gallery of Art. It underscores his tender years and innocence, while reminding us that childhood isn’t just about age. It is a condition of existence created, sustained and protected by adults. The hat tells us not only that there is someone close to him who loves and cares for him, but also that all of us, as adults, owe to children the right to live free from the suffering and meanness that so often define the world of adulthood. We must certainly never co-opt them into our guile or cruelty.

 

Much of what we know about the image must be surmised: that he is bewildered and terrified. What is the evidence for these suppositions? A basic sense of human empathy.

 

This is an image of universal moral urgency, akin to a small number of photographs that once upon a time had the power to change our behavior, away from cruelty or indifference and in the direction of basic decency. The 1972 “Napalm Girl” image, of a child running naked in the street after an attack by U.S.-backed South Vietnamese forces, is one example. Kevin Carter’s 1993 “Vulture and the Little Girl” image, of an emaciated and starving Sudanese child stalked by a hungry vulture, is another. In the last Trump administration, a photograph of Salvadoran migrant Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter, Valeria, drowned in the Rio Grande, stirred considerable resistance to the president’s immigration policies.

 

The use of the term “bait” is understandable but inadequate to the moral questions raised by the photograph of Liam. Local school officials say that ICE officers compelled the child to knock on the door of his house, in an attempt to lure other adults out or gain access.

 

But the use of a 5-year-old child in distress, cold, confused and helpless, to trick and ensnare his own caretakers doesn’t fit this metaphoric use of language.

 

A universal moral image works because at some level we share a universal moral conscience. There are certain things that, when seen, compel us to action in a way that transcends all other concerns.

 

It is universal because the suffering of a child cuts across race, nationality and ideological divisions. It is universal because it takes precedence over all other concerns. A child in distress demands action now. The world stops for a moment, and decent people do what is absolutely, immediately necessary.

 

Among the most deeply distressing things this image represents is the instrumentalization of compassion.   - (ANA) -

 

AB/ANA/24 January 2026 - - -