Child of fear Could image of five-year-old in ICE hands turn shock to rage?

As symbols of the indiscriminate disproportionality of the Trump administration’s militant anti-immigrant crusade in Minneapolis, the images are hard to surpass.

- Robert Tait Washington

One 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 officials from the Columbia Heights public school district, which circulated both pictures, say they conjure a disturbing reality - of an unsuspecting Liam being exploited as bait to lure adults in his family home to open the door so ICE agents can arrest them.

In the two weeks since the shocking killing of Renee Good by an armed agent, footage of violent arrests and assaults by ICE operatives deployed to Minnesota by an administration claiming it is seeking to restore “law and order” have become grimly commonplace.

Yet the dystopian optics of a small child being caught up in Trump’s mass deportations have the power to shock. The pictures of Liam recall those of Alan Kurdi and Elián Gonzalez, two other children whose images in circumstances of extreme drama conveyed a stark message.