Children aren’t exempt from ICE’s violence. And for administration hardliners, that’s the point.
By Jordan Liz
On January 20, ICE agents detained a five-year-old child just outside his home in Minnesota. The child was used as “bait” to try to draw family members out of their home.
A widely circulated photo of the boy being apprehended, with
his Spiderman backpack and fuzzy little animal ears on his winter hat, may
become an
indelible image of ICE’s cruelty.
Zena
Stenvik, the local school superintendent, reports that this was the fourth
child detained by ICE in that community alone. A 10-year-old fourth grader and
two 17-year-olds were also taken.
Since then, more children have been abducted. On January 22,
ICE agents detained a 2-year-old
girl and her father, Elvis Joel Tipan Echeverria, in south
Minneapolis. Like Arias and his son, Echeverria and his daughter are asylum
seekers without an active order for deportation.
On January 29, two brothers in the second
and fifth grades were detained with their mother. She also has a
pending asylum case.
Violence towards children is nothing new for the Trump
administration. During Trump’s first term, more than 5,000 immigrant children were forcibly
separated from their parents. These children were
held in dirty, crowded, chain-linked cages and only provided foil sheets to
serve as blankets. In December 2024, Human
Rights Watch reported that as many as 1,360 children had still not
been reunited with their parents.
Treating children like this is morally abhorrent. Childhood is supposed to be a time of play, learning, and discovery — it is meant to be a sanctuary. For the Trump administration, however, childhood represents a frontline in a battle against “foreign invaders” who threaten “civilizational erasure.”
As Trump’s extremist Homeland
Security Advisor Stephen Miller put it, “You are not just importing
individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when
failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate
the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”
In this distorted view, the children of immigrants are just
as — if not more — dangerous than their parents. Thus they merit none of the
special protections we ordinarily extend to children. ICE will arrest, detain,
cage, traumatize,
and tear
gas them. Agents will use them as bait, deny their rights,
and deport them
in the name of defending America.
For the Trump administration, there are two kinds of babies:
those, in Trump’s words, with “bad
genes” that jeopardize the nation, and those that make America great again.
This double standard is why Vice
President J.D. Vance can defend ICE arresting a 5-year-old one day,
and then the very next day claim that he wants to
see “more families and more babies” in the United States. “The mark of
barbarism is that we treat babies like inconveniences to be discarded rather
than the blessings to cherish that they are,” Vance said at the 2026 March for
Life anti-abortion rally.
While the irony is lost on him, he’s right about this much:
All babies, regardless of the circumstances of their birth, are blessings.
Instead of deporting them, we should cherish them. Instead of denying them
citizenship, we should embrace them. No baby is an inconvenience to be
discarded. ICE’s actions truly are “the mark of barbarism.”
The Trump administration will continue to preach pro-life
politics while jailing babies. They will continue their anti-immigrant crusade
with reckless abandon unless we stop them — and, for the sake of the children
and all others who can’t defend themselves, we must.
Jordan
Liz is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at San José State
University. He specializes in issues of race, immigration, and the politics of
belonging. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.