About Liam Ramos
Everyone remembers Liam Ramos. Blue bunny hat. Spider-Man backpack. Sure, we’re all safer now that that dangerous kid is off of American streets.
Last week, the family’s attorney explained that Liam and his father had been deported to Mexico. That’s how DHS, under the Trump administration, is using taxpayer dollars. Going after Liam and his Dad, instead of the violent criminals Trump campaigned on removing from American streets. We’re not seeing any boost in that beyond what other administrations have accomplished.
Data obtained from the government by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press via Freedom of Information Act requests and analyzed by The Guardian shows that the vast majority of people—77%—the Trump administration is sweeping up have no criminal history. Others have minor, non-violent criminal history. It’s far from the “worst of the worst” narrative peddled by the administration. The Guardian reported that “of those who did have a criminal conviction, nearly half were for non-violent traffic and immigration offenses. Traffic offenses alone made up nearly 30% of the convictions, the largest category by far. Some 9% of criminal convictions were for assault, while only 1% were for sexual assault and just 0.5% were for homicide.” But at least the deport Liam Ramos to support the “mass deportation” claims.
One of the horrors of this administration is that with so much bad all around us, it’s hard to stay focused. And outraged.
Last March and April, the administration deported over 200 Venezuelans to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. Then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem posed in cosplay for the occasion.
The people the Trump administration used our taxpayer dollars to house in CECOT were systematically beaten, psychologically abused, and held in inhumane conditions. There also were some reports of sexual violence. And as it turned out, they were denied due process before they were deported and as that came to light, the government cavalierly ignored court orders. Those included the instance exposed by whistleblower Erez Reuveni, who supported Trump’s anti-immigrant policies during his first administration, revealed that now-Third Circuit Judge, then DOJ official, Emil Bove advised his subordinates that “if some court should issue an order preventing that, we may have to consider telling that court, ‘f*** you.”
More recently, the administration has adopted the practice of deporting people to countries they have no ties to and leaving them in dangerous conditions, including in combat zones, in countries where they don’t speak the language. The New York Times reported that about 70 people with no ties to the country were sent to the Central African Republic, where a vicious civil war is ongoing, late last month. NYU law professor Ryan Goodman highlighted an instance revealed by an active-duty Marine Colonel, where a 24-year-old Afghan man, Khalil, whose two older brothers, one of whom was a pilot, was killed in service.
The Colonel said he believed the man would be killed if he was returned to Afghanistan. The Times reported, “Deporting relatives of Afghans who aided the U.S. military during its 20-year campaign in Afghanistan breaks a longstanding American commitment to protect wartime allies.” An immigration judge granted Khalil withholding of removal last year after the Trump administration began revoking the status, finding his “fear of persecution”—that’s the relevant legal standard—credible. These so-called third country removals have included countries like South Sudan, Eswatini, Rwanda, and Ghana.
We could spend the entire night detailing this administration’s abuses. U.S. citizen children being deported along with parents despite being seriously ill. The cruel, life-endangering conditions in immigration detention facilities on U.S. soil. 33 people died in 2025 alone. Racial profiling—the “Kavanaugh stops”—that allowed ICE to detain people because of the color of their skin or the language they spoke. And violent immigration sweeps that left two Americans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, dead at the hands of ICE agents with more injured and courts across the country declining to give the government its longtime “presumption of regularity” after the government and its agents repeatedly lied to the courts. Over the summer, at least two more men were killed by law enforcement during immigration sweeps, one in Houston, one in Biddeford, Maine, by agents who appeared to have no cause to do so.
Looking back, we remember it all. The protests have died down but our outrage simmers below the surface. Trump’s popularity is dropping, fueled in part by his immigration “policies.”
But it’s not policy, designed to help the American people. It’s policy designed to boost Trump’s political fortunes. And it damages and kills real people. It alters the course of their lives forever, scarring them and their families. It’s inhumane. Much of it is illegal. It’s being done in our names.
Liam is 5.
That fact sticks with me.
In February of 2021, as the Biden administration began to grapple with the long term impact of first term Trump’s family separation policy and whether it would be able to reunify children with their families, I wrote a piece for Cafe.com about an experience I had as a U.S. Attorney during the Obama administration when the state of Alabama passed it’s own anti-immigrant policy (then-Senator Jeff Sessions was a big fan) and we challenged it. Taken as a whole, Alabama’s law, which intended to make conditions so bad for immigrants that they would “self-deport,” was horrific. But it was putting a single human face on it that made the law intolerable, a human rights and civil rights abuse that had to be defeated no matter what the personal cost was.
For me, that face was a 7-year-old named Javier. He reminded me of my nine year old at the time, Ollie. He reminded me that it could have been Ollie, as easily as it was him, and that forgetting the real people behind the laws and the statistics has dangerous consequences for our humanity.
The good folks at Cafe, where I podcast with my former U.S. Attorney colleague Preet Bharara have been nice enough to remove the paywall from that piece and I hope you’ll head over there to read it in full after you finish here. I wrote about a meeting I attended with community members while we were litigating against the state:
“At the end of the meeting, there was Javier and his parents. They had waited patiently to bring him to speak with me. He was quiet and shy, with a sweet smile. His Dad explained, “he has an uncle who is two years older than him. He’s not a citizen. We used to take the kids to the zoo on Tuesdays, but now we can’t take them. He’s afraid they’re going to take his uncle, his best friend, away. I promised him you would try to fix it.”
The look on Javier’s face said everything. He was so sweet and so trusting. It could have just as easily been my own son in this position if circumstances were different. I bent down and we hugged each other. For a long time. And I told him I would try.
I’ve been trying ever since. We won the challenge in court against HB 56, keeping the most discriminatory and malicious parts of the law from going into effect. Ultimately, that wasn’t enough.
I hope it will be enough this time. We can never forget. There are a lot of reasons to do whatever it takes to vote this November. It’s the people being impacted by Trump’s horrific immigration abuses. But it’s also all of us. The phrase, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” is widely misattributed to the 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke, though no evidence shows he ever said or wrote those exact words. But whoever said them got it right. We must do something: remember, share, protest, vote, run for office, work in our communities—whatever it is in front of us that we can do.
We must not forget about Liam, Javier, our own children, the soul of our country.
One reason to read Civil Discourse is because we have long memories around here; we don’t forget. And we follow the through lines so we understand what it means when we say this is an authoritarian-minded, anti-democratic administration. Thank you for being here with me. Subscribe, stay informed, and support my work if you find pieces like this one valuable.
We’re in this together,
Joyce