REPUBLICANS WANT TO BE CRUELER TO IMMIGRANTS' CHILDREN THAN I WANT TO BE TO STEPHEN MILLER

A federal judge has ordered the release of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, who were detained last week in Minneapolis by President Trump's immigration goons. At the time of his arrest, Liam Ramos was wearing a bunny hat and a Spider-Man backpack.

In The New York Times today, Elora Mukherjee, the director of the immigrants’ rights clinic at Columbia University, notes that Liam Ramos is far from unique:

Children all across the country are being arrested and detained.... From January to October 2025, at least 3,800 children under the age of 18, including 20 infants, were arrested and detained by U.S. immigration authorities. Since March 2025, many hundreds of families with children who are minors have been detained in federal immigration custody, with more than 1,700 children in custody since family detention centers reopened. Many have been detained for long periods of time, some for nearly half a year.

The children at Dilley with whom I’ve worked over the past year range in age from 2 to 16 years old.... A 2-year-old boy was breastfeeding in detention. One 6-year-old boy had leukemia. An 8-year-old girl began wetting the bed. A 14-year-old girl engaged in self-harm. All of these children and their parents were detained despite being eligible for release — ICE has the authority to release these families, who are not flight risks, on parole — and while seeking asylum and other humanitarian protections in the United States. None of these children or their parents had a criminal history anywhere in the world.

What's sickening about this is the gratuitous cruelty:

The family detention facility at Dilley is a hellhole. Children and parents consistently report not having access to sufficient potable water, palatable food (both children and parents have told me they found worms in their meals), adequate medical care or meaningful educational opportunities. Lights are left on 24 hours a day, making it difficult to sleep.

And the cruelty has been the point since the first Trump presidency:

... the first Trump administration insisted in 2019 before a federal appeals court that it was “safe and sanitary” to detain immigrant children for days in facilities without soap or toothbrushes and to make them sleep on concrete floors under bright lights without blankets in cold temperatures.

How does all this advance the administration's stated goal of removing every undocumented immigrant from America? How, for instance, does leaving the lights on 24 hours a day in areas where children are detained advance that goal in a way that allowing a period of darkness wouldn't?

They're doing it because people in the administration, as well as their most devoted voters, relish the suffering of these immigrants, the same way they relish the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. They want the people they hate to suffer, and that includes children of immigrants.

I don't know about you, but while I want the people orchestrating this orgy of brutality to be held accountable, I don't fantasize about piling on sadistic punishments for them. I think it would be justice for the president to die in prison, and for long terms to be meted out to Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Greg Bovino, and many other Trump officials, as well as the cops who killed Good and Pretti. But this is America, where conservatives are rarely held accountable, so I don't expect any of this. Nevertheless, at the very least, I'd like these people to be lifelong pariahs, as marginalized and widely reviled as David Duke.

Your mileage may vary. You might hope that these people will be brutalized in the future. But even so, you feel that way because they've actually committed unspeakable offenses. Republican voters feel this way about little kids -- kids who've done nothing to them.

The key voting bloc in the coalition that elected our current federal government has a worldview that places right-wing heterosexual Christian men in a dominant position in the culture and believes they should be given carte blanche to dole out extremely harsh punishments to everyone who fails to live up to their standards of behavior, starting with their own children and wives. These are people who believe it's sinful not to subject your children to corporal punishment. These are people who believe empathy for people outside one's own tribe is a grave sin.

I don't think these people represent a majority of America. But for years they've been seen as normative, while the rest of us have been seen as elitist weirdos.

Maybe we're arriving at a point where their extremism is being recognized outside communities of liberals and progressives. Yesterday's election of a Democrat (by approximately 14 points) in a state legislative district in Texas that went for Trump by 17 points in 2024 suggests that maybe times are changing. I hope so. But for now, the dominant ideology in America approves of mistreating children if they're the "wrong" children.

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UPDATE: Liam Ramos and his father have been released.