This is what America has become?

If this is not child abuse, what is?

After World War II when our parents and grandparents and other family members so heroically destroyed Adolf Hitler and Fascism, we were proud.

After President Kennedy brought down the leader of the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis, which started the crack in the Berlin Wall, we were proud.

After the Soviet Union fell, we were proud.

And going back much further, we were proud when Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and won the Civil War.

Yes, we were proud -- at one point in our lives.

So, when the photos of a little five-year-old named Liam Ramos hit the internet, we should have been appalled and should have asked ourselves, "Is this making us proud?"

Can we really say were are proud of a government that would do this?

Background

Here is what happened,

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

One recent image 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.

Robert Tail, “What images of a detained five-year-old boy reveal about

Trump’s draconian ICE crackdown,” The Guardian, Jan. 22, 2026

A dark and disturbing reality

The problem is that innocent children and innocent schools are being played as criminals. Actually, the masked people are more in the latter category,

Yet officials from the Columbia Heights public school district, which circulated both pictures, say the latter conjures a dark and 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.

The Guardian

Does this photo make America proud?

If it does, we are in more trouble than we realized.