The arrest of a five-year-old captured public attention and ignited a prisoner revolt inside a U.S. ICE detention center. Powerful imagery is a useful tool for the people, but dangerous in the hands of oppressors.
" I would write a book even bankers' daughters would not be able to cry over "
Richard Wright
We know that 100,000 people in the streets of Minnesota on January 23rd is a low count and that day already part of the people's history will not melt in our memories unlike Trump's phantasmagoric "piece of ice". The murders by ICE in Minnesota of Renee Nicole Good, Geraldo Lunas Campos ( in detention ) and Alex Jeffrey Pretti are sending tremors through all the nations and cities and the world.
Meanwhile I want to focus on one minor, a 5 year-old child, who was kidnapped in Minneapolis on January 20th along with his Ecuadorian father, Adrian Conejo Arias, an immigrant who had entered the US legally under Biden but was accused of fleeing his arrest and "abandoning his own child as he fled"
I followed little Liam Conejo Ramos’s story, like the world did, as the photo of him went viral.
I too found myself fascinated by the photo in red, white and blue of a bunny-hatted child gazing at a frostbitten car as the hand of a faceless stranger rested albeit lightly on his "Spiderman" backpack. I watched with emotion and rage... and yet something felt wrong, and to paraphrase J.D. Vance's disingenuous words, I too decided to do my own research. Except that I came up with distinctly different and damning facts.
As I researched, I was guided by these words of the longtime friend and supporter of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the award-winning Palestinian novelist and poet, Susan Abulhawa, who says,: " They want us to be the fake news."
Her words take me back to the flight of a 12-year-old immigrant in the snow who is finally overtaken by an ICE goon and pushed brutally to the ground and trampled on while the thug takes his time to get his handcuffs out. The child keeps shouting, " I am legal, I am legal". Maybe that very morning, his mother had taught him those strange adult words would be his only passport.
But why was there something about the virality of Liam's photo that set off alarm bells?
Though the photo of Liam is real and definitely not doctored, it is offered to us out of context and I would suggest deliberately so. The context being that the child was coerced by ICE agents to knock at his own door so the rest of the family, those they wanted to arrest, would open it.
Also, the photo is still and silent - it is not moving footage with sound. We are not made aware of what happened before the click, and we are offered another photo of Liam and his father later - we don’t know how much later - behind a chain fence with another click. How many clicks have we missed?
Second, there is the soppy, sentimental, near-poetic January 22nd column in the Washington Post validating the "iconic" status of the photo and giving us permission to cry over it ... well with some caveats. The photo is treated like a work of art and we find ourselves noticing the color harmony within the photo's frame: the white of the child's pom poms "rhyming" with the frost on the ICE vehicle, the red of his backpack reflected in the lit tail-light of the vehicle. The eye is almost soothed out of horror.
Then the column waxes sentimental as it explores other historical iconic photos - almost weighing them one against the other in a competition of horror - something only the elites know how to do in order to balkanise our ordeals. In fact the choice of the subtitle of the piece is significant.
An image like this could once have changed history. Can it still?
Other attempts to gently lead us to doubt the narrative of the witnesses are made, such as scoffing at the idea that Liam was used as "bait”.
Bait suggests something akin to fishing, with a dynamic of desire and reward. The fish covets the worm but gets hooked in the process. But the use of a 5-year-old child in distress, cold, confused and helpless, to trick and ensnare his own caretakers doesn’t fit this metaphoric use of language.
Really? So what about "Operation Catch of the Day" that was just launched by ICE in Maine? And the leaked fact that a bonus is being offered for the "catch" of each human being out there?
The Washington Post column is selectively historic and, following the amnesia pattern of a political dementia, dredges up examples of a distant past, the better not to remind us of unresolved trauma in our very recent history.
We are encouraged not to connect the dots with what the IDF still does every day in a genocidal context to separate families from one another in Gaza and the West Bank.
We are especially encouraged to forget the drones equipped with AI sound equipment replicating distressing cries of Palestinian children imploring to be saved - in order to lure compassionate adults out of their shelters to a certain death as they go to the rescue of a disincarnate toddler's voice.
And the fact that ICE, who trains with the IDF, has now ordered drones to buttress their US city paramilitary operations has been very unreported.
And no reference anywhere, even in our independent press, to what happened on October 27th, 2020, to a young mother in Philadelphia called Rickia Young during an "incident" eerily reminiscent of the one where Renee Nicole Good was murdered. After the killing by the police of a Black man, Walter Wallace Jr., during a mental health episode, Rickia had collected her nephew from school and was riding with her 2-year-old toddler in her car when she encountered a group of protesters on the way home. She was stopped by the police while she was maneuvering to extract her car from the crowd. She and her nephew were dragged out of the car, severely beaten and taken to the police station. Meanwhile, the toddler was removed from the car by a female police officer and was disappeared... only to reappear in a photo representing him in the "protective" arms of the said officer with the following caption written by the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP).
"This child was lost during the violent riots in Philadelphia , wandering around barefoot in an area that was experiencing complete lawlessness. The only thing the Philadelphia police officer cared about in that moment was protecting this child. We are not your enemy, we are the thin blue line. And we are the only thing standing between order and anarchy."
With great courage, Rickia Young, after receiving an astounding $2 million settlement from the City of Philadelphia, went on to sue the FOP for psychological damage and for using the image of her child for their own political propaganda.
The FOP had to delete the photo, but it carried disturbing similarities with the photo of Liam that is going viral today...because captions matter and columns such as the one in the Washington Post, which is a liberal media outlet.
And J.D. Vance's words, "Were we to allow a child to freeze?", those words were meant to be the definitive caption to that photo, a caption coldly reminiscent of the FOP narrative in Philadelphia in 2020.
ICE, like the FOP, wants to have its cake and eat it too. They want what Vance calls "super immunity" and a curated do-gooder image. Absolution for their crimes must be complete
So, to return to Liam, why do Trump's henchmen protest so often and too much?
What if the real photos and footage are those we have not yet seen go viral because they are far more political and less "soft" than the bunny-hatted one, the footage that the ICE agents are literally keeping close to their chests, i.e. the bodycam footage of how little Liam was coerced to go knock on his own door to unknowingly lure his mother out to be arrested, while his father shouts to the mother who is looking out of the window, " Don't open."
If the Grimm Brothers had not existed, this sadism would have invented them.
The real photos that mark in real time the killing of a childhood are hidden. Let's demand them.
A prison revolt for Liam
Meanwhile, at the infamous Dilly ICE Detention Center in Texas, where Liam and his father were incarcerated, the imprisoned families there needed no photos to understand. The ICE guards had cut off the internet after Renee Nicole Good's murder to prevent them from watching the anti-ICE protests that followed, as well as the general strike that took place on January 23rd. But when the 1200 detained families witnessed at first hand the arrival in their midst of Liam and his father, from their testimony the word spread and the word became anger and the anger sparked an upheaval among 80% of the detained.
This is the first instance of a prison revolt inside a major ICE detention Center - revealed by chance thanks to the presence on the site of a visiting lawyer, Eric Lee, who comments in real time as drones fly over the buildings and we can hear distinctly the clamor, "Let us out, let us out! Libertad!"
Not content with Gaza, white supremacist America is creating a cluster of open-air prisons at home.
Julia Wright is the elder of Richard Wright and executrix of his estate. She worked as a journalist in Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana until the coup d'etat in 1966. She was a member of SNCC and accompanied the BPP to the First Panafrican Festival in Algiers. She has been in the campaign to free Mumia since the mid-eighties.
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