Thursday, January 29, 2026
PMT: Rampaging over human dignity
Not long ago, I posted about 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who was detained and sent to Texas from his home here in Minnesota. His blue bunny hat has become a symbol for people here; many are being knit by fireplaces across Minnesota for events this coming weekend. Part of Liam's name is Conejo, which is Spanish for rabbit. According to the family's lawyer, his father had no criminal record and an active asylum case.
Yesterday, two members of Congress visited Liam at a detention center in Texas. They said he was "lethargic," and that he asked about his bunny hat and Spiderman backpack, which apparently were taken from him.
There are more gruesome stories from all this mess, of course-- involving actual death-- but there is something about a little kid having not only his home and much of his family but his bunny hat taken away that makes the whole thing seem all the more outrageous and wrong.
A part of Operation Metro Surge's operating orders seems designed to strip human dignity from those who are targeted. We are told, for example, that the people swept up are "the worst of the worst," when that very clearly is not true in the vast majority of cases, and those who are detained have too often been treated brutally. The entire project rests on a false dichotomy between "us" and "them," with "us" being protected from "them"-- a group that, apparently, includes a little kid who wonders what happened to his blue bunny hat.
