Another Ridiculous Media Lie About ICE

Amid all of the chaos regarding the immigration situation in Minneapolis, members of the legacy media and the Left have simply started to tell lies.

The latest lie being told is that federal agents seized a five-year-old boy in an effort to bait his father.

“Columbia school officials say a 5-year-old boy was used as ‘bait’ for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain him and his father,” Fox News reported.

This was treated by the legacy media as a major story.

This story was apparently first reported by the New York Times, which stated in an article titled, “Detention of 5-Year-Old by Federal Agents Incenses Minneapolis”:

A 5-year-old boy wearing a Spider-Man backpack and an oversized hat was detained with his father by immigration authorities on Tuesday, one of four students who have been apprehended in a suburban Minneapolis school district during the past two weeks, school officials said.

The prekindergarten pupil, Liam Conejo Ramos, is pictured in a photo released by the school system as he stands next to a vehicle with an adult’s hand on his backpack. His father is not in sight. The image prompted outrage in the Twin Cities area, where many people have been angered since mid-December by the Trump administration’s surge in deportation operations.

“Why detain a 5-year-old?” Zena Stenvik, the superintendent of schools in Columbia Heights, Minn., asked at a news conference about the episode on Wednesday.

Buried in the fifth paragraph of the article was this admission: “The boy and his father were taken to Dilley, Texas, outside of San Antonio, where they are being held at an immigration detention center, according to Marc Prokosch, a lawyer working with the family.”

The image of the child in custody prompted an outcry.

But what exactly happened?

According to Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, when the agents sought to detain the father, he fled on foot and left Liam behind in the vehicle, which is a bit of a different story.

If you’re detained alongside your five-year-old child and you take off, that might say something about your parenting style, to say the very least.

Stenvik stated, “Another adult living in the home was outside and begged the agents to let him take care of the small child, and was refused. Instead, the agent took the child out of the still-running car, led him to the door, and directed him to knock on the door asking to be let in in order to see if anyone else was home, essentially using a five-year-old as bait.”

Presumably, one of the reasons they refused to simply allow an adult staying in the home to take care of the boy is they didn’t know who the adult was.

This has raised hackles because there is widespread debate over what sort of warrant is necessary — an administrative warrant or a judge-signed warrant — in order to enter a home where there’s probable cause to believe illegal immigrants are residing.

The fact of the matter is, we have a serious problem on our hands, and it dates back decades. A consent agreement known as the Flores agreement prevented the federal government from holding children and parents together in custody after they crossed the border. Thus, children were released into the interior of the country. This caused the Biden administration, among other administrations, to release the parents as well, to reunify the family.

Now the idea is you can’t deport anyone because they might have children.

What exactly are immigration agents supposed to do?

This, of course, makes everything unworkable, which I believe is the point.