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The image of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos being detained outside of his house upon arriving home from school has gone viral. Wearing a blue fuzzy hat and Spiderman backpack half his size, he faces the bed of a black truck, a white hand holding his backpack.

According to the Columbia Heights Public School District in Minnesota, federal agents have detained four students that attend their schools four separate times over the course of two weeks. Conejo was one of them, and he was used as “bait” to draw family members out of their home for them to be arrested and detained. Conejo was apprehended in his driveway when he returned home from school with his father.

According to Columbia Heights superintendent Zena Stenvik, “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 5-year-old as bait.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents then took the father and child away to ICE’s South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. Marc Prokosch, a lawyer representing the family, said that the family had been following everything they were asked to do, “so this is just … cruelty.”

A judge issued a stay Monday on their deportation order. Liam’s father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, told Rep. Julian Castro that Liam has been “depressed and sad.” Liam’s mother, Erika Ramos, told MPR News that her son “is getting sick” and not eating due to the poor quality of the food at the Dilley center.

Conejo is not the only recent example of child abduction. Earlier this month, 5-year-old Génesis Ester Gutiérrez Castellanos and her mother were deported to Honduras. Both of them are U.S. citizens.

The forced abductions of these two children are deeply reminiscent of the forcible abduction of Indigenous children in the 19th century. Under the guise of child welfare (enabled in the U.S. by the 1887 Dawes Act), Indigenous children were often taken from their families and communities without their family’s consent, sometimes with military or police presence if parents resisted. Sometimes parents were tricked or coerced into sending their children, especially if the parents were threatened with criminal charges or violent repercussions.

The children were moved to boarding schools as part of “re-education” campaigns, where they underwent forced white Christian assimilation — their hair was cut and they were forbidden to speak their native........

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