The Lone Star State is becoming an unscrupulous laboratory for federal immigration enforcement and all its $85 billion faults. Detainees of the President Donald Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign are being forced out of their homes and thrown into Texas detention facilities.

The latest victim forced to inhabit an overcrowded camp was a 5-year-old child.

Liam Conejo Ramos was barely a foot taller than the unmarked SUV’s wheels he was shuffled into on Jan. 20. Grabbing Ramos’ Spider-Man backpack, an ICE agent dressed in all black towered over him and ushered the 5-year old into the van.

It is a haunting image.

This blatantly capricious grab-and-go technique is sedimented by the fact that “Miranda warnings” do not apply to immigration proceedings since they apply to criminal cases not civil ones, despite Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem repeatedly claiming detainees as “criminal illegal aliens” and “domestic terrorists.” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller even directed ICE to prioritize large numbers of arrests, not necessarily those convicted of a crime.

This perversion of law enforcement and rhetoric holds together a larger, brutal mosaic of baton-shattered car windows, broken-up families and crushed aspirations for the “American Dream.”

Many detainees have been snatched up by federal agents when attending their immigration hearings, striving to attain legal status and residency. While obeying the law, they were still being punished.

What non-charge would Ramos have to answer for? Did this preschooler pose a threat to our country? Embedded in an agenda to catch and store immigrant children in detention camps is an insufficiently explained goal to meet conveniently lucrative deportation quotas.

It’s becoming increasingly harder to ignore the reality that the brute-force execution of this agenda has always been its purpose: The function of ICE and Customs and Border Protection presence in Minnesota, or at least what they may celebrate as “mission accomplished,” is exactly what it has carried out, including the killings of citizens Alex Pretti, Renee Good and the six people who have died in ICE detention facilities this year, that we know of. 

As ICE-related shooting deaths occur nationwide, will a child be next to die in custody? Do we trust the system enough to seek justice internally? Ramos is the fourth child to be taken by ICE from his school district and uprooted from his home in Minnesota. A “bright young student” who’s missed by his classmates and teacher is held in a detention facility in Texas.

According to Congressman Joaquin Castro, Ramos’ father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, told him that, “Liam has been very depressed since he’s been at Dilley, that he hasn’t been eating well.” 

The Ramos family entered the United States legally, pursuing legal status and posed no safety risks to their community, but the Department of Homeland Security described Arias as an “illegal alien.” 

However, he doesn’t have a criminal record in the U.S. or in his native country of Ecuador; Ramos’ family has a pending asylum case and no deportation orders. In fact, those taken to the center in Dilley do not possess a criminal record and were most likely in the middle of being legally processed, another example of politicians trying to seize optics and not working toward the public interest.

Crammed in the courtyard of the South Texas Family Residential Center are families who face inhumane conditions. Two measles cases have been detected by medical staff, claiming that the detainees were quarantined as ICE movements halt.

However, former detainees from Dilley described their experience in the facility as seeing numerous sick children and individuals not being separated from healthy ones.

Not only are ICE agents stripping children away from their communities, state troopers were seen dispersing crowds of protestors with tear gas outside the drawn perimeter while inside the facility children were shouting, “Let us out!”

These protests are reverberated by the courts.

On Jan. 30, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery ordered that Ramos and his father be released from ICE detention. In a searing opinion, Briery said, “the case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.”

Condemning the detentions as built on an “imposition of cruelty,” Biery had previously ruled Ramos and his father could not be removed from the country in the meantime.

Young children are being shuffled through one of the most scrutinized legal processes condemned on the international stage in a country that’s supposed to be a leading vessel of a democracy based on constitutional principles.What good does it do to seemingly uphold the Constitution while federal agencies illegally fail to comply with court orders or to congresspeople on the ground, investigating human rights violations?

An underlying cause of this festering legal conundrum — where detainees awaiting trial are not given a date or are forced to stay put for an undecided amount of months or years — is the plethora of declarations of national emergencies that normalize the violent crusade against immigrants.

As it stands, the master signifier in our political culture today is “national security.” If a cabinet secretary invokes claims of threats to the nation, the muscle of the state will fall in line — no questions asked or allowed.This means the sovereign in power, namely the president, is equipped to declare any and all things an emergency. Echoing philosopher Giorgio Agamben, “The metaphor of war becomes an integral part of the presidential political vocabulary.”

ICE hunts are not the exception to the rule, but are the rule. The viability of these operations is contingent on the growing indistinction between what is an emergency and what is not. Thrust into a perpetual indistinction, the detained inch further into becoming a kind of “living dead.”

When the policies of this country carve out innocent children and hold their lives in limbo, we should not pretend to be shocked. We must continue to inform ourselves and be in touch with the political community that is recycling their picket signs to protest ICE operations each passing year. The continuity of protest is as frightening as it is sobering; perhaps it’s a flicker of hope.

On Jan. 31, Ramos and his father were released and reunited with their family, but the injustices inflicted upon him cannot be reversed. This is one of many instances of pointless violence driven by a political ideology — a crucible of callousness — that regards children as collateral damage.

Lest we forget, what happens to the detained children the public isn’t allowed to see?

Sidney Uy is a philosophy junior and opinion columnist for The Battalion.