Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin appeared on right-wing media Friday to spin a dubious accounting of Immigration and Customs Enforcement thugs. This newest work of fiction was around detaining a five-year-old Minnesota child in the driveway of his home after he returned from school.
“The facts are actually that this little boy was abandoned by his own father,” McLaughlin told Newsmax. “His own father was being approached by ICE agents when he darted, ran, and abandoned the child. Our law enforcement in these temperatures stayed with the child, tried to bring him into custody with the mother who actually would not take the child into custody, which is so sad, so horrific.”
The only verifiable element of McLaughlin’s statement appears to be that the father and son are now reportedly being held in a detention center in Texas.
Multiple reports contradict McLaughlin’s reimagining of the terror that President Donald Trump’s ICE goons visited upon the family. According to Zena Stenvik, superintendent of the Columbia Heights school district where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos attends school, the Ramos family has an active asylum case and no deportation orders.
Stenvik explained that the child and father were detained while sitting in a "running car" in their driveway. Federal agents allegedly removed the child and “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.”
Contrary to claims that the father abandoned Liam, adults were living in the home, including the child's mother. ICE agents, however, refused to leave the child with them. The father reportedly instructed the mother not to open the door out of fear of additional arrests.
Top border patrol henchman Gregory Bovino later addressed the terrifying allegations at a press conference, stating with a straight face: “Here in the U.S. Border Patrol, I will say unequivocally that we are experts in dealing with children.”
Whatever you say, Bovino.
