As we watch the ICE Gestapo losing their minds in the US, I thought of these three photos that changed politics:
Alan Kurdi from Syria drowned on a Greek beach in 2015, along with his brother, when his family tried to escape Syria by boat. It turned out that the Harper government had refused to let his aunt in Canada take them in as refugees. Harper lost the Canadian election to Trudeau two months later.
Yanela Sanchez from Honduras arrived at the US border in 2018 with her mother after a month on the road and a trip by raft across the Rio Grande. They were immediately taken into custody. This photo of that poor crying exhausted baby became the face of Trump's cruel zero tolerance family separation policy. Trump lost the US election two years later.
Finally, this one: arriving home from pre-school on Tuesday, 5-year-old Liam Ramos from Ecuador was used as bait by the ICE Gestapo in Minnesota, so that his family would open their doors. Liam and his father were admitted to the US in 2024 as refugees but both were arrested on Tuesday, nobody knows why, and are now in ICE detention in Texas, nobody knows why.
OMG, and it looks to me like Liam is wearing a Spiderman bullet-proof backpack that parents in the US now buy their children to keep them safe from school shooters.
But against America's ICE Gestapo, they don't work.
