On Jan. 20, one of the coldest days of the year in Minneapolis, Ali Daniels received a text message warning that ICE agents were targeting school bus stops in Columbia Heights. Daniels, an office administrator working in the metro area, had recently completed legal observer training and was participating in rapid response work for the second time.
Grabbing a friend as her passenger seat sidekick, the two patrolled the neighborhood for signs of ICE activity. After about 10 minutes of turning down residential streets, they spotted a large SUV stopped in the middle of the road. She recalls seeing ICE agents in masks and tactical vests standing outside the vehicle.
That’s when Daniels saw Liam Conejo Ramos—a small, wide-eyed child in a Spider Man backpack and blue bunny hat—being escorted to a slush-streaked car. Daniels recalls agents shouting “get it in the car,” referring to Liam.
People at the scene pleaded with the agents to allow the five-year-old to go with authorized staff from Columbia Heights schools, where Liam attended pre-kindergarten classes. Daniels says the agents refused.
“I decided to start taking pictures,” she said. “This wasn’t part of the training; it was something I did out of impulse.”
Daniels took out her Samsung to snap photos of the agents, the vehicle, and then bent down to Liam’s eye-level. “He was silent, staring ahead, undoubtedly scared and in shock,” she said. “That’s when I got the photo of him.”
Daniels posted the image to her private Facebook page, unaware of the journey this one photograph would take.
We all know this photo and the surrounding details intimately now. Liam was returning from school with his father when immigration agents pulled them from their car near their home, according to the school district. The boy’s father, Adrián Alexander Conejo Arias, was also detained, and the pair were transferred to an immigration detention center outside San Antonio.
A lawyer for the family said that Mr. Conejo Arias, who is from Ecuador, had entered the United States under existing asylum guidelines. The Department of Homeland Security, however, charged that he entered the country unlawfully in Dec. 2024. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that “ICE did NOT target a child,” and that the operation was instead to arrest the child’s father.
Against this backdrop, Daniels’ image of Liam’s seizure went mega-viral at a moment when public anger over immigration enforcement was already acute in Minnesota and elsewhere across the country—the incalculable, inescapable kind of viral in which images move faster than explanation.
X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and BlueSky were flooded with versions of the photo: cropped, captioned, subtitled, paired with legal explainers, donation links, and calls to action demanding Liam’s release. The power of these posts came from their terrifying precision: that this child could be anyone’s, that Minneapolis could be home.