A Poem for Liam Ramos

A 5-year-old boy has stood up against ICE fascism and no child must never be deported

My Fellow Democracy Defenders,

Liam Ramos is a brave defender of democracy. He stood in the freezing cold while ICE thugs arrested his father. They were both sent to an ICE prison. Thankfully, he has been reunited with his family and neighbors in Minneapolis. Like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, I have written a poem for a Latinx hero.

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The linoleum is cold under his velcro shoes
the kind with dinosaurs stamped on the sides.
He knows the shortcut to the park,
knows which fire hydrant drips the best
in summer. This is the world he knows:
crayon smudges on the wall,
his mother’s arroz con leche,
the way his dad lifts him to watch the train
go rumbling past their rented room.

The knock comes on a Tuesday.
Not the friendly rap of the neighbor kid
asking to play. Hard. Official.
His parents go still, the way they’ve practiced
in the quiet hours after he falls asleep.
They know the boots before they see them.
Black. Heavy. Words like removal, order, status.

He comes out holding his t-rex,
pajamas half unzipped,
hair sticking up in the back
the way it does when he’s been napping.
He does not know the word asylum.
Does not understand the paperwork,
the legal limbo his family has lived in
since they ran from the guns,
since they walked thousands of miles
so their son could just be five.

But he knows fear when he sees it.
He knows when someone is trying to take
the people who love him away.

So he stands up.

Barely comes up to an agent’s waist.
Voice small but steady, no tremor in it,
he says what no adult in that room
dared to say to the men with badges:

You can’t do that.

They came here for numbers.
For faceless names in a system
built to unweave families,
to forget that asylum is not a crime.
They came here to do their job,
and here he was:
small, unapologetic,
reminding them what their job has made them become.

Fascism does not know what to do with boys like this.
It preys on quiet. It feeds on fear.
It hates when the smallest among us
points and says this is wrong.

Liam did not set out to be brave.
He did not come to this country to make a speech.
He came here to outgrow his shoes,
to learn English, to draw rainbows,
to not be afraid.

Now they say we should send him back.

Send back the boy who stood taller
than any man in that room.
Send him back to the danger his parents
ran themselves ragged to escape.
Call it law. Call it order.

But there is no law that demands we be cruel.
No border policy that says we must punish a child
for having more decency
than the machine that came for his family.

Liam Ramos does not need to be a hero.
He just needs to be five.

To color outside the lines.
To argue about vegetables.
To grow up here, in the country where he learned
his first English words, made his first friends,
and found his voice.

The voice that said what we all should have said sooner:

You can’t do that.

You will not take him.

Not today.
Not ever.

Home is not a stamp on a paper.
Home is not a line on a map.
Home is the boy who stood his ground.
Home is us, choosing to stand with him.