On Jan. 20, one of many coldest days of the yr in Minneapolis, Ali Daniels obtained a textual content message warning that ICE brokers have been concentrating on faculty bus stops in Columbia Heights. Daniels, an workplace administrator working within the metro space, had not too long ago accomplished authorized observer coaching and was collaborating in fast response work for the second time.
Grabbing a pal as her passenger seat sidekick, the 2 patrolled the neighborhood for indicators of ICE exercise. After about 10 minutes of turning down residential streets, they noticed a big SUV stopped in the course of the highway. She remembers seeing ICE brokers in masks and tactical vests standing exterior the car.
That’s when Daniels noticed Liam Conejo Ramos—a small, wide-eyed baby in a Spider Man backpack and blue bunny hat—being escorted to a slush-streaked automotive. Daniels remembers brokers shouting “get it in the car,” referring to Liam.
People on the scene pleaded with the brokers to permit the five-year-old to go along with licensed workers from Columbia Heights faculties, the place Liam attended pre-kindergarten lessons. Daniels says the brokers refused.
“I decided to start taking pictures,” she stated. “This wasn’t part of the training; it was something I did out of impulse.”
Daniels took out her Samsung to snap photographs of the brokers, the car, after which bent right down to Liam’s eye-level. “He was silent, staring ahead, undoubtedly scared and in shock,” she stated. “That’s when I got the photo of him.”
Daniels posted the picture to her personal Facebook web page, unaware of the journey this one {photograph} would take.
We all know this photograph and the encircling particulars intimately now. Liam was coming back from faculty together with his father when immigration brokers pulled them from their automotive close to their residence, according to the school district. The boy’s father, Adrián Alexander Conejo Arias, was additionally detained, and the pair have been transferred to an immigration detention heart exterior San Antonio.
A lawyer for the household stated that Mr. Conejo Arias, who’s from Ecuador, had entered the United States below present asylum pointers. The Department of Homeland Security, nevertheless, charged that he entered the nation unlawfully in Dec. 2024. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin stated in a press release that “ICE did NOT target a child,” and that the operation was as a substitute to arrest the kid’s father.
Against this backdrop, Daniels’ picture of Liam’s seizure went mega-viral at a second when public anger over immigration enforcement was already acute in Minnesota and elsewhere throughout the nation—the incalculable, inescapable form of viral by which photographs transfer sooner than rationalization.
X, Instagram, TikTook, Facebook, and BlueSky have been flooded with variations of the photograph: cropped, captioned, subtitled, paired with authorized explainers, donation hyperlinks, and calls to motion demanding Liam’s launch. The energy of those posts got here from their terrifying precision: that this baby could possibly be anybody’s, that Minneapolis could possibly be residence.
By Jan. 31, Judge Fred Biery, a U.S. District Judge for the Western District of Texas, ordered the discharge of each Liam and his father from immigration custody, condemning their elimination from their suburban Minneapolis neighborhood as unconstitutional. At the underside of his three-page ruling, Judge Biery included the viral photograph of Liam with the caption: “Matthew 19:14” and “John 11:35.”
Those New Testament verses quote Jesus saying “Let the little children come to me” and “Jesus wept.” The picture that had proliferated on social media was now a part of the authorized document.
After more than a week in detention, Liam and his father have been launched from the Texas immigration facility and returned to Minneapolis, in accordance with U.S. Representative Joaquin Castro. Castro documented the trip on social media, the place he shared a photograph of a handwritten be aware he gave Liam, by which he wrote that the boy had “moved the world.”
“Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack. Thank you to everyone who demanded freedom for Liam,” Castro, a San Antonio Democrat, wrote on X.
To make certain, this isn’t the primary social motion by which social media has performed a central function in world political resistance. During the Arab Spring, platforms like Facebook and Twitter functioned as organizing instruments and distribution channels for footage that state-controlled media suppressed—most notably in Egypt in 2011, when stay updates and images from Tahrir Square reworked native protests into a global disaster inside days.
A decade later, mass mobilization round Black Lives Matter was catalyzed by cellphone video made by then 17-year-old Darnella Frazier documenting the homicide of George Floyd, turning a single Minneapolis avenue into the epicenter of a worldwide rebellion.
Since the racial justice protests of 2020, nevertheless, political posting has existed below sustained suspicion as performative. During the summer of 2020, critics of all ideologies mocked symbolic gestures untethered from motion: black squares on Instagram, TikTok videos of white influencers (hair carried out, make-up snatched) raising fists to trending audio, memes lampooning allyship that required no materials threat.
That skepticism has lingered over the previous a number of years, significantly when crises really feel distant or summary, the place posting about Sudan or Gaza, for instance, can resemble a stand-in for motion. “Spreading awareness” stays notoriously tough to measure.
What makes this second distinct is that the controversy now not feels theoretical. As not too long ago as final week, reposting Liam’s photograph was criticized as performative on platforms such as TikTok. But the end result complicates that cost. The circulation, and the calls for it elicited, compelled visibility, authorized scrutiny, and response.
The unfold of Daniels’ photograph of Liam exhibits how public strain on social media can nonetheless bend the equipment of the state.
This is to not say that posting is sufficient. It is straightforward to criticize a celebrity wearing a political pin on the crimson carpet (or a Facebook infographic, or a hashtag in an Instagram bio) as advantage signaling. Talk can solely take you up to now.
Social media also can flatten nuance. As the photograph was reshared and reposted on Facebook, Daniels started seeing feedback questioning its authenticity, suggesting it was pretend or AI-generated. She determined to establish herself because the photographer to determine the picture’s provenance.
“It’s hard to be told you’re changing hearts and minds with one photo, yet knowing that no amount of saying ‘I saw this firsthand’ will make people see how cruel and unjust the whole institution is,” Daniels informed me. “Nothing is that easy.”
Liam is way from the one baby impacted by the Trump administration’s insurance policies. According to a Guardian analysis of records obtained by the Deportation Data Project, ICE booked about 3,800 minors into immigrant household detention from Jan. to Oct. 2025. The variety of youngsters at the moment in migrant detention facilities stays unclear. Posting on social media is not going to free the hundreds of kids at the moment detained.
Minnesotans like Daniels with a cellphone digicam are demonstrating in actual time how social media can push past symbolism into tangible change. The {photograph} of Liam, movies of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and different photographs have contributed to stepping up the strain on the federal authorities, in the end forcing a reversal of its ways in Minnesota.
And social media is proving to be an indispensable software for coordination. Instagram, X, Facebook, Threads, WhatsApp, and Signal are getting used to trace ICE exercise, mobilize protests, flow into witness requests, and distribute exact name and electronic mail templates for elected officers. On streets throughout the nation, Americans are placing their very own our bodies on the road to impede the operations of a federal police power of their metropolis.
“Like so many people in the Twin Cities, I got trained [as a legal observer and rapid responder] because I felt like I had to,” Daniels stated. “I couldn’t just do nothing while our neighbors are being snatched up from their homes.”
Instead, she turned to her telephone’s digicam. Her picture not solely helped change the life of 1 baby, it helped change coverage.