Trump and Vance Can’t Be “Pro-Life” While Committing Violence Against Children

On January 20, ICE agents detained a five-year-old child just outside his home in Minnesota. The child was used as “bait” to try to draw family members out of their home.

A widely circulated photo of the boy being apprehended, with his Spiderman backpack and fuzzy little animal ears on his winter hat, may become an indelible image of ICE’s cruelty.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alleges that ICE was conducting a targeted operation against the boy’s father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias. Yet he and his son had entered the country via an official crossing point. They have an active asylum case and there was no order of deportation against them.

Zena Stenvik, the local school superintendent, reports that this was the fourth child detained by ICE in that community alone. A 10-year-old fourth grader and two 17-year-olds were also taken.

Since then, more children have been abducted. On January 22, ICE agents detained a 2-year-old girl and her father, Elvis Joel Tipan Echeverria, in south Minneapolis. Like Arias and his son, Echeverria and his daughter are asylum seekers without an active order for deportation.

On January 29, two brothers in the second and fifth grades were detained with their mother. She also has a pending asylum case.

Violence towards children is nothing new for the Trump administration. During President Trump’s first term, more than 5,000 immigrant children were forcibly separated from their parents. These children were held in dirty, crowded, chain-linked cages and only provided foil sheets to serve as blankets. In December 2024, Human Rights Watch reported that as many as 1,360 children had still not been reunited with their parents.

Treating children like this is morally abhorrent. Childhood is supposed to be a time of play, learning, and discovery — it is meant to be a sanctuary. For the Trump administration, however, childhood represents a frontline in a battle against “foreign invaders” who threaten “civilizational erasure.”

As Trump’s extremist Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller put it, “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”

In this distorted view, the children of immigrants are just as — if not more — dangerous than their parents. Thus they merit none of the special protections we ordinarily extend to children. ICE will arrest, detain, cage, traumatize, and tear gas them. Agents will use them as bait, deny their rights, and deport them in the name of defending America.

For the Trump administration, there are two kinds of babies: those, in Trump’s words, with “bad genes” that jeopardize the nation, and those that make America great again.

This double standard is why Vice President J.D. Vance can defend ICE arresting a 5-year-old one day, and then the very next dayclaim that he wants to see “more families and more babies” in the United States. “The mark of barbarism is that we treat babies like inconveniences to be discarded rather than the blessings to cherish that they are,” Vance said at the 2026 March for Life anti-abortion rally.

While the irony is lost on him, he’s right about this much: All babies, regardless of the circumstances of their birth, are blessings. Instead of deporting them, we should cherish them. Instead of denying them citizenship, we should embrace them. No baby is an inconvenience to be discarded. ICE’s actions truly are “the mark of barbarism.”

The Trump administration will continue to preach pro-life politics while jailing babies. They will continue their anti-immigrant crusade with reckless abandon unless we stop them — and, for the sake of the children and all others who can’t defend themselves, we must.