What are the Trump administration’s policies about detaining immigrant children?

The detention of Liam Conejo Ramos, age five, marks the turbocharging of a policy discontinued five years ago

This week, ICE’s detention of a five-year-old boy wearing a Spider Man backpack in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights quickly became a defining image of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration enforcement. Furious critics, including many local politicians, seized on Liam Ramos’s ordeal as glaring evidence that Trump’s mass deportation campaign has little to do with crime and a lot to do with terrorizing children and their families.

A homeland security spokesperson said ICE officers took the boy into custody only after an attempt to arrest his father led to a foot chase. But Liam Ramos’s detention is not an isolated incident. It’s part of a uniquely aggressive push to detain more unauthorized immigrant families, a turbocharging of a policy discontinued five years ago.