“The United States of Amnesia and Chains: The Deportation of a Child”

As of this column, somewhere in Virginia, a 13-year-old boy has been sitting in a cage for four days—and counting.

The United States federal government locked him up and carted him away from his Massachusetts home on October 10th, like a sack of contraband, with all the care and dignity this nation now reserves for its brown-skinned children.

The teenage boy committed no crime. He was simply noticed.

The Trump regime in Washington—whose orange-hued standard-bearer would struggle to spell “due process” without a teleprompter—now presides over a deportation machine so obscene, so gleefully inhuman, it sweeps children into vans and calls it justice.

In this case, the boy had an interaction with local police (not even an arrest), and ICE, ever hungry for fresh meat, then pounced like a pack of jackals.

We are told this is “law enforcement.” It is actually state-sponsored kidnapping, with badges.

This was not a cartel boss plucked from his mansion. This was a 13-year old, somebody’s child.

Taken from his family, removed from his junior high school, and driven hundreds of miles to rot in a juvenile facility. He is not a flight risk. He is not a threat.

He is just brown, unprotected, and unlucky enough to live under a Trump administration that believes cruelty is next to godliness.

This grotesque spectacle comes amidst what the Trump administration’s ICE agents have referred to as “Operation Midway Blitz.” A title so pompous it could’ve been cooked up by a failed screenwriter on on a meth binge.

What it actually is, of course, is a dragnet focused mostly on Illinois, but also reaching into other states.

It is designed to terrorize immigrant communities into silence and retreat. It is bureaucracy gone feral, steered by the moral sensibilities of a hungry and crazed wild dog.

In the evangelical fervor of Trumpism 2.0—where the Constitution is weaponized and compassion is considered treasonous—there is no room for nuance. To Trump Gestapo agents and sycophants, a brown child is not a human being, but a potential deportation statistic.

A headline. And a warning.

And the system obliges.

Judges must now force ICE to explain why, exactly, they’re imprisoning a seventh grader with no criminal charges, no family, and no say. A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to give the boy a bail hearing in front of an immigration judge by October 17.

Meanwhile, the boy sits in a cell—likely bewildered, probably afraid, and certainly learning firsthand what the Land of the Free does to its uninvited guests.

This is not immigration policy. This is moral necrosis.

A government that terrorizes children for political optics is not a republic—it is a carnival of goons dressed in flag pins, administering tyranny under fluorescent lights.

Every official who signed the paperwork to abduct this boy should be publicly named, shamed, and chased from public life.

Every uniformed coward who placed him in a van should have to answer to the American public—though I suspect most are too gutless to identify themselves, never mind take of their ICE face coverings and masks.

Let’s dump the euphemisms. What happened here was not “detention.”

It was abduction under color of law. If a private citizen did it, it would be a federal felony. But when the Trump administration does it, it’s just another line item in a Stephen Miller spreadsheet.

After days of silence, a spokesperson for ICE claimed the 13-year old boy in question had a firearm in his possession and a record of breaking and entering.

Even if that’s true, (a big “if” given this ICE spokesperson’s record of dishonesty) legal experts say that still doesn’t justify hauling this child to a detention facility 500 miles away.

Some MAGA types will argue, as they always do, that “laws must be enforced.” And that this boy’s Brazilian parents should not have come to the United States years ago “illegally.”

But law without humanity is no law at all—it is merely the outward shell of justice, emptied of all meaning.

Once upon a time in the United States, slavery was legal. The Trail of Tears was legal. The internment of Japanese-American families was legal.

Legality, as history shows us, is often just the camouflage worn by evil when it wishes to appear respectable.

There are still those MAGAs who will shrug at this and will find reasons to excuse Trump’s ICE reign of terror.

To them I say: may you someday be judged not by your good fortune, but by your worst hour. And may you receive exactly the mercy you were willing to extend to this boy.

Because that is what we are truly talking about here—not law, nor policy, nor border security. We are talking about mercy. About decency.

About the most basic test of civilization: how it treats the defenseless.

And today, America has failed that test—again—with boots on, teeth bared, and a 13-year old child in chains.