Photo by Simran Sood on Unsplash
I can’t get the image of him in his little light blue beanie out of my head. His name is Liam. He’s five years old. He looks just like one of my Mexican cousins, and I am ashamed of us.
Liam had just come home from preschool on Tuesday when armed, masked federal agents escorted him to a vehicle in his own driveway in Minneapolis.
We should probably sit with that image in our heads before we say anything else.
A child. Five years old. Escorted from his home by strangers in masks.
He’s five years old, for God’s sake.
And now Ramah is under siege, and Rachel is crying again.
Matthew’s Gospel features her, right there in the middle of the Christmas story we just finished telling. The thing is, we can’t get to the Magi’s gifts or the flight to Egypt without passing through Ramah, where her voice pierces the celebration: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”
She. refused. to. be. consoled.
That refusal is its own kind of witness. In a world quick to explain, to move on, to assure us that all this violence is complicated or necessary or somehow legal, Rachel won’t take her medicine like a good girl. She spits it out. She keeps weeping.
The rationalizations hang in the air longer and more intensely than tear gas.
They’re telling us Liam was “abandoned.” That his father ran. That ICE had no choice. (“Can you not understand how difficult our jobs are? What about us ICE officers and our feelings?”)
But the school superintendent says an adult in the home begged to take the child, only to be refused. And even if we take ICE at their word—which, I mean, at this point, why should we take them at their word about anything—here’s what I can’t get past: Why were armed, masked agents in that driveway at all?
Why?
Why does a family that came to the border legally, applied for asylum, and did “every single thing the right way” get met with the machinery of state terror outside their home?
Why?
“Abandoned” is the story that the leg-breakers tell when they need somebody else to blame. Rachel doesn’t buy it. Neither do I.
And Liam Conejo Ramos, the little boy with the light blue beanie, isn’t the only one, either. In the same school district, a 10-year-old girl was taken with her mother two weeks ago. She’s in a Texas detention center now. A 17-year-old was pulled from a car on the way to school. No parents present. Another 17-year-old and her mother were taken from their apartment.
Rachel knows their names even when we don’t.
The vice president asked, “What are they supposed to do? Let a 5-year-old freeze to death?”
Seriously? That question starts the clock on this whole thing a bit late, doesn’t it? I mean, it already assumes armed agents had to be in that driveway to create the kind of terror that made a father bolt in the first place. It magically transforms their intended cruelty into a “rescue,” and they’re puzzled about why we’re not grateful.
Herod had his reasons, too. He was protecting something, and sent his goons to do what goons do. But Matthew refuses to let us hear Away in a Manger without first hearing the sound from Ramah, and all the mothers who paid the price for the empire’s fear with their babies. Apparently, “pro-life” and “pro-family” were just slogans in Ramah, too.
We just lit the Advent candles. We just sang about a refugee child born to anxious parents far from home. And now, in the same city where Renée Good died on a snowy street, children are being escorted to vehicles by masked strangers.
I don’t have a program today. I don’t have action steps. Maybe tomorrow. But right now, I think the most faithful thing we can do is, like Rachel, refuse to be consoled. Refuse to let this become normal. Refuse to be talked out of our grief by people who need us to move on before we’ve had a reckoning with what’s happening.
Rachel’s weeping isn’t the end of the story. Jeremiah 31 goes on to speak of restoration, of children returning. But Matthew doesn’t quote that part. He leaves us with the weeping.
Maybe it’s because we don’t get to skip to hope until we’ve refused to fall prey to the lies.
Liam is five years old. As far as I know, he’s still in a detention facility in Texas with his father right now.
And Rachel is still crying. I hope enough of us are, too.
I can’t get the image of that little boy out of my head. I hope none of us can