When Democracy Learns to Speak the Language of War, Children Become Collateral Damage

How war language is being used to collapse the distance between immigration enforcement, political retaliation, and the criminalization of dissent…

“The curse of empathy is to see yourself in every death,
and to see the child hidden in the body of every corpse.” —John D. MacDonald

A five year old child — Liam Conejo Ramos — was taken from his home and sent hundreds of miles away to a detention facility for-profit concentration camp in Texas. He was never accused of a crime, didn’t cross our southern border alone, and is so young he barely understands what’s happening to him; odds are he has no understanding of why he’s being treated with such brutality.

Nobody told little Liam about Tom Homan and Stephen Miller being so eager to punish brown-skinned immigrants, delighting in their pain, rationalizing it as a “deterrent” to “illegal immigration” that’s “poisoning the blood” of white America, as Donald Trump himself pointed out on the election trail.

He’s confined to a cell in a cold, concrete facility where the lights are kept on day and night.

There’s no school for him to attend, nobody to hold him and reassure him, his medical care limited, and the food so bad he’s struggled to keep it down.

His lawyer says his health has declined while in government custody.

But this isn’t really about immigration; it’s about power. And how stories and language facilitate the exercise or restraint of that power. It’s about what happens when a nation starts talking about its own people (and the people seeking refuge here) as if they’re enemies in a war.

As Radley Balko noted on BlueSky:

“I’m coming to Boston and I’m bringing hell with me.” — Tom Homan in February
”Do I expect violence to escalate? Absolutely.” — Tom Homan in March
”I actually thought about getting up and throwing that man a beating right there in the middle of the room…” — Tom Homan in July, referring to a Democratic congressman who’d offended him.

This week, during a press briefing, Homan again used the language of war to describe immigration enforcement against brown-skinned people, and resistance from blue states. Words like “fight,” “battle,” “theater,” and “invasion.” When asked how many of his masked goons were still in Minneapolis, he said:

“3,000. There’s been some rotations. Another thing I witnessed when I came here, I’ll share this with you, I’ve met a lot of people, they’ve been in theater, some of them have been in theater for eight months. So there’s going to be rotations of personnel.” [emphasis added]

“In theater”?!? That’s how Eisenhower used to talk about taking on the Nazis in Europe. That’s not how law enforcement talks; it’s how invading armies speak of invading the territory of their enemies.

That’s no accident by Homan, nor is it the mere use of “colorful phrasing.” When he uses that kind of language, he does it explicitly as a political weapon. And history tells us exactly where that leads.

Nixon taught us this lesson when he declared a “war on drugs” and then used it to spy on and persecute antiwar and civil rights leaders: the language of warfare changes the moral rules.

Dan Baum chronicled how it works — and why — in 1994 when he interviewed Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, about Nixon’s “war on drugs” effort, and Ehrlichman said:

“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying?

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

”We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

In war, suffering is normal. In war, collateral damage is unfortunate but socially acceptable. In war, the people caught in the middle stop being human beings with rights and start being obstacles to be managed, broken, or, as in the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, killed dead.

Five-year-old Liam, one of hundreds of children Trump and Homan have shipped off to Texas, is now living inside the consequences of that shift in language, that “war” rhetorical frame.

This is absolutely unnecessary.

The United States has laws for immigration enforcement. We have courts, due process and longstanding legal standards for the treatment of children in government custody.

I recently wrote about a friend who was deported during Obama’s administration by ICE agents in windbreakers with badges and ID, who politely gave him a month to get his affairs in order. Obama actually deported more people than Trump in any given year, including 2025, and nobody had their window smashed in or suffered 10 bullets in the back.

We’ve been enforcing immigration laws since 1924 when the Border Patrol was created, and never before have we needed an armed force with a larger budget than the FBI or the Marine Corps to pull it off. And we’ve deported a hell of a lot of people:

Syracuse University’s TRAC data attribute more than 3.1 million deportations over Obama’s eight years, with a peak of over 407,000 removals in FY 2012.​
By comparison, the first Trump administration (2017–2020) carried out fewer than about 932,000 deportations total, peaking at roughly 269,000 removals in 2019.​
After Trump’s return to office last year, ICE reported about 290,000 removals through late 2025 and mid‑FY 2026, which is still far below Obama’s cumulative total.​

In other words, Obama deported more “illegals” than Trump in any year, including last year with ICE going full force, and he did it with courtesy and the law. No masks or guns, no people being shot, no cars being chased and rammed.

As you can see, today’s ICE violence is more about the skin color of the deportees than about enforcing the immigration laws or ridding the country of undocumented persons.

None of those systems require keeping children locked in facilities where the lights never go off. None of them require denying a child a hug or an education. None of them require the conditions that lawyers and doctors have repeatedly warned cause physical and psychological harm to both children and adults but that Miller, Homan, Trump, et al insist on using.

The conditions of this child’s confinement aren’t a bureaucratic accident; they’re the predictable result of a system designed around the use of violence, isolation, terror, and pain directed at people with nonwhite skin as a brutal way of enforcing “deterrence” to Make America White Again.

A system designed to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to private prison operators on the assumption they’ll recycle a good chunk of that back as campaign contributions and “gifts” to Republican politicians.

For years now, Republicans and rightwing media figures have described immigrants as if they’re part of an invasion. A “flood,” or a “threat” to be repelled. When leaders and the press talk about human beings that way, people find it easier to treat them as less than human. It becomes easier to cut corners, ignore the suffering, and to look away when a child gets sick or even dies behind locked doors.

And — like Nixon’s war on drugs — it doesn’t stop with migrants.

Trump’s war on immigrants is as phony as was Nixon’s War on Drugs. Blacks are again the victims, but now instead of the young white men and women who took LBJ and Nixon down, he chose brown-skinned children. This is a sickness.

When that same war language is turned against Blue states, states that disagree with grandstanding politicians and brutal, inhumane agendas, something even more dangerous happens. Political disagreement becomes treason. Federalism becomes defiance. And America itself starts to look like a battlefield.

If we accept that it’s normal to treat migrant children this way because we’re at war during an invasion, what else becomes acceptable? What happens the next time a governor refuses to comply with a federal directive? What happens the next time protesters take to the streets, or a reporter chronicles a demonstration? Who gets labeled the enemy then?

This is not hypothetical. We don’t even have to reach back to the 1930s in Europe; we’ve seen this movie before right here in America.

The “war on drugs” gave us mass incarceration and militarized police. The “war on terror” gave us torture, secret prisons, and ongoing surveillance.

Every time we let wartime language redefine our domestic policy debates, the result is the same. Rights shrink, power concentrates, and dissidents, members of the media, and the most vulnerable alike pay the price.

Children are supposed to be the line we never cross: they’re the moral stress test of any society. If a system refuses to protect its children, it isn’t a system worth defending.

Little Liam locked up in that Texas facility behind concrete and razor wire is not a symbol: he’s a child who should be in school. Who should be sleeping in his own bed at home, tucked in by a loving parent. Who should be held by people who see him as a human being, not a person with brown skin to be exploited to satisfy the racist blood-lust of the MAGA base.

Supporters of these policies will say that enforcement is necessary. That the private, for-profit facilities they use meet legal standards. That Homan’s rhetoric is just “tough talk.”

But it’s all bullshit: enforcement doesn’t require cruelty. Following the law doesn’t require dehumanization. And words are never just words when they come from people with power.

Language shapes policy. Policy shapes systems. Systems shape societies.

That’s the through line from Homan’s bizarre press briefing filled with war talk to a small child lying awake hungry, shivering, and crying under fluorescent lights.

A nation that truly believes in liberty and justice doesn’t have to declare war on children to enforce its laws. It doesn’t need to turn sovereign states into enemies in order to govern effectively, or imprison reporters for doing their jobs. And it doesn’t need to abandon its humanity to keep its citizens safe.

The question this regime confronts us with isn’t one of how to enforce or not enforce immigration law; it’s what kind of society we’re willing to become in the process.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Bring Home Liam Ramos”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink is now available in bookstores nationwide.
You can follow me on Blue Sky here: https://bsky.app/profile/thomhartmann.bsky.social