Psalm for Little Liam in the Spider-Man Backpack by Jeff Callaway

Psalm for Little Liam in the Spider-Man Backpack

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

"Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me: for the kingdom of heaven is for such." — Matthew 19:14, Douay-Rheims

They came for him on January the twentieth, the year of Our Lord two thousand and twenty-six, and the sky over Minnesota was the color of old bone.

He was five years old.

He had a Spider-Man backpack.

He had a blue knit bunny hat pulled low over ears that had never heard a sentence begin with you have the right.

He had come home from preschool the way five-year-olds do — small feet on cold pavement, trusting the driveway, trusting the door, trusting that the world had agreed to be safe for someone his size — and they were waiting for him.

Masked.

Federal.

Counting him toward a quota.

Lord God of Abraham, God of the widow and the sojourner, God Who told Your people forty-six times in the Torah — forty-six times — to welcome the stranger because you yourselves were strangers in Egypt —

I am raising this psalm to You not with clean hands and a quiet spirit.

I am raising this psalm with a Texas throat full of gravel and gospel and the kind of holy anger that does not apologize for being born.

Because what I witnessed in that photograph —

a masked agent gripping the handle of a child's Spider-Man backpack like it was evidence, like a five-year-old walking home from pre-K in the cold was a threat that required the full force of a federal operation —

what I witnessed in that photograph was the face of a government that has confused power with righteousness and quotas with justice and cruelty with law.

And I say to You, Lord — You Who wept at the grave of Lazarus, You Who took children into Your arms when the disciples tried to wave them off — You see this.

You see all of this.

His name is Liam Conejo Ramos.

Say it.

Liam.

Not Case Number. Not Alien File. Not Collateral Apprehension. Not the fourth student from Columbia Heights Public Schools detained in two weeks.

Liam.

His mother, Erika, pregnant with his sibling, watched from a window she did not open — not because she did not love her son, God, You know she would have crossed fire for him — but because her husband was on his knees in the driveway begging her to stay inside, knowing what waited for her on the other side of that door.

Another adult outside begged the agents. Let me take the child. Let someone who loves him hold him.

They refused.

They took the boy to the door. School officials — the ones who had taught him his letters, who knew the sound of his laugh — said they used him as bait. That they walked him to the threshold so the door would open, so the pregnant woman inside would step out into the cold and into handcuffs.

They used my boy as bait, Erika said.

Say it again, Lord, so Heaven hears it.

They used a five-year-old child as bait.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph two thousand two hundred and forty-one, says this without equivocation: The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin.

This is not a political opinion.

This is the deposit of faith. This is the teaching of the Church that was built on the bones of martyrs and sealed with the blood of the Apostles.

The Conejo family entered this country through a legal port of entry. They used the CBP One application. They made an appointment. They presented themselves to Customs and Border Protection in December of two thousand and twenty-four and asked for asylum the right way, the legal way, the only way a family from Ecuador fleeing economic destruction and insecurity is supposed to ask.

They did what the system told them to do.

And the system sent masked agents to stand in their driveway and grip their child's backpack on a cold January morning.

Saint John Chrysostom, Doctor of the Church, the golden-mouthed preacher who thundered from the pulpit of Constantinople until the powerful had him exiled twice for telling the truth, wrote that the rich man's excess is the poor man's theft. He wrote that when we pass a hungry man and do not feed him, we have fed the devil. He wrote that no cruelty is accidental when it serves the interests of the powerful.

He would recognize what happened in that Minneapolis driveway.

He would have a name for the policy that sets a target of three thousand arrests a day — not three thousand criminals, not three thousand threats, but three thousand human beings counted like inventory, like units toward a number somebody in an office wrote on a whiteboard.

He would call it what U.S. District Judge Fred Biery called it in a three-page court order that will outlast every press release that rationalized it:

"The ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children."

"The perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty."

"And the rule of law be damned."

That was a federal judge. A man appointed by a Democratic president, citing Thomas Jefferson, quoting Matthew 19:14, signing his name with a judicial finger in the constitutional dike — and beneath his signature, the photograph of a child in a Spider-Man backpack.

Beneath his signature, Jesus wept.

Lord, I have no partisan flag to wave in this psalm.

I have condemned the left when the left abandoned its soul.

I have condemned the right when the right traded its conscience for applause.

I say here, before You and before every soul that reads these words, that this is not a Republican crime or a Democratic crime.

This is a human crime against a child.

This is the crime of any government — of any party, of any era, of any nation — that looks at a five-year-old in a Spider-Man backpack and sees a statistic before it sees a soul.

The Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, said at a press conference that he is himself the father of a five-year-old boy and that such arrests are traumatic — and then said, in the same breath, that just because you're a parent, doesn't mean that you get complete immunity from law enforcement.

Lord God.

The man knows what trauma looks like because he has seen it in the face of his own child at bedtime, in the dark, when the world gets big and frightening —

and he stood at a podium and defended the machine that created it in the face of someone else's child.

There is a word for that in the Church. It is not a gentle word. The Catechism uses it without flinching.

It is called hardness of heart.

Matthew 25. Verse 40. The Douay-Rheims does not soften it:

"Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me."

Liam Conejo Ramos is the least of these.

He was sent thirteen hundred miles from his mother in a federal SUV and then onto a plane to a detention facility in Dilley, Texas — a place advocacy organizations have documented for illness, malnourishment, and a fast-growing population of caged children.

His father told Congressman Joaquin Castro that the boy was not eating well. That he was sleeping too much. That he asked, over and over, for his mother and his classmates.

A five-year-old in a detention cage in Dilley, Texas, asking for his mother.

And on January the twenty-fourth, while Liam was still inside, dozens of detained children in that facility staged a demonstration in the yard.

They chanted libertad.

Freedom.

Children chanting for freedom inside a government facility on American soil while a Republic argued about warrants.

This is the part of the psalm where King David would have called down the consuming fire.

I am not King David, but I carry his tradition, and I will not sanitize this moment with pastoral language and careful hedging.

So hear me, Lord —

Let the men who signed the orders that put a number on a child's head answer for it. Not to me. Not to a court. Not to a news cycle that will forget by Tuesday.

To You.

Let the bureaucrats who built the quota system and the administrators who defended it in press releases and the officials who stood at microphones and called it targeted enforcement —

let them stand before the God Who told His disciples to become like little children to enter the Kingdom, and explain the Spider-Man backpack.

Let the architects of Operation Metro Surge explain to Christ, in the particular judgment, why three thousand arrests a day was more important than one child's face.

Let every Christian who cheered this policy answer for their theology.

Because the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph seventeen hundred and thirty, says that human dignity is the foundation of all Catholic social teaching. And paragraph nineteen hundred and twenty-nine says that social justice is inseparable from respect for the human person.

And there is no respect for the human person in using a child as bait.

He came home from preschool.

That is the whole indictment.

He came home from preschool the way five-year-olds do all over this country, all over this world, every afternoon — backpack bouncing, mind full of whatever pre-K puts in a mind, feet trusting the driveway —

and the Republic was waiting for him with a quota.

The Republic that was founded, in part, on the words: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.

Unalienable.

That means God gave them. That means no warrant — not an administrative warrant, not a judicial warrant, not a warrant signed by the entire executive branch in triplicate — can strip them away.

Judge Biery knew it. He wrote it.

And Jesus wept.

Lord, I am a Texas outlaw who found his way to the foot of the Cross by roads that should have killed him, and I have no authority to demand anything of You except the authority You gave me when You called me Your son.

So I ask this as a son asks a Father.

Let Liam sleep in his own bed tonight.

Let him grow up in a country that has looked at his photograph and been changed by it.

Let the image of a five-year-old in a Spider-Man backpack surrounded by masked federal agents be branded onto the conscience of this nation the way the photographs of Birmingham were branded — not as a relic of something we merely witnessed, but as evidence of something we refused to normalize.

And let the Church — the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church — speak with the voice of every Doctor and Saint and martyr who ever told the powerful the truth they did not want to hear.

Let her speak now.

The children of the earth are waiting.

~Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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