1. United States
2. Ohio
3. Letter

Liam Ramos is so sick in detention that adults who have seen him say he barely eats, mostly sleeps and looks like he is fading in front of them, and we have to get him out now. He is just five years old, on his NINTH DAY locked in a Texas facility, lethargic, depressed and constantly asking for his mom and his classroom back. This is not “processing,” it is a political choice to warehouse a kindergartner until his body and spirit give out. His mother describes a once energetic, social kid who now sounds weak and frightened on the phone, a little boy who can hear the echo of guards’ boots instead of her voice down the hall. Inside, advocates say the air feels heavy, the bathrooms never really feel clean and the food is so gray and processed that kids push it around their trays instead of eating it. No child gets healthier in a cage with fluorescent lights, strangers and inedible meals. This should ring alarm bells because history is full of children who got sick and never walked out of “detention centers.” Anne Frank did not die in a gas chamber but from disease and deprivation in a camp where overcrowding, filth and typhus finished what Nazi bureaucracy began. When a democracy chooses to keep a sick five year old behind barbed wire, it is not defending the border, it is flirting with that same cruel logic that treats some families as expendable and hopes the rest of us look away.