How to terrify a child - Abduct or kill their parent, preferably while acting as threatening as possible
By: Tom Cloyd - 8 minute read
(Published: 2026-01-39; reviewed: 2026-01-30:1749 Pacific Time (USA))
Photo by Lucas van Oort on Unsplash
Her eyes still watch me, though years have passed.
She knew.
I had come to take her mommy away.
Like so many other times, like so many other strangers.
She was just 5, her mother 25, and 26 times her mother had disappeared, removed to a hospital because of her mental instability. The little girl had seen it happen too many times. So she knew why I was there.
And I didn’t have a visible weapon, or 8 armed buddies backing me up. And I certainly didn’t have a mask. It didn’t matter. She knew.
And she was wrong. I had come to her home to stabilize her mommy so that another hospitalization would not happen. I succeeded, that time. But the little girl’s dark eyes never left me for a moment, while I was there.
I remember thinking, “How can she possibly grow up safe in this world, having seen what she’s seen?”
It only takes one time, one parental abandonment, or abduction, or whatever, to do the damage. A parent is a child’s umbilical cord to the world, and they know this in their bones. No one can really take that parent’s place.
Psychologist Nancy Burke1 joins me in worrying about the children seeing their parent abducted by masked, armed gangs of men bristling with weapons. As she points out, it’s also frightening seeing, in one’s own neighborhood, or on television news, or in news photos, the parents of other children being abducted by armed, masked men. It doesn’t take much to frighten a child.
Or to put them in utterly untenable situations: “The 9-year-old paralyzed in a grocery store aisle, unable to tell parsley from cilantro, whose parents can no longer risk leaving home to shop. The 7-year-old who refuses to go to school. He’s afraid of the stranger who escorts him each morning while his mother stays hidden inside. The 6-year-old who tells her brother, ‘We have to be good or ICE will get us.’ These children are not living in a war zone overseas. This is Chicago. This is Minneapolis.”1 ICE can leave, but their threat doesn’t, and the children carry it everywhere.
Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE — an arm of the Department of Homeland Security) has been terrorizing children for years. In the spring of 2018, ICE separated “approximately 2,000 children from their parents…as they approached the U.S. border. Children and parents were placed in separate facilities as they were being processed and were not told when or how they would be reunited.”2 I was horrified at the time, and I’m still horrified. How could this sort of thing ever be considered acceptable?
Exactly how ignorant, how callous, does one have to be not to know or care that “…overwhelming scientific evidence [shows] that separation between children and parents, except in cases where there is evidence of maltreatment, is harmful to the development of children, families, and communities. Family separations occurring in the presence of other stressors, such as detention or natural disaster, only add to their negative effects.”2
This is not news. It’s just an inconvenient truth when one wishes to launch ethnic cleansing without regard for “collateral damage,” as the military conveniently calls it.
So what? This: “What U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is doing to immigrant families is not simply a policy failure. It is a large-scale state-inflicted trauma on children. The effects will shape their mental health, their relationships, and their sense of safety for decades to come.”
“As parents are detained, threatened, or disappeared, children absorb the violence in ways that are profound but often invisible. This is true even if a child’s own parents are safe. The terror looms: What they see on the news is not a movie or a bad dream. It could happen to them. Their suffering is overlooked not because it is minor but because it is unbearable to witness.”2
Considering children morally insignificant is nothing new. In the Biblical Book of Genesis, circumstantially dated by multiple sources as coming from the first or second millennium CE, the story is told of Abraham’s encounter with 3 strangers, eventually identified as God and two angels.3 They are on a mission when Abraham encounters them. God considers the situation: “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do…?” He decides not to, revealing then that he is investigating the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah, due to persistent rumors of their sinfulness. Apparently Abraham grasps that the plan is to destroy the cities if they are found to be sinful, so he begins a bargaining process, urging God to be forgiving, as surely not everyone in the towns is sinful. God finally agrees that if 10 righteous people are found, the towns will be spared.
Note that “God’s mercy” is nowhere to be found in this story, until Abraham provokes it.
There are two additional significant elements to the story, one of which is never a part of the frequent retelling one encounters.
The two angels-in-human-form come to the house of Abraham’s nephew Lot, on the edge of Sodom.4 Lot persuades them to spend the night there, and, shortly after, the house is surrounded by men from Sodom, demanding that the two strangers be brought out to them. Apparently fearing for their safety, he attempts to strike a bargain with the angry men: “Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.” The men refuse the offer, so the strangers (angels) strike the men blind.
So, compared to the welfare of the two strangers, the welfare of his two virgin daughters is nothing.
Finally, the towns are found to have less than the 10 righteous men (women are not mentioned) of Abraham’s bargain, so they are destroyed.
Are we to believe, in this tale, that the children of the cities were also found sinful? More probably, following the example of Lot and his daughters, they simply were not deemed worthy of the least compassion.
Why do we allow this abuse? More videos than I can count are showing up documenting unnecessary violence by ICE and Border Patrol officers against those they engage with. Children are too often witness to this.
One video shows a woman pleading with ICE officials as they take her husband away. They respond by pushing against a wall, then violently slamming to the floor, while her terrified child daughter screams. The incident was witnessed by two New York officials.5
Another video documents the late November 2025 break-in of ICE into a Queens, N.Y., home. The occupants claim the agents did not identify themselves or show a warrant. The group, some wearing masks, showed up in riot gear, wearing marks, entered the home after breaking down its door, entered the bedroom of a woman with a baby in her bed, swearing at her and threatening her. It was reported that firearms were pointed at the woman and she was forcibly removed from the bed. The New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) stated that the agents had the wrong address.6
It has been documented that an internal ICE memo states that officials do not need a judicial warrant to force entry into a residence; an “administrative warrant” is sufficient, the memo states. A department spokesman confirmed this.7
However, “John Sandweg, who served as an acting director of ICE under President Barack Obama, said the practice of entering homes without a judicial warrant would be a significant departure from decades-old ICE policies and procedures.7
The NY Times has collected and published multiple vidios documenting ICE violence against non-threatening individuals, protesters, and restrained and immobilized individuals, including both men and women. In some cases, their families were present.7
Domestic terrorists are indeed among us, and this is nothing new. What do you think the Jim Crow era in the American South (and elsewhere - the Ku Klux Klan was in Portland, Oregon, at one time!) - was like for African American families? Black families were terrorized for generations, and our country ignored it for the most part. And now teachers are condemned and ostracized for trying to teach this history.
ICE doesn’t lynch people; they just send them to countries where they have no support whatsoever, not even a common language. Our government. Our tax dollars.
And no one minds the children, who watch and will remember.
References ^
Bouza, J., et al. (2018, June 20). The Science is Clear: Separating Families has Long-term Damaging Psychological and Health Consequences for Children, Families, and Communities | Society for Research in Child Development SRCD. https://www.srcd.org/briefs-fact-sheets/the-science-is-clear
Burke, N. (2026, January 29). I’m a Psychoanalyst. I Know the Damage ICE Is Doing to Our Children—And How Long It Will Last. Slate. https://slate.com/technology/2026/01/psychoanalyst-ice-children-bunny-hat-chicago-minneapolis.html
Gustafson, S. (2025-11-19). Video shows ICE raid of Queens home: ‘I have my baby, no!’ https://www.msn.com/en-us/society-culture-and-history/human-rights/video-shows-ice-raid-of-queens-home-i-have-my-baby-no/ar-AA1QL6rE
oremus Bible Browser: Genesis 18. (n.d.). Retrieved January 30, 2026, from https://bible.oremus.org/?passage=Genesis%2019:1&version=nrsv
oremus Bible Browser: Genesis 19. (n.d.). Retrieved January 30, 2026, from https://bible.oremus.org/?passage=Genesis%2019:1&version=nrsv
Shao, E., Lajka, A., Rosales, H., & Saha, R. (2026, January 24). Videos Showing Aggressive ICE Tactics in Minnesota Fuel a Backlash. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/01/24/us/minnesota-ice-violence-tactics-videos.html
Tripathi, P. (2025-09-26). ICE Agent Tackles Woman to the Floor in NYC Immigration Office After Her Husband’s Detention. Retrieved January 30, 2026, from https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ice-agent-tackles-woman-to-the-floor-in-nyc-immigration-office-after-her-husband-s-detention/ar-AA1NlQjY
Notes ^
☀ ☀ ☀