Liam Ramos, a 5-year old pre-schooler in a Minneapolis suburb, snatched from in front of his home by ICE Agents; Tom Suozzi, as a young boy, son of an Italian immigrant, raised in wealth & privilege.

Steve Villano

Jan 24, 2026

(Liam Ramos, Age 5, (top, dark shirt), son of a legal immigrant, inhumanely taken by ICE agents from in-front of his suburban Minneapolis home; Congressman Tom Suozzi (bottom, tan suit and red tie), son of a legal immigrant, raised in wealth and privilege in a NYC suburb.)

This is a story of two lives, separated by nearly 60 years, millions of dollars, and the accident of birth and background.

One life belongs to Liam Conejo Ramos. He is 5 years old. He was a pre-schooler at Valley View Elementary School in a Minneapolis, Minnesota suburb when ICE agents forcibly took him away from his home this week, while he was wearing his Spider Man back-pack, and his blue bunny ski hat. His middle name is “Conejo” which means bunny in Spanish.

Liam’s pregnant mother was just a few feet away from him, inside their home, when Liam and his father, Adrian, a legal immigrant from Ecuador, were snatched from their driveway and shipped off to a Texas ICE detention facility this week. The student population at Liam’s Pre-School is 50% Latino, and, according to school officials, three other of his young classmates were ripped away from their families by ICE Agents during the past year.

Liam’s father, did have a connection to Texas, where, according to a CNN story by Holly Yan, reported on Friday, January 23, “His family came to the US legally from Equador and presented themselves to the Border Office in Texas, in December, 2024, to apply for asylum.” Little Liam’s family was here in the United States legally, having followed every rule, and done everything immigrants applying for asylum in the US are supposed to do.

The other story belongs to another son of a legal immigrant, Congressman Thomas Suozzi of Glen Cove, Long Island, N.Y. Suozzi, now 63, was born in the small city of Glen Cove, a rare community that welcomed immigrants.

His father, Joseph A. Suozzi, immigrated to the United States from Ruvo del Monte, Italy, during a time of severe anti-Italian sentiment, led by the KKK, which drafted the xenophobic Immigration Act of 1924, the model for the Trump/Stephen Miller anti-immigration policy. During the 1920’s, with the Klan at the peak of its political power, a swath of US public sentiment at that time, considered Italians, especially those from Southern Italy, to be too dark-skinned to be “real Americans.” Since he was a child, it was Joseph Suozzi’s wish to be a “real American,” a sentiment Tom Suozzi discovered his father expressed early in his life.

Joseph Suozzi, Tom’s father, attended elementary and high school in Glen Cove, served in World War II where he became a war hero, and graduated from Harvard Law School. He returned to Glen Cove, where he was elected to a local judgeship, served as Mayor for four years, was elected to a 14-year term on the New York State Supreme Court, appointed to an Associate Justice Appellate Division judgeship by Governor Hugh Carey, and then founded one of the most prestigious, and most successful law firms on Long Island, with other former judges and political leaders.

Tom Suozzi, born in 1962 , one year after his father was elected to his first Statewide judgeship, never had to worry about being ripped away from his mother, and sent to a detention center for swarthy-looking Italian-Americans. He was the youngest of 5 Suozzi children and was comfortably swaddled into his family’s political and legal cocoon. Not only did Tom’s father serve as Mayor of Glen Cove, so did his Uncle Vincent, and his cousin Ralph. So too, did young Tom Suozzi, elected to his first term as Mayor only 5 years out of Fordham Law School.

Liam Ramos’ father was not a lawyer, nor a judge, nor had he yet had the opportunity to serve in an American war. Only a legal resident of the US for one year who was “following the process to secure safety for his family from persecution in their home country,” according lawyer Marc Prokosch, Liam’s father didn’t have the chance Joseph Suozzi had, to establish himself or his family in a community in the United States.

The Ramos family legally entered the United States one month before Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term as President, promising to deport one million “illegal” immigrants—only the most dangerous, he said—during the first year of his second term. Liam’s father, Adrian, while not a judge, nor a Mayor, had no criminal record. Liam, an innocent five-year old, was not a danger to anyone, and was beloved in school.

During the first year of Trump’s second term of office, The Marshall Project, a non-profit organization which keeps detailed records of ICE’s actions, reported that more than 3,800 children were detailed by ICE, including 20 infants. Liam Ramos was another non-white child snatched from the driveway of his family’s suburban Minneapolis home, along with his father, a legal immigrant.

CNN’s reported on Friday, January 23, that the Ramos’ family pastor Sergio Amezcua ,who has been helping the family, was on the scene and witnessed that the “ICE agent was trying to use the baby to get his mother to come out of the house, but the neighbors advised her not to do it.” Neighbors were advising Liam’s mother to stay inside the home, where ICE agents could not enter without a judicial warrant for her arrest. Reading that, I thought of the scenes in the brilliant,16-time Academy Award nominated film “Sinners,” where the Vampires—all White Supremacists—couldn’t enter a building full of Black people unless they were invited.

Like the Ramos’, the Suozzi’s were people of strong faith. Devout Catholics, they sent their youngest son Tom to Chaminade High School, an expensive private Catholic School in Mineola, Long Island. From Chaminade, Tom Suozzi stayed within the Catholic education system, attending Boston College for his undergraduate degree, and Fordham University Law School. Both are stellar Jesuit colleges.

Last year, Suozzi was part of an official delegation to the funeral of Pope Francis, the first Jesuit Pope in the long history of the Catholic Church. He met Pope Francis two years earlier, when Francis, a passionate advocate for migrants and refugees who said that “driving away migrants is a grave sin,” gave Suozzi a zuccetto, a white, circular skull cap, like a yarmulke, which is a symbol of humility and faith. Francis had, himself, worn the cap.

In a tribute to Pope Francis after his death, Suozzi said: “Thank God for Pope Francis. He always reminded us that the poor, the homeless, and migrants are all made in God’s divine creation.” Suozzi said that less than one year ago.

In a CNN Interview with Anderson Cooper during Pope Francis’ funeral, Suozzi retold his family’s own history of immigration:

COOPER: “And your dad came from Italy.

SUOZZI: My father was born in Italy, came to the United States as a young boy, lived a great American success story and —I define my whole look of America through the lens of the American Dream and immigrants. It’s painful for me that immigration has become such a tough issue.

COOPER: Well, especially when you think about the way Italians were treated back then when your father came.

SUOZZI: Oh yes. And my father, even after he graduated from Harvard, couldn’t get a job at a law firm because Italians were not liked because they had fought with the Germans during World War II. And that and the mafia, and you couldn’t get to first base….And then he went back to our hometown, teamed up with another Italian guy, and ran for city court judge, and at 28 years old, became the youngest judge in the history of New York State.”

With that kind of rich, immigrant family background and a compelling story of how an Italian-American outcast like Joseph Suozzi seized the moment to make it in a country which symbolized opportunity—overcoming virulent prejudice and hatred—the link between the experience of the Suozzi family and the Ramos family would appear to be unbreakable. If anyone could understand the plight of immigrants facing hostility and discrimination, the Suozzi family certainly could.

Couple that with Tom Suozzi’s strong Catholic faith, and his profoundly moving personal meetings with the two most powerful pro-immigrant Popes of the last century—Francis and Leo XIV—it’s astonishing that Tom Suozzi is not a champion of the rights of immigrants and migrants, considering that Pope Francis declared it to be a “grave sin” for Christians to drive away migrants—precisely what the Trump Administration is presently doing in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and in towns and cities across the country.

Suozzi himself, as Mayor of Glenn Cove in 1994, took concrete actions to integrate Glen Cove’s immigrant workers into his community that was so good to his family:

“I was the young Mayor of Glen Cove in 1994, and we had dayworkers from Central and South America gathering on a street corner, seeking work. The community was divided…and I ended up setting up the first day-worker spot on the East Coast—and those same guys that were on the street corner NOW have their own businesses, they own their own homes and there children go to school with my children…THAT’s the American Dream.”

Years later during in first term in Congress, Tom Suozzi took to the House floor on January 18, 2018 and gave a speech worthy of Pope Francis’s advocacy for immigrants:

“We have to remember that all immigrants, whether documented or undocumented, are human beings, and they are entitled to be treated with human respect and dignity…If we really want to make America great again, we have to reclaim that mantle as the beacon of hope.”

With that kind of immigrant family history, deep Catholic faith, and public record, it makes Suozzi’s latest crassly political, immigration-crushing actions perplexing, since he is actively denying what he knows to be true, and has lived.

A Newsday story by Billy House this week headlined “Long Island Dems Back DHS Bill,” underscores the point. On the one hand, in voting for the appropriations bill that increased ICE funding by billions of dollars without extracting citizen safeguards against ICE’s cruel and illegal actions, Suozzi declared:

“There is no question that ICE has overstepped its bounds. ICE’s current confrontational enforcement posture in Minnesota, previously in Chicago and elsewhere across the country is escalatory and inappropriate.”

Yet, Suozzi, contradicting everything he learned about the law at Fordham Law School and from a brilliant, compassionate legal mind like his father Joseph; everything he learned from superb social justice mentors like Jack English and Eugene Nickerson; and all of the lessons on humanity taught directly to him by Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV, Suozzi still voted in favor of the legislation that kept funding the Trump Administration’s unconscionable and unaccountable War against Immigrants. I cannot imagine that Pope Leo, whom Suozzi met and praised last year, would buy Suozzi’s lame argument that he voted to “avoid a government shutdown,” while voting to continue a State-sponsored assault upon migrants, and people of color.

Suozzi’s vote, and the votes of six other of his Democratic colleagues, provided the margin of difference for the legislation to pass. Had those seven Democrats—over whom Suozzi has some sway because of his leadership in the “Problem Solvers Caucus,” voted “NO” on the Trump-favored appropriate bill, the unlimited license for ICE to mistreat immigrants and American citizens would have been defeated 214-213.

Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in Congress, opposed the bill, demanding broad cuts and legal guardrails on ICE, in the aftermath of the Renee Good murder by an ICE Agent. Good, not a migrant, was an American citizen and mother of three, who was following the moral example set by Popes Francis and Leo, in objecting to the mistreating of migrants. In announcing his opposition to providing billions of dollars more to ICE—without accountability for their inhumane, illegal actions—Jeffries noted that he would not “support the lawless behavior of ICE to use taxpayer dollars to brutalize American citizens.”

That legal and fiscal rationale didn’t seem to matter to Tom Suozzi, who is both a lawyer and a CPA, with a present net worth of approximately $13 million.

If he was willing to forget the moral power of the white skull cap, the zuccetti, that Pope Francis wore, and then gave to him, and the words Pope Francis spoke that “mistreating migrants was a grave sin,” Tom Suozzi demonstrated to many of us who have know him for years, that something much darker is at work within him and has driven the Long Island Congressman to abandon what he knows to be true about his faith, his family history, and his commitment to the Rule of Law.

But redemption is possible, for someone like Suozzi who was raised on the religious concept of forgiveness. He can do penance by fighting for the freedom of 5-year old Liam Ramos and his legal, immigrant father from ICE’s deadly grip, and perhaps, setting up a scholarship fund for other migrant children like Liam. He can do that in memory of his father, a legal immigrant. He can reign in the Stephen Miller/Trump/DHS/ICE reign of terror aimed at the “grave sin” of driving away migrants, a moral crime of which Pope Francis eloquently warned.

And, Suozzi can put into action the words of Pope Leo XIV, whom he also had the privilege of meeting. On November 1, 2025—less than three months ago— Pope Leo held a mass in Rome, where, after quoting the Gospel from Matthew:25 of ‘feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, and clothing the naked,” the Pope added his own interpretation of Matthew’s great humanity:

“Jesus says very clearly that at the end of the world, we’re going to be asked, ‘How did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and welcome him or not. . .There’s a deep reflection that needs to be made in terms of what’s happening with how immigrants in the U.S. are being treated today.”

The question for Tom Suozzi, is whether or not he’s listening to what Pope Leo said, whether he cares about the towering teachings on migrants and humanity from both Popes Leo and Francis—each of whom he met— and if he has the courage to act on a moral imperative, far, far larger than himself, or his own political career.