THE BAIT BOY HOAX

Opinion - Clickbait: How the left created yet another false story to trigger outrage

 

 

By Jonathan Turley

 

The Hill

Jan 24, 2026

 

 

School officials claim ICE agents then used the boy 'as bait' to lure other migrants

 

“I am outraged, and you should be too.” That message from former Vice President Kamala Harris has been a virtual mantra of the Democratic Party for years. For several months, this has meant decrying the imminent death of democracy and our descent into authoritarianism. Now, it means falsely claiming that ICE “kidnapped” or “arrested” a five-year-old boy and used him as “bait” to catch someone.

The “bait boy” story is actually the latest clickbait hoax in our “Age of Rage.”

Five years ago, Harris was expressing the same call for outrage over the false story of Border agents whipping migrants in Texas. She expressed disgust over the “horrible and deeply troubling” scenes reminiscent of the slave period.

It quickly became a pile-on, with the media spreading the false account. Reps. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) described the incident as “worse than what we witnessed in slavery” and “white supremacist behavior.”

President Biden threw the agents under the bus, publicly expressing disgust over their conduct and promising punishment before any investigation had occurred: “It was horrible what to see, as you saw — to see people treated like they did: horses nearly running them over and people being strapped. It’s outrageous. I promise you, those people will pay.”

The media continued to repeat the false account, even as many of us pointed out that the publicly available video showed the story was demonstrably untrue. It did not matter. It fit the narrative on the left, and the agents were left under investigation for more than a year before being cleared of the “whipping” charges.

After the false story was exposed, the media just shrugged and went on to the next gotcha story.

As for this new hoax, Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.) declared the incident to be “the worst of the damn worst” in a video on X. Craig, a candidate for Senate, accused federal officers of taking the boy to “use him to lure his father out.”

That is false. According to reports, the father was spotted in public and fled, abandoning the boy. Like Harris, Craig reminded citizens that “this is a time where we should all be outraged. If this doesn’t pierce through your humanity, as a Republican member of Congress, if you can’t speak out about this, then you’ve got no humanity left.”

The key, again, is the requisite outrage. If you are not outraged, you are not human.

It is often said that we are living in a “post-truth” political environment. The term rose to favor due to the 2016 election of President Trump. Oxford Dictionaries specifically cited Trump when it selected the term as word of the year. The irony is that the proof of post-truth politics is often found among those who use it the most on the left, in the media and academia.

The bait boy hoax is particularly disgraceful. It is common to have minor children present during arrests of all kinds. Officers will often try to get family members to take a child rather than put him into child services.

In this case, ICE officers were trying to detain Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, an undocumented Ecuadorian national, when he bolted and left behind his five-year-old child, Liam Conejo Ramos.

Rather than leave the child in the freezing cold on the street, the officers took the child to his home to get his mother to take him in. She refused to open the door despite agents reportedly saying that she would not be detained. They proceeded to take the boy to McDonald’s, play his favorite music, and take care of him. He was never arrested. They also did not send him into detention. According to ICE, his father asked for the boy to be allowed to stay with him at a detention facility, and ICE agreed.

One can have good-faith objections to immigration enforcement policies. The Trump administration has made it a priority to deport the millions of undocumented migrants allowed into the country under the Biden administration. That is what Trump pledged to do in his campaign.

Post-truth politics and post-truth journalism are designed to fuel rage — to give people license to say and do things that they would not ordinarily say or do.

Even nurses this week have joined in the hate-fest against ICE and the administration. In New York, an injured NYPD officer and his colleagues were treated rudely by nurses when they were mistaken for ICE officers.

In Florida, a nurse named Lexie Lawler at the Baptist Health Boca Raton Regional Hospital directed her rage at White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, who is expecting her second child.  Lawler posted that “As a labor and delivery nurse, it gives me great joy to wish Karoline Leavitt a fourth-degree tear. I hope you f——- rip from bow to stern and never s— normally again, you c—.” Like the ICE agents, Leavitt is not treated as a person but some Golem who can be joyfully and righteously harmed.

There is a strange aspect to rage addictions. Many on the left will use false stories to virtue signal, then unleash the most unvirtuous attacks. The greatest irony is that these individuals are doing precisely what they accuse ICE of doing. They are using this five-year-old as bait — clickbait — to fuel protests and outrage.

The call for outrage is meant to strip away the humanity of ICE agents, who are portrayed as having no sympathy or concern for a child. Indeed, the use of this child by protesters strips him of his humanity. He was as much of a prop as the ICE agents were.

The bait boy hoax does show that Harris and Craig may be right about one thing: “This is a time where we should all be outraged.”