How Jasmine Crockett Shamelessly Turned A Viral ICE ‘Bait’ Story Into A ‘Kidnapping’ Claim

My daughter is almost 17. She’s smart, empathetic and deeply tuned in to the world around her.

Like a lot of teenagers, she gets much of her news from social media. And like a lot of parents, I found myself staring at the ceiling after something she brought up the other night at the dinner table, wondering how something so wrong could sound so convincing.

She was trying to process something she had seen and read online. I listened to every word and stayed quiet, partly because I didn’t yet know the facts, and partly because I wanted to understand how the story had landed with her.

The spark was a viral claim that ICE used a 5-year-old boy as "bait" to capture his father, who was in the country illegally. The images were emotional, the language inflammatory. And the framing was unmistakable: this wasn’t immigration enforcement, it was cruelty.

Hillary Clinton said ICE was using children as "pawns," and Kamala Harris echoed the "bait" term.

Some went further. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a U.S. Senate hopeful, publicly described the incident as a "kidnapping." That wasn’t a careless word choice. It was a loaded accusation, delivered without hesitation, and released into an ecosystem that rewards outrage far more than accuracy.

From there, the escalation was predictable. Online, the comparisons piled up quickly: fascism, Nazis, Hitler. My daughter, trying to make sense of what she was being shown by people she’s been taught to trust, said it reminded her of the kinds of things Nazis had done in the 1930s and '40s. 

That didn’t strike me as irrational. It struck me as learned behavior.

For years now, kids have watched adults, especially authority figures, respond to political events with certainty, panic and the most extreme historical language available. I’ve seen it up close.

Last year, the day after Donald Trump was elected, one of my daughter’s track coaches confronted me at the school, where I was an assistant coach on the team. She was waiting for me, visibly angry.

In front of more than a dozen members of the team, and without provocation, she loudly lectured me about how the country was now in grave danger, how the LGBTQ community was immediately unsafe, how abortion rights would be stripped, how everything had changed overnight. She was unhinged and unprofessional, and I was embarrassed for her.

She made assumptions about my politics without ever having asked, and she delivered those assumptions publicly, as fact, to a group of kids who were watching how adults handle disagreement and uncertainty.

That moment stayed with me, because it revealed something important: kids don’t just absorb information; they absorb tone. They learn which emotions are rewarded, which words carry moral authority, and which comparisons are treated as acceptable shorthand.

So, when my daughter echoed the language she’d been hearing — when she reached for the most extreme historical analogy she knew — I didn’t hear recklessness. I heard the downstream effect of years of modeled hysteria.

Here’s the problem: the ICE "bait" story wasn’t true. Had it been, I would have been enraged, too.

People hold a photo of Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old boy who was held by immigration officers, during an "ICE Out" protest in New York on Jan. 23, 2026 against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). (Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP via Getty Images)

None of this requires pretending immigration enforcement is easy, clean or painless. It isn’t. Families get separated. Children get scared. Even when the law is being enforced properly, the human cost is real, and it deserves to be acknowledged honestly.

That’s exactly why the facts matter so much. When false stories spread, they don’t just mislead the public; they deepen fear among immigrant communities and make an already difficult reality even harder to navigate.

According to DHS officials, what actually happened was far less sinister than what was being spun online. During an enforcement action, the father, in this country illegally, fled, leaving his young son behind. One officer stayed with the child to ensure his safety while another pursued the father. This was not a kidnapping.

That detail didn’t go viral. The accusation did.

This is how misinformation works now. You don’t need to fabricate an entire story. You just remove enough context, add a charged word or two, and let the algorithm do the rest.

And suddenly, a teenager is wondering aloud whether she’s watching the early stages of Nazism play out on her phone.

That should alarm us, not because of the teenager, but because of the adults.

Words matter. History matters. 

When elected officials casually accuse law enforcement of kidnapping without evidence, they aren’t just scoring political points. They’re teaching a generation that facts are optional if the narrative feels righteous enough. When educators and authority figures normalize Nazi comparisons as everyday rhetoric, they flatten history into a political prop.

U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Nazism wasn’t harsh rhetoric or unpopular policy. It was a totalitarian system that stripped people of rights, humanity and, eventually, life itself. Millions were murdered. There were no free elections. No free press. No lawful way to object without disappearing.

Treating that history as a reusable insult doesn’t make us more vigilant; it makes us careless.

My daughter deserves better than that. So do your children.

Her instinct to care is a strength. The people who exploit that instinct for clicks, clout or political advantage are the ones who should be answering hard questions.

If we’re serious about protecting kids, maybe we should start by telling them the truth.