This week’s illegal immigrant poster boy is 5-year-old Liam Ramos.

According to ICE, when agents approached the boy’s father outside his home, he fled, abandoning his son. The boy’s mother refused to take him, so the agents had to assume custody. The father was soon arrested, but insisted that his son come with him to the Dilley Detention center in Texas (built under Obama for illegals with children to “send a message that our border is not open to illegal migration”).

The two were soon sprung by Clinton judge Fred Biery, for incomprehensible reasons, and sent back to Minnesota, escorted by approximately half the Democrats in congress.

The media are bombarding us with pictures of Liam in a bunny-ear hat, providing minute-by-minute updates on his glorious return to Minneapolis, and holding nonstop interviews with the principal and teachers at Liam’s school and, for extra cuteness, his fellow 5-year-old classmates.

That got me thinking. Remember the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo by Alan Diaz for the AP, showing an INS agent (the precursor to ICE) pointing a 9-mm MP-5 submachine gun directly at a terrified little boy, Elian Gonzalez, who was hiding in a closet at the home of his Miami relatives? (Incidentally, to this day, the agent’s name remains unknown.)

Media:

THIS 5-year-old child is totally adorable!

THIS 5-year-old child is real a**hole.

Unlike Liam, Elian was in our country legally — as that rarest of things, a legitimate asylum seeker. His mother, along with 11 others, had fled Cuba on a boat to the U.S., the boat sank and all aboard drowned, except 5-year-old Elian who, days later, was found clinging to an inner-tube by Miami fishermen.

Under immigration law at the time, Elian was completely legal because he was a Cuban who had reached dry land before being intercepted by law enforcement. According to the law, not fairytale dreams of the Cato Institute, that made him eligible to remain in the U.S. and apply for residency.

(As a sidenote, in deference to the left’s invented legal requirement for deportation – which is found nowhere in our actual written laws – Elian, so far as we know, hadn’t committed any crimes.)

But the Clinton administration really wanted to send him back to Cuba, which, if you’re a leftist is, a super cool place! The fall of the Soviet Union had been heartbreaking for Democrats. The least they could do was hastily return a 5-year-old boy to this socialist paradise, where he could frolic on the beach with Bill de Blasio.

Elian’s Miami relatives went to court to ask for custody. After six weeks of the administration swearing up and down that they would abide by the Florida courts’ decision, the moment the courts ruled for the relatives, the Clintonistas changed their minds, defied the courts, and said they were deporting Elian, anyway.

The sacred supremacy clause!

I know what you’re thinking. The New York Times must have been outraged by the photo of a federal immigration agent pointing a submachine gun at an utterly petrified little boy, his finger on the trigger. I couldn’t remember, so I checked. Weirdly, they had exactly the opposite reaction.

The Times’ Thomas Friedman:

“Yup, I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elian Gonzalez warmed my heart. They should put that picture up in every visa line in every U.S. consulate around the world, with a caption that reads: ‘America is a country where the rule of law rules. This picture illustrates what happens to those who defy the rule of law and how far our government and people will go to preserve it.”’

In another column, Friedman expressed disgust at the Democratic mayor of Miami for refusing to allow local law enforcement to assist federal agents in seizing Elian. This, he said, proved that the mayor’s “allegiance” was “not to the laws of this land.” (I hope that Tom never hears how Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey hasn’t allowed local law enforcement to help immigration agents in Minneapolis. HE WILL BE SO MAD.)

For his part, the Times’ Frank Rich sneered that Elian was “the latest pawn in our culture’s increasingly pornographic exploitation of children …the new JonBenet Ramsey, a child the camera loves who can be bought, sold, dramatized and ogled for ghoulish fun and profit.”

We’re just going to have to trust the Times that it isn’t “pornographic exploitation of children” for the media – led by the Times – to promote a video of little kids at Liam’s pre-school reading their letters to ICE (not at all encouraged by their teachers, you hear me!?!) while holding up adorably childish drawings, mentioning the bunny-ear hat, and telling federal law enforcement, “this kind of makes me sad.”

No, no, no. That’s not “pornographic exploitation.” Pornographic exploitation is Cuban exiles trying to keep their 5-year-old relative out of Fidel Castro’s clutches.

Regarding the legal dimensions of the case, the late Anthony Lewis, Times opinion columnist and president of the Ho Chi Min Admiration Society, laid down the law in no uncertain terms: “Longstanding statutes give the Immigration and Naturalization Service custody of any alien who, like Elian, arrives at this country’s borders without entry documents.”

The law’s the law! No tickee, no entry.

As to that disturbing photo, Lewis forcefully defended the immigration agents’ wearing tactical gear to retrieve a crying child, explaining that “police going into a hostile situation where there may be danger say they must be prepared for the worst.”

(Okay guys - I think you’ve done enough self-incrimination.)

Meanwhile, a Times editorial praised the federal government’s pre-dawn, armed raid to nab Elian, noting with approval that “there was no deadly violence.” I guess the bar for a tiptop immigration arrest has risen a bit.

Deporting Elian, the editorial continued, was the “proper legal conclusion,” and his American relatives had “no business blocking” immigration agents.

(Can I quote you on that, New York Times?)

The fault, according to the Times, lay with the relatives’ “belligerence” and the local authorities’ “posturing.” Miami’s elected leaders’ refusal “to aid federal authorities,” the paper pronounced, “was insupportable.”

One refusal to comply: heroic. The other: unsupportable.

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