Pictures of pre-schooler Liam Conejo Ramos being taken into custody by ICE agents as he wore his school backpack and bunny hat sparked outrage across the US at ICE’s heavy-handed tactics
A five-year-old who was taken into custody by ICE agents outside his home in Minneapolis before being driven 1,300 miles to a detention centre has now been released.
Pictures of little Liam Conejo Ramos being taken into custody wearing his school backpack and bunny hat sparked outrage across the US and beyond after ICE agents snatched the lad as he returned home from school.
Liam was stopped by masked individuals in his driveway as he arrived home from preschool with his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, an official from The Columbia Heights Public School District said.
Neighbours and school officials say immigration officers used the young boy as “bait”, allegedly telling him to knock on the front door so his mother would open it. Eventually Liam and dad Adrian were taken from their snowy suburban Minneapolis driveway 1,300 miles to a Texas detention facility designed to detain families.
The boy and his father have spent more than a week at the Dilley detention centre but lawyer and congressman for Texas 20th district Joaquin Castro today announced the pair were back home in Minneapolis.
“Yesterday, five-year-old Liam and his dad Adrian were released from Dilley detention centre. I picked them up last night and escorted them back to Minnesota this morning. Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack,” Castro said in a post on X on Sunday.
“Thank you to everyone who demanded freedom for Liam. We won’t stop until all children and families are home.”
Liam’s case sparked horror as ICE clashes with residents in the US city of Minneapolis. In the past two weeks alone, students in Liam’s school district have been detained by federal agents in four separate immigration raids, an official said.
Speaking at the time of his arrest neighbour Vanessa Mullenix told the Mirror: “We have entered a new layer of hell, now that ICE is targeting children, and using kids as pawns to get their families out of their homes. It’s absolutely heartbreaking.”
The Department of Homeland Security has vehemently denied this narrative, which it has dismissed as an “abject lie”, while officers have claimed Mr Arias fled on foot, leaving the boy in a running vehicle in the driveway.
Liam and his dad were freed after a federal judge issued an order requiring that the preschooler and his father be released “as soon as practicable,” and no later than Tuesday as their immigration case proceeds through the court system.
US District Judge Fred Biery blasted ICE and the Trump administration’s migration policy in the ruling, calling out “the government’s ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence” and quoted Thomas Jefferson’s grievances against “a would-be authoritarian king,” saying today people “are hearing echoes of that history.”
Liam’s case, Biery wrote, originated in “the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.”
“Observing human behaviour confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency,” wrote the judge. “And the rule of law be damned.”