5-year-old boy detained by ICE released, back in MN after judge’s order
Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old boy who became one of the symbols of the Trump administration’s immigration raids in Minnesota, has been released from a Texas detention facility, where he was held for over a week with his father.
“Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack. Thank you to everyone who demanded freedom for Liam,” Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said on X.
Ramos and his father, asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias, were taken by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents while in their driveway after the boy came home from school on Jan. 20. Agents at the time refused an offer made by another adult living in the home to take the child.
Instead, the agents led the boy to his front door and ordered him to knock – “essentially using a 5-year-old as bait,” according to a news release from Columbia Heights Public Schools.
While ICE has disputed this claim, Vice President JD Vance defended the agency on Jan. 22, saying that the federal officials were targeting Conejo, an undocumented immigrant from Ecuador accused of trying to flee from immigration agents. As for the boy, Vance said, “Are they supposed to let a 5-year-old child freeze to death?”
The pair’s release was ordered by U.S. District Judge Fred Biery on Jan. 31. Castro said he picked them up later that night, and they returned to Minnesota Feb. 1.
“The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” Biery wrote in his order. “With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike, it is so ordered.”
Biery in his ruling also compared the administration’s actions to those of King George III cited by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence.
“Thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson enumerated grievances against a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation … ‘We the people’ are hearing echoes of that history,” Biery wrote.
Castro’s post included a photo of a handwritten note to Ramos where he asked the child to judge the United States “not by your days at Dilley (immigration detention center) but by the millions of Americans whose hearts you touched.”
Photos of the arrest, which showed Ramos outside the home in a character hat with a Spiderman backpack, circulated widely online. The arrest, along with the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents, sparked intense protests in Minneapolis and across the country.
President Donald Trump‘s border czar Tom Homan last week described plans to “draw down” the federal presence in the Midwestern state. The Trump administration has deployed thousands of agents in Minnesota as part of its wide-reaching, and often contentious, deportation surge.
USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for the boy’s family for comment.
Contributing: Jonathan Limehouse, USA TODAY
