A federal court in the US has ordered the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father Adrian Conejo Arias from the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
This is reported by the New York Times.
Liam and his father were arrested on January 20 on a path outside their home in a suburb of Minneapolis as the boy was returning from school. Both were taken to a detention center in Texas.
The Department of Homeland Security charged the father with illegally entering the United States in December 2024. The familyʼs lawyer claims that Adrian is from Ecuador and entered legally, taking advantage of the asylum rules.
The superintendent of the Columbia Heights School District said that ICE agents actually used a five-year-old child as bait during the arrest.
When the agents arrived, another adult who was in the house asked to be allowed to watch over Liam. The agent refused. Instead, they made the five-year-old boy knock on the door of the house to see if anyone else was there—only then could he return to the adults.
The judge initially ordered the family to be removed from the U.S. In the new ruling, he ordered Liam and his father to be released by February 3. The court said the case arose from a “poorly conceived policy of daily deportation quotas” that was causing trauma to the children.
- Federal immigration agents shot and killed a 37-year-old man in Minneapolis on January 24, the second such incident amid the cityʼs tightening of immigration controls. It came a day after more than 10,000 people took to the streets to protest the presence of 3,000 federal agents that Trump had sent to the state.
- Residents were outraged by several incidents involving the Migration Service, including the murder of US citizen Renee Goode, the detention of a US citizen who was taken from his home in his underwear, and the detention of schoolchildren, including a 5-year-old boy.
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