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A five-year-old boy and his father detained by immigration officials in Minnesota and detained in Texas have been released by a judge’s order. They returned to Minnesota, according to the office of Democratic Representative Joaquin Castro.
Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, were arrested in suburban Minneapolis on January 20 before being taken to a detention center in Dilley, Texas.
Katherine Schneider, a spokeswoman for Castro, confirmed that the two men had returned home. She said the Texas congressman picked them up in Dilley Saturday night and drove them home to Minnesota on Sunday.
Images of the young boy wearing a bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack and surrounded by immigration agents sparked outrage over the Trump administration’s crackdown in Minneapolis.
Castro wrote a letter to Liam while they were on the plane to Minnesota, in which he told the young boy that he had “moved the world.”
“Your family, your school, and many strangers have prayed for you and offered whatever they could to see you home again,” Castro wrote.
A photo of the letter was posted on social media. “Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t belong. America became the most powerful and prosperous nation in the world because of immigrants, not in spite of them.”
Photos on Castro’s social media showed Liam wearing his blue bunny hat and a Pikachu backpack.
U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, welcomed the boy, saying in a social media post that he “should be in school and with family – not in detention,” adding, “Now ICE has to go.”
On Saturday, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, who sits in San Antonio, Texas, and was appointed by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, said in his ruling that “the case has its roots in the government’s ill-conceived and incompetently implemented attempt to set daily expulsion quotas, apparently even if doing so requires traumatizing children.”
At a news conference Thursday afternoon alongside the attorney for Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year-old detained by ICE in a Minneapolis suburb, school board President Mary Granlund became emotional as she spoke of the anxiety she said she has seen in schools since immigration agents arrived in the area.
Neighbors and school officials said federal immigration agents used the preschooler as “bait” by telling him to knock on the door of his home so his mother would answer.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security called that description of events a “abject lie,” saying the father fled on foot and left the boy in a moving vehicle in their driveway.
