The parents of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos told CBS News immigration correspondent Camilo Montoya-Galvez that their son has been “very different” ever since his and his father’s ICE arrest in Minneapolis in January.
The moment in question, in which Ramos was photographed wearing his school backpack and a blue hat while being taken into ICE custody, ignited a wave of outrage across America. He and his father were subsequently held in an ICE holding facility in Texas for two weeks and were only released after a federal judge ruled in their favor and wrote that their detainment was the result of an “ill-conceived and incompetently implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.”
Months later, Liam’s father Adrián Conejo Arias and mother Erika Ramos told Montoya-Galvez in a “CBS Mornings” report that aired Monday that their son remains traumatized by ICE’s actions and is scared that he and his family could be detained again.
“As parents, it worries us a lot that he’s no longer as he was before and we’re worried this could last a long time,” Conejo Arias said in the family’s first sit-down interview about the incident. “It does worry us that this will not heal quickly.”
“My boy is very different,” Erika added. “He sees police officers, and he says, ‘It’s ICE, Mommy.’”
Liam now reportedly sees a psychologist, and his parents told “CBS Mornings” that he has been exhibiting signs of trauma and has been more prone to acting out. He purportedly does not wish to go to certain classes at school or play with other children anymore, either.
When he was asked by CBS what scares him the most, Liam said “la inmigración.”
His father also pushed back against ICE’s claims that he abandoned Liam by trying to evade arrest in January, telling CBS News, “It’s not true what people are saying.” When asked if he would ever abandon his son, Conejo Arias reiterated, “I never did and never would.”
“The most difficult thing was I couldn’t do anything,” Erika added. “My desperation was to go and get them out, because I really did not understand why.”
Like her husband, she pushed back against ICE’s narrative that they asked her to take Liam but she refused, telling “CBS Mornings” that she believed at the time that the agents were attempting to use her son as “bait” to arrest her and that she was concerned that Liam’s 13-year-old older brother Tadeo would be left without anyone to look after him.
“I think it was an injustice that they did that to us, when in reality we were doing everything right,” Conejo Arias told Montoya-Galvez. The family contends that they entered the U.S. legally at a port of entry in 2023 using a Biden administration program for asylum seekers. President Trump shut that program down immediately after he retook office in January 2025.
Despite the family’s claims, the Trump administration remains adamant that its deportation target during the January incident was Liam’s father and that Conejo Arias is an illegal immigrant. The family remains at risk of being detained a second time and potentially deported back to their home country of Ecuador.
The Trump administration has since terminated their asylum case and appealed the very federal court order that resulted in Liam and his father’s release. The Department of Homeland Security contends that Liam’s family’s deportation was ordered after they received “full due process” by an immigration judge.
