Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who was detained by ICE agents in Minnesota and sent to Texas alongside his father, has returned home.
“Liam is home now and we are grateful to @JoaquinCastrotx for traveling to Minneapolis with him and his dad,” Rep. Ilhan Omar wrote on X. “Welcome home Liam.”
Rep. Castro picked up Liam and his father Adrian Conejo Arias from the Dilley Detention Center in Texas and escorted the pair back home to Minnesota.
Marc Prokosch, the family’s lawyer, has insisted Liam and his family came to the United States from Ecuador legally. “So they did everything right when they came in. They used the app, they made an appointment, they came to the border and presented themselves to Customs and Border Patrol. They’ve shared all of their information with the government, and they were following the process,” he said in a statement after the pair were taken to Texas.
“They were just trying to secure safety from persecution for their family from their home country. But ICE didn’t care about the fact that they had those pending claims and then just arrested them.”
Prokosch continued: “We know that detaining children and families is wrong. Immigration violations are civil in nature, and so how can you justify incarcerating a child because of a civil violation, which, again, is not even accurate here because they entered lawfully through the CBP [Customs and Border Patrol] one program.”
U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, ordered the release of Liam and Adrian Saturday. In his ruling he said in part that “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Biery also added that it is “apparent also is the government’s ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence,” a perceived suggestion that the actions of the Trump administration echo the complaints the document’s author Thomas Jefferson lodged against England.
