(AFP) – A five-year-old boy whose detention in the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration raids in Minneapolis shocked the world is now back home, a lawmaker said Sunday. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, who are asylum seekers from Ecuador, on January 20 as the boy arrived home from preschool.
Images of the boy with a blue bunny hat and backpack being held by officers whizzed around the world and added fire to public outrage at the federal immigration crackdown, during which agents have shot dead two US citizens. The father and son spent 10 days in a detention center in Texas, hundreds of miles from home, until a judge ordered them freed on Saturday.
“Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack,” Democratic congressman Joaquin Castro, who accompanied them on the trip from his home state, wrote on X in a post with photos of the child. The Trump administration sought to justify the boy’s detention by arguing that ICE took him into custody after his father tried to flee from immigration agents.
During a visit to the detention center last week, Castro said Adrian Conejo Arias described his son as being sad and depressed. “His dad said that he hasn’t been himself,” Castro wrote on X then. US District Judge Fred Biery, who ordered the boy’s release, said in a scathing opinion “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.”
He criticized what he called the government’s apparent “ignorance” of the US Declaration of Independence that “enumerated grievances against a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation.” Biery also cited the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, which protects the right against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
After this ruling came out, Castro went to pick up the boy and his father and flew home with them to Minnesota. “We won’t stop until all children and families are home,” Castro wrote.
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