A five-year-old boy and his father, who were detained as part of United States President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration raids and held at a detention facility in Texas, have returned to their home in Minnesota.
Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian, who are asylum seekers from Ecuador, spent 10 days in the Dilley detention centre until US District Judge Fred Biery ordered their release on Saturday.
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US Representative Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, wrote in a social media post that he picked them up on Saturday night at the detention facility and escorted them home on Sunday.
“Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack,” Castro wrote, including photos of the child. “We won’t stop until all children and families are home.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Liam and his father 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 spread around the world and added fire to public outrage at the federal immigration crackdown, during which agents have shot dead two US citizens.
Liam was one of four students detained by immigration officials in a Minneapolis suburb, according to the Columbia Heights Public School District.
In a statement, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said ICE did not target or arrest Liam, and that his mother refused to take him after his father’s apprehension. His father told officers he wanted Liam to be with him, she said.
“The Trump administration is committed to restoring the rule of law and common sense to our immigration system, and will continue to fight for the arrest, detention, and removal of aliens who have no right to be in this country,” McLaughlin said.
Neighbours and school officials say that federal immigration officers used the preschooler as “bait” by telling him to knock on the door to his house so that his mother would answer.
DHS called the description of events an “abject lie”. It said the father fled on foot and left the boy in a running vehicle in their driveway.
Biery said in a scathing opinion 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”.
He criticised what he called the government’s apparent “ignorance” of the US Declaration of Independence, which “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”.
US Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, posted a photo to social media of her with Liam, his father and Castro, with her holding Liam’s Spider-Man backpack.
