5-year-old boy and father detained by ICE return home to Minnesota | migration news

Liam Conejo Ramos and his father Adrian came home with Texas Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro.

A 5-year-old boy and his father have returned home to Minnesota after being detained and held in a Texas detention facility as a result of President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown.

Liam Conejo Ramos and his father Adrian, asylum seekers from Ecuador, spent 10 days in the Dili Detention Center until U.S. District Judge Fred Biery ordered their release Saturday.

U.S. Representative Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, wrote on social media that he picked them up from the detention center on Saturday night and brought them home on Sunday.

“Liam is home now. He has his hat and backpack,” Castro wrote, including a photo of the child. “We will not stop until every child and family comes home.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Liam and his father on January 20, when Liam returned home from kindergarten.

Images of a boy wearing a blue bunny hat and a backpack being held up by police officers have spread around the world, adding to public outrage over the shootings of two US citizens by agents during a federal immigration raid.

Liam was one of four students detained by immigration authorities in suburban Minneapolis, according to the Columbia Heights Public School District.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Deputy Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that ICE did not target or arrest Liam and that his mother refused to take him in after his father was arrested. His father told officers he wanted Liam to stay with him.

“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.

Neighbors and school officials said federal immigration agents used the preschooler as “bait” by telling him to knock on the door of the home so his mother would answer.

DHS called its account of events “an absolute lie.” The father reportedly fled on foot, leaving the boy in a running vehicle in the driveway.

“This incident arose from the government’s ill-conceived and incompetent execution of its pursuit of daily deportation quotas,” Vieri said in a scathing opinion.

He criticized the government’s apparent “ignorance” of the American Declaration of Independence, which “enumerated the grievances of a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation.”

Biery also cited the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects the right against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, posted a photo on social media of herself with Liam, his father, and Castro, holding Liam’s Spider-Man backpack.

“Welcome home Liam,” he wrote, along with two hearts.