Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democratic congressman, has visited the five-year-old boy and his father who were detained last week by federal immigration agents in Minnesota and transferred to a detention facility in Texas, providing an update about the child’s health and wellbeing.
In a social media post on Wednesday, Castro said he visited the boy, Liam Conejo Ramos, and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, at the immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas.
“I demanded his release and told him how much his family, his school, and our country loves him and is praying for him,” Castro wrote.
The post included a photo of the meeting, showing Liam resting in his father’s arms. In an Instagram video after the meeting, Castro, who represents Texas’s 20th congressional district, said he went to Dilley to visit the boy and his father, to “check on their welfare and demand their release, and also check on the 1,100 people who are at Dilley right now”.
“I did have a chance to see Liam, we spent about 30 minutes with he and his dad,” Castro said.
Castro said that he called Liam’s mother after the visit to update her. Liam’s father told Castro that the boy “hasn’t been himself” and that “he’s been sleeping a lot because he has been depressed and sad”. The congressman added that Liam “actually was not awake during our visit, he was sleeping”,
“I am concerned about his mental state,” he added.
Last week, Liam became a symbol of the wide scope of the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation in Minneapolis when he was detained on 20 January on his way home from preschool along with his father. A widely shared photograph shows Liam wearing a blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack as federal agents detained him.
Zena Stenvik, superintendent of the Columbia Heights school district in a Minneapolis suburb, said Liam and his father were taken into custody in their driveway shortly after arriving home. They were then transferred out of Minnesota and taken to the Dilley immigration processing center in Texas.
The Department of Homeland Security has said that ICE was conducting a “targeted operation” to arrest Liam’s father, whom they said was in the country illegally. DHS claimed that Liam’s father “fled on foot – abandoning his child” and that “for the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended [his father]”. The DHS also claimed that Liam’s father requested that Liam remain with him.
School officials who witnessed the encounter have disputed that account and said that there was an adult who lived in the home who offered to take Liam, but that officials still detained him.
An attorney representing the family has also challenged the DHS’s claims, and said the father and son had an active asylum case. The attorney shared paperwork showing that they entered the US at a port of entry, meaning an official crossing point.
“They did not come here illegally. They are not criminals,” the attorney said last week, adding that there was no order of deportation against them.
On Monday, a federal judge temporarily blocked their deportation while the litigation challenging their detention continues.
