A five-year-old boy and his father were back in Minneapolis on Sunday after being released from a Texas immigration detention center where they were held for more than a week, according to US House representative Joaquin Castro.
“Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack. Thank you to everyone who demanded freedom for Liam,” Castro, a San Antonio Democrat, said in a post on X. “We won’t stop until all children and families are home.”
The Texas politician said he picked them up from the detention center and brought them back to Minneapolis early Sunday.
Liam Conejo Ramos and his father Adrian Conejo Arias were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on 20 January.
A viral photo of the five-year-old preschooler wearing a bunny hat and a plaid coat sparked outrage across the country after claims that the child, who was arrested on the driveway of his home, was used as bait to try to arrest his mother.
On Saturday, a US judge ordered the five-year-old boy and his father be released from the detention center, saying: “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.”
During the day of the arrest, the five-year-old was returning from school with his father when immigration agents pulled him from their car near their home in Columbia Heights, a suburb of Minneapolis, according to the school district.
“This family is following US legal parameters and has an active asylum case with no order of deportation,” said Zena Stenvik, superintendent of the Columbia Heights public school district, in a statement on 21 January. “I have viewed the legal paperwork with my own eyes. Why detain a five-year-old? You cannot tell me that this child is going to be classified as a violent criminal.”
Stenvik said that another adult who lived in the home was outside during the encounter and pleaded to take custody of the child so he would not be detained, but officers refused.
The Department of Homeland Security refuted this claim, posting on X that the five-year-old “was ABANDONDED [sic] by his father, and the alleged mother REFUSED to take custody of her own child”.
Amid the release of the preschooler and his father, the school district said on Sunday that they were “grateful for the overwhelming number of well-wishes and offers of support from people around the globe”.
“Liam’s release is an important development, and we hope it will lead to positive developments for other families as well, including our other four students who are being held at the Dilley facility in Texas,” reads a statement by the Columbia Heights public school district spokesperson. “We want all children to be released from detention centers and hope for the reunification of families who have been unjustly separated.”
According to an analysis of records obtained by the Deportation Data Project, ICE booked about 3,800 minors into immigrant family detention from January to October 2025. The number of children currently in migrant detention centers remains unclear.
The five-year-old and his father were detained at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, where most children detained with a parent are eventually transferred to. The detention center, operated by the private prison company CoreCivic, is intended to be less punitive than traditional jails, with access to schooling and playgrounds for children.
However, representatives Castro and Jasmine Crockett described gruesome conditions at the detention center when they visited the preschooler and his father last week, saying they encountered children “mentally broken because of the trauma that they’re experiencing”.
Crockett said that the children at the detention center told her that “we’re not in school,” while the facility’s staff said otherwise.
Conejo Arias told the Texas representatives that the child was frequently tired and not eating well at the detention center, which is housing about 1,100 people, according to Castro.
A lawyer for the family told CNN last month that the child and his father entered the US legally, leaving Ecuador amid the economic situation, insecurity and unstable employment conditions. The lawyer also said the five-year-old and his father were undergoing a legal process to obtain status in the United States, and that their claims remained pending.
