Trump administration wants ICE to quickly deport five-year-old Minneapolis boy and dad days after release
Donald Trump’s administration is moving to quickly deport the family of a five-year-old Minneapolis boy whose now-viral image capturing him in the snow as federal officers arrested his father has fueled outrage against the president’s mass deportation efforts.
The Department of Homeland Security filed a motion in immigration court this week to end asylum claims for the father of preschooler Liam Conejo Ramos and to place him in expedited removal proceedings.
The motion, first reported by Minnesota Public Radio, was filed just days after a federal judge granted their release from an immigration detention center in Texas.
A hearing is scheduled Friday.
Liam’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, who is originally from Ecuador, told the outlet that they do not know what will happen to them next.
“The government is moving many pieces, it’s doing everything possible to do us harm, so that they’ll probably deport us. We live with that fear, too,” he told MPR in Spanish.
The family’s legal team says the government’s motion appears to be “retaliatory.”
“It’s really frustrating as an attorney, because they keep throwing new obstacles in our way. There’s absolutely no reason that this should be expedited. It’s not very common,” said immigration attorney Danielle Molliver with Nwokocha & Operana Law Offices.
Homeland Security did not immediately return The Independent’s request for comment.
Liam and his father were detained by federal officers from the driveway of their home in Minneapolis on January 20 and brought to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Texas, where the preschooler was sick and asking for his mother, according to family and lawmakers who visited him.
Their return to Minneapolis last weekend followed a blistering court order for their release, as District Judge Fred Biery delivered a brutal assessment of Trump’s “ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas” that appears to require “traumatizing children.”
Biery signed his three-page order with the viral image of Liam in his blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack and added two Bible verses below it: Matthew 19:14 and John 11:35.
The verse from Matthew states roughly that “Jesus said, ’Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,” while the verse from John is “Jesus wept.”
Liam’s image has become emblematic of sweeping arrests in Minnesota after federal officers surged into the state last month, sparking several lawsuits and demonstrations across the country.
