Detained by immigration agents, 5-year-old Liam has been released from custody
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
By ANUSHKA PATIL
Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old who was detained by federal agents while wearing a Spider-Man backpack and a blue bunny hat, is back home in Minnesota, a statement from his school district said Sunday.
The boy and his father were released from the immigration detention center where they were being held in Dilley, Texas, after a federal judge demanded they be set free in a fiery opinion Saturday that condemned the government for pursuing daily deportation quotas “even if it requires traumatizing children.” Included in the judge’s opinion was the now-famous photo of Liam being detained, which sparked outrage in the Twin Cities and across the country.
The district where Liam is a student, Columbia Heights Public Schools, said that his release was 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.”
“We want all children to be released from detention centers and hope for the reunification of families who have been unjustly separated,” the district said.
Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said in a post on social media that he had picked up Liam and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, from the Dilley detention center on Saturday night and escorted them to Minnesota on Sunday morning. He shared photos of the two on social media, including one showing Liam at the airport clutching what appeared to be a Pikachu toy and wearing a Pikachu backpack.
Castro was part of a delegation of Democratic lawmakers who visited Liam and his father at the detention center last week, where he said Liam’s father had reported that the child was “very depressed” and hadn’t been eating well since they were detained in January.
School district officials said that Liam and his father had just arrived home on Jan. 22 when federal agents detained them and tried to use Liam as “bait” to lure other family members out of the house. Someone in the family home, as well as a school official, had unsuccessfully pleaded with agents to keep the child, but he was taken along with his father, the school officials said.
Officials from the Department of Homeland Security have contested this account, saying that agents were only targeting Liam’s father and that he fled, leaving Liam behind. Federal officials have claimed that Conejo Arias, who is from Ecuador, entered the country illegally in December 2024. Lawyers for the family have said they entered legally and that they have an active asylum case.
The detention of children is increasingly common under the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown. At least 3,800 children, including 20 infants, were booked into ICE custody from January to mid-October 2025, an analysis by The Marshall Project found. That figure only includes children in the custody of ICE, not other federal agencies.
Among children in federal custody are at least two other students from Liam’s school, Valley View Elementary in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, according to the school’s principal, Jason Kuhlman. He said he brought the two children, a second grader and a fifth grader, to federal custody at the request of their mother, who was detained after leaving an immigration hearing. Twenty-five families at the school have had a parent or caregiver detained during recent immigration sweeps in the Twin Cities, he said.