Ema Alice: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers on Tuesday detained a 5-year-old boy and his father in Minnesota after the boy came home from preschool, according to several media reports.
Columbia Heights Public School District Superintendent Zena Stenvik told Minnesota Public Radio that Liam Conejo Ramos and his father were approached by masked officers in their driveway.
“Another adult living in the home was outside and begged the agents to let him take care of the small child, and was refused,” Stenvik said. “Instead, the agent took the child out of the still-running car, led him to the door and directed him to knock on the door asking to be let in in order to see if anyone else was home, essentially using a 5-year-old as bait.”
The father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, ran from the officers but was quickly detained, The Washington Post reported. The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) policy is that ICE will place children in the custody of a safe person designated by the parent.
DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin defended detaining Arias, saying he was from Ecuador and “RELEASED into the U.S. by the Biden administration,” and she said officers “did NOT target a child.”
“As agents approached the driver Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, fled on foot — abandoning his child,” she said in a statement. “For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended Conejo Arias.”
Ramos’s brother, a middle school student, returned home 20 minutes later and only found his mother, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported. Officers took Ramos and his father away, and the two are believed to be in a detention facility in Texas.
Stenvik told Minnesota Public Radio that Ramos’s family had an “active asylum case” with no orders for deportation, saying she has seen the “legal paperwork with my own eyes.”
“Every step of their immigration process has been doing what they’ve been asked to do, and so this is just … cruelty,” Marc Prokosch, the lawyer representing Ramos’ family, told Minnesota Public Radio.
Prokosch noted that detaining Ramos was “probably not” illegal, but just “because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s moral. You know, yes, they may have the legal authority to detain a 5-year-old, but why?”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) weighed in on the incident Thursday and shared the Star Tribune’s story about Ramos in a post online.
“Minnesotans want safety,” Walz wrote on social platform X. “They want freedom. They want what’s best for our kids. Masked agents snatching preschoolers off the street and sending them to Texas detention centers serves none of those purposes. This campaign of retribution has got to stop.”
Ramos is one of four Columbia Heights students to be detained by ICE this month, the Post reported. Masked immigration enforcement officers detained a 17-year-old high school student driving to school earlier Tuesday, with no parents present. Another 17-year-old high school student also was detained last week after ICE officers “pushed their way into an apartment” and detained the student and her mother, the school district told the Post.
Earlier this month, the agency also detained a 10-year-old fourth grade student and her mother, the Post reported, citing the school district. The student called her father and told her ICE officers were taking her to school. The father went to the school and found his daughter and wife were taken to a detention center in Texas.
Local and state leaders in Minnesota also called for a drawback in federal immigration enforcement activities following the death of Renee Good, a Minneapolis woman shot and killed by an ICE officer on Jan. 7. The shooting sparked outrage, prompting Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D) to demand that federal agents leave the city.
Outrage grew further after the Trump administration defended the shooting, accusing Good of “domestic terrorism” for allegedly attempting to run over the officers with her SUV. Protests erupted across the country, with a federal judge ordering ICE to stop using retaliation to suppress peaceful protests in Minnesota. On Tuesday, a federal appeals court lifted those restrictions.
The Department of Justice issued subpoenas for Frey and Walz on Tuesday, accusing them obstructing an immigration enforcement investigation. The governor called it “partisan distraction,” and Frey said he will continue “doing the job I was elected to do: keeping our community safe and standing up for our values.”
(*This report is produced by Bangla Press. Republishing our content, images, or broadcasts in any other media outlet without permission is strictly prohibited.)
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