A federal judge has ordered the release of a five-year-old child and his father who were targeted in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid in a Minneapolis suburb last week. Details of the process were released by the broadcaster CNN.
Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias and his son Liam Conejo Ramos were separated from their family and taken to the South Texas Family Residential Center, more than two thousand kilometers from where they lived.
The court order determines that the preschool-age child and his father be released “as quickly as possible”, limiting this period to Tuesday (3), while their immigration process is processed in the Judiciary.
In the ruling, federal judge Fred Biery criticized Donald Trump’s administration, saying Liam’s case is proof of the government’s “ill-conceived and incompetent pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it means traumatizing children.”
The image of the child at the time of his father’s arrest has gained wide repercussion in recent weeks. In the image, an immigration agent holds his Spider-Man backpack as he keeps his head down in his bunny hat.
The judge admitted that the father and child could end up being deported anyway due to what he called an “archaic” US immigration system. However, he highlighted that this deportation must occur in an “orderly and humane” manner.
Last Tuesday, a court decision had already prevented the immediate deportation of the two to Ecuador. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), responsible for supervising immigration in the US, stated that the boy’s father is an undocumented Ecuadorian immigrant and justified that agents took the minor because the father himself said he wanted to keep him.
The family’s lawyer, in turn, defends the illegality of their detention, arguing that Conejo did not commit any crime and followed “all established protocols” to legally request asylum in the USA, including “attending all scheduled court hearings”.
The state of Minnesota has become the epicenter of protests against the large deployment of immigration agents, numbering about 3,000 since the operation began earlier this year.
