Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, returned to Minnesota on Sunday morning following a federal judge’s order to release them from an immigration detention center in Texas.
The father and son arrived at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport accompanied by Representative Joaquin Castro, who picked them up from the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley on Saturday night and escorted them home.
“Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack,” Castro wrote on social media, referencing the viral image of Liam wearing his blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack that drew national attention to the case.
Castro also published a letter he wrote to Liam during their flight, telling the young boy, “Your family, school and many strangers said prayers for you and offered whatever they could do to see you back home. Don’t let anyone tell you this isn’t your home. America became the most powerful, prosperous nation on earth because of immigrants not in spite of them.”
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Representative Ilhan Omar posted a photo on social media showing her together with Liam, his father, and Castro, thanking the Texas congressman for joining them on their flight back home.
“I’m happy to finally be going home,” Adrian told ABC News as he carried his sleeping son to board the plane back to Minnesota.
Liam and his father were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Columbia Heights on January 20 after returning home from Liam’s preschool. The two were subsequently transferred to the detention facility in Dilley, Texas, where they remained for nearly two weeks.
On Saturday, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery ordered the Trump administration to release them by Tuesday. In a sharply worded ruling, Biery wrote that the detention appeared to involve “traumatizing a five-year-old child” as part of what he described as an “ill-conceived and incompetently government pursuit of daily deportation quotas.”
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The judge added that “the lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency,” and concluded, “the rule of law be damned.”
The family’s attorney maintains that they are in the country legally while pursuing a claim for asylum, that they have shown up for their court hearings and posed no safety threat, and that they were being held for civil immigration violations.
The circumstances surrounding their initial arrest remain disputed. The family’s attorney claimed that during the arrest, ICE agents tried to use Liam as “bait,” walking him up to the family’s front door and having him knock on the door, asking to be let in.
The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly and vigorously disputed this allegation, claiming instead that Adrian tried to run away from agents and abandoned Liam in a running vehicle in the family’s driveway. DHS said ICE officers tried to return the boy to his mother’s custody but claimed she refused to take the child. DHS called the “bait” description an “abject lie.”
Columbia Heights Mayor Amada Márquez Simula welcomed the family’s return.
“The community is ready to support them. The schools are ready to be here to support them with whatever they need, and so we’re just happy to have him home, but we have so many people who have been taken,” Simula said. “We’re not done until our families come home and our community comes home.”
Senator Amy Klobuchar welcomed the boy back in a social media post, saying Liam “should be in school and with family — not in detention,” adding, “Now ICE needs to leave.”
Despite Liam’s return, Columbia Heights school officials noted that four other students from the same district remain in federal custody in Texas.
The Department of Homeland Security stated at the time of the detainment that they were conducting a “targeted operation” to arrest Adrian.
Reports also surfaced about concerns regarding Liam’s health while in detention, though specific details were not disclosed.
The case drew widespread criticism of the federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota, particularly amid ongoing protests following the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens Renée Good on January 7 and Alex Pretti on January 24 by federal immigration agents.
