FORCED TO GO THROUGH an unimaginably terrifying ordeal, 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, were finally released from a Texas detention center 1,200 miles from home last Saturday. After Liam was reunited with his now-famous bright blue bunny hat and Spider-Man bookbag, he had a request. He asked for papitas—french fries. That’s how he ended up with a Happy Meal from a McDonald’s down the road from the Dilley facility where he had spent over a week in federal detention. ICE’s use of the little boy as bait to lure out his father and other family members to be detained sparked nationwide outrage and contributed to the intense scrutiny of the actions of federal forces in Minneapolis.
Liam’s return to his family is a rare example of a positive outcome for a person targeted by DHS. I wanted to get the full story, so I contacted Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), who was instrumental in getting Liam released.
Through luck or fate, Castro had already requested to visit the Dilley facility along with Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), giving the required seven days’ notice, before Liam was taken by DHS. But when he saw the now-iconic photo of the scared little boy being loaded into a vehicle by masked agents, he felt he needed to act.
“When I saw him and the cap and the backpack, I just thought, ‘I can do something about this, I’m already scheduled to go there,’” he told me. His visit date was Wednesday, January 28.
Castro and his staff prepared for a week. They were going to visit with Liam and Adrian, but they wanted to be prepared to talk to other detainees. They ended up speaking to hundreds of parents and young people.
Dilley is a small rural town in Texas, and Castro estimates that 90 percent of the ICE staff, including administrative workers and career people, are Mexican American. Upon entering the facility, he and Crockett and their staffers were taken to a makeshift courtroom and given a brief overview of how the facility works. Castro said staff told him that they’ve been at the facility for years and have enacted the policies of each administration, whether it was Obama, Trump during his first term, Biden, or now Trump again. “That’s how they justify being part of this whole system,” he said.
Crockett asked a staffer who said he had been there under the Biden administration whether he had seen a difference in the way the facility had been run under different administrations. That’s when Carmen Ayala, a bilingual staffer who accompanied Crockett for the visit, saw one of the man’s colleagues frantically signaling “to shut up and not answer the question” by covering his mouth with his hand, she later told me.
The group was taken to the medical facility, which they were told was closed that day because of a public protest a couple days prior where parents had yelled “Libertad!” demanding the children be released. The group then walked through the commissary before heading to see Liam. When the detained mothers and fathers heard Ayala ask a question of staff in Spanish, they crowded close to her and Crockett, telling stories of their treatment, and of food and water that were “nasty,” Ayala told me.
As I wrote last week, Castro noticed that Liam didn’t seem okay; the boy was reportedly sleeping a lot and possibly depressed. When Ayala walked over after speaking with several women about their treatment, Crockett leaned in. “Carmen, I don’t even have to speak Spanish to know something is wrong with that baby. Come with me to translate so I can ask questions,” she said.
They learned from Adrian that Liam’s medical care since arriving at Dilley amounted to one meeting with nurses that lasted just two or three minutes, where the only questions they asked him were about how much he was eating and sleeping. Adrian shared with the visitors that Liam was sad, missed his mother, and wanted to go back to school.
The next day, Castro requested another visit to Dilley for a week later, but he received a response that a measles outbreak at the facility meant everything would be shut down until February 14. News of the outbreak added an urgency to Castro’s work to free the child: The highly contagious disease was like a ticking time bomb for Liam, Adrian, and everyone else at the facility.
Then on Saturday, some news broke on the legal front. U.S. District Judge Fred Biery ordered Liam and his father released, angrily chastising “the government’s ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence.”
The judge maintained this fiery register throughout the opinion. The case of the young boy was born of “the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” Biery wrote, adding:
Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.
Biery concluded his opinion in a highly unusual way. Below his signature, he included the widely circulated photo of Liam in the bunny hat being held by a federal agent, and below that, two citations from scripture: Matthew 19:14 (“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these”) and John 11:35 (“Jesus wept”).
Bringing Liam Home
CASTRO WAS IN AUSTIN on Saturday, January 31, for an afternoon rally with Texas state Rep. James Talarico and others when he heard from Liam’s legal team. They were asking if Castro’s office could facilitate picking Liam and his father up at Dilley. Castro offered to do it himself, and soon he was driving the two and a half hours it takes to get from Austin to Dilley.
Castro was met by Dilley Mayor Alexandria Inocencio and six police officers—the town’s entire PD. “They were kind to [Liam], they gave him a cross and a trinket,” Castro said. It was then that Liam and his father were asked what they wanted to eat. Liam got his Happy Meal before heading to San Antonio.
Castro, who represents the city, called longtime friends he knew had a spare guesthouse, and within a few hours, Liam and his father were settled for the night. Castro picked them up again at 4:30 a.m. the next day to take them to the airport for their flight back to Minneapolis. They were escorted by San Antonio police. The pilot for their flight home gave Liam a tour of the cockpit and a pair of junior pilot wings. It was an early morning flight, so the other travelers were slow to realize who Liam and his father were. That changed after ABC News journalist John Quiñones started taking video of their return home.
With the big problems in the rearview, only smaller problems remained. Castro didn’t take a jacket or coat to Minnesota, wearing only his suit and congressional pin, and you can see him grinning and bearing it in a photo taken on the tarmac after the group landed and met up with a coated and scarfed Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who represents the area where Liam and Adrian live.
Castro had a ticket for an immediate return flight back home; he hoped to be able to make it to his son’s 11:30 a.m. birthday party. He dropped off Liam and Adrian at a fire department, where Liam’s mother thanked him on FaceTime. Castro then said his farewells to the father and son whose story had captured the hearts of a nation. After giving Liam a hug, he raced back to the airport. In the end, he made his son’s birthday party just in time.
Meanwhile, back in Dilley, there are plenty more Liams. “All these parents, with TVs in the rooms, they all heard stories of Liam and how he got out, so they want the same thing for their kids,” Ayala told me. She says that family members have been texting her photos of their young relatives and asking her, “Please put them up online so people can see.”
They want their kids released, too.
Thank you Adrian. As an immigrant, who came here at 5 years old, my heart breaks for all the Liams who are separated from their families.
US law requires AFTER one gets a green card, a residency requirement of. five years before even applying for citizenship. And, no surprise, the Trump regime has cancelled several naturalization ceremonies. Want fewer undocumented? Allocate that obscene amount of money that went to ICE to improve and speed up the naturalization process.