A heartbreaking story came out of Minnesota recently about a little 5-year-old boy named Liam Conejo Ramos who was picked up by ICE agents right in his family’s driveway. He had just gotten home from preschool with his dad, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, when it all happened.Family games
According to school officials and the family’s lawyer, agents approached the car, and the father tried to run. Once he was caught, they reportedly asked the young child to go knock on the front door of their house—to check if anyone else was inside. The superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools, Zena Stenvik, called it “essentially using a 5-year-old as bait.”
An adult who lives in the home was there and begged the agents to let them keep the boy safe with them, but the officers said no. Instead, they took both father and son to a detention center in Texas.
The Department of Homeland Security pushed back on some of this, saying they weren’t targeting the child at all—it was an operation aimed at the father. They explained that the dad ran away when agents came up, leaving the boy alone for a moment, so one officer stayed with Liam to keep him safe while the others got the father. DHS also said it’s standard policy to give parents the choice: either get removed together with their kids or leave the children with someone safe that the parent picks.
It’s still not clear why the boy wasn’t handed over to that other adult who was pleading to take care of him.
The family’s lawyer, Marc Prokosch, stressed that they weren’t here illegally—they came through an official border entry point and have been following the asylum process every step of the way. There’s an active asylum case, no deportation order, and the family has done everything by the book. “They are not criminals,” he said.
Superintendent Stenvik backed that up too, saying she’s personally seen the paperwork. She was really upset, asking, “Why detain a 5-year-old? You cannot tell me that this child is going to be classified as a violent criminal.”
This wasn’t the only incident in the area lately. The school district said three other students were detained by ICE this month alone—one a 17-year-old pulled from a car by armed and masked agents without parents around, and a 10-year-old taken along with her mom on the way to elementary school. The girl even called her dad saying the agents would drop her at school, but when he got there, both she and her mom were gone.
Liam’s older brother, who’s in middle school, came home just 20 minutes later to an empty house and no idea where his little brother and dad had gone.
It’s tough to read about something like this—a tiny kid caught up in all of it. The whole thing has left the community shaken and raised a lot of questions about how these enforcement actions are playing out, especially when children are involved.