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Lawyers for the Ecuadorian asylum seeker have speculated the Trump administration is seeking ‘retaliatory’ actions.

The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has revealed it will continue to seek the deportation of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father Adrian Conejo Arias, after their recent return to Minnesota.

The department, however, denied it is seeking their expedited removal, as the family’s lawyer claimed.

“These are regular removal proceedings,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said on Friday. “This is standard procedure, and there is nothing retaliatory about enforcing the nation’s immigration laws.”

Conejo Ramos’s case has drawn nationwide attention since his initial detention on January 20.

Photos went viral of Conejo Ramos standing in the snow, dressed in floppy blue bunny ears, with an immigration agent grabbing onto his Spiderman backpack.

Officials in Minnesota’s Columbia Heights Public School District accused immigration officials of using the preschool student as “bait” for his father. DHS, meanwhile, has claimed that his father abandoned the child when approached by immigration authorities.

Each side has denied the other’s account of the January 20 arrest.

Since December, the administration of President Donald Trump has led an immigration crackdown in Minnesota known as Operation Metro Surge. As many as 3,000 agents were deployed to the state at the operation’s height.

But bystander videos and photos have raised questions about the heavy-handed tactics being used, particularly in the Minneapolis-St Paul metropolitan area.

There, two US citizens were shot dead by immigration agents in the last month alone: Renee Nicole Good on January 7 and Alex Pretti on January 24.

The outcry over the shooting deaths, as well as other reports of violence against bystanders and warrantless arrests, has prompted the Trump administration to announce this week the withdrawal of nearly 700 immigration agents.

The detention of Conejo Ramos and his father had been among the high-profile flashpoints during the crackdown.

The five-year-old and his father were detained as they were coming home from preschool. They were quickly transported from Minnesota to Dilley, Texas, where they were kept in an immigration processing centre while Trump officials sought their expulsion.

But on January 27, Judge Fred Biery ruled that the two should be released while they challenged their expulsion.

“They seek nothing more than some modicum of due process and the rule of law,” Biery wrote in his brief but cutting decision.

Conejo Ramos and his father arrived in the US from Ecuador. Their legal team has said the pair entered the country legally and were in the midst of their asylum proceedings at the time of their detention.

Lawyer Danielle Molliver told Minnesota Public Radio this week that DHS had filed documents to expedite the father and son’s removal, speculating that the action was “retaliatory”.

“It’s really frustrating as an attorney, because they keep throwing new obstacles in our way,” she told the public broadcaster. “There’s absolutely no reason that this should be expedited.”

Five-year-old Liam Ramos and his father have been released from a US immigration detention facility, following an order by a judge who accused ICE agents of traumatising children as they pursue the Trump administration’s deportation quotas.

Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, who were detained by immigration officers in Minnesota and held at an ICE facility in Texas, have been released a day after judge’s order, which excoriated the Trump administration for its conduct in the case. They have returned to Minnesota, according to the office of Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro.

The two were detained in a Minneapolis suburb on Jan. 20. He and his father were taken to a detention facility in Dilley, Texas.

Katherine Schneider, a spokesperson for Castro, a Democrat, confirmed that the two had arrived home. She said Castro picked them up from Dilley on Saturday night and escorted them home Sunday to Minnesota.

The Associated Press emailed the Department of Homeland Security for comment on the father and son’s release. There was no immediate response.

Images of the young boy wearing a bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack and surrounded by immigration officers drew outrage about the Trump administration’s crackdown in Minneapolis.

Neighbors and school officials say that federal immigration officers used the preschooler as “bait” by telling him to knock on the door to his house so that his mother would answer. The Department of Homeland Security has rejected that description. It said the father fled on foot and left the boy in a running vehicle in their driveway.

Castro wrote a letter to Liam while they were on the plane to Minnesota, in which he told the young boy he has “moved the world.”

“Your family, school and many strangers said prayers for you and offered whatever they could do to see you back home,” Castro wrote. A photo of the letter was posted on social media. “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.”

In a social media post, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) welcomed the boy back to Minnesota, saying that he “should be in school and with family — not in detention,” adding, “Now ICE needs to leave.”

Jan. 31 (UPI) — Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials must release Adrian Arias and his 5-year-old son, Liam, from detention, a federal district court judge ruled on Saturday.

U.S. District Court of Western Texas Judge Fred Biery Jr. on Saturday granted a writ of habeas corpus petition naming the father and son.

Biery likened his strongly worded ruling to placing a “judicial finger in the constitutional dike.”

The petitioners “seek nothing more than some modicum of due process and the rule of law,” Biery wrote.

“The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently, even if it requires traumatizing children,” he said.

“This court and others regularly send undocumented people to prison and orders them deported but do so by proper legal procedures,” Biery added.

He accused the federal officers of violating the Fourth Amendment via an unlawful search-and-seizure and said only judicial warrants enable them to arrest or detain people when there is no probable cause to do so.

“Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster,” he said.

“That is called the fox guarding the henhouse,” Biery said. “The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer.”

He ordered the federal government to release both from custody no later than Tuesday.

Former President Bill Clinton appointed Biery to the federal bench in 1993.

Federal officers arrested Adrian Arias and detained Liam while enforcing an administrative warrant for the father on Jan. 20 in the Greater Minneapolis area.

The two were transferred to a detention center in Texas, while awaiting deportation.

Liam’s mother, Erika Ramos, told media that she watched from a window as ICE officers detained her son and partner.

She said they led her son to the door and knocked while her son asked her to open the door, but she wouldn’t because she feared she would be arrested.

“When I didn’t open the door, they took Liam to the ICE van,” Ramos said, adding that she thought the officers were using her son as “bait.”

Ramos said she is pregnant and has another child, whom she feared leaving alone if she had opened the door and was arrested.

Homeland Security officials on Jan. 22 said the ICE officers wanted Ramos to open the door so that they could leave her son with her.

“Our officers made multiple attempts to get the mother inside the house to take custody of her child. Officers even assured her that they would NOT take her into custody.

“She refused to accept custody of the child. The father told officers he wanted the child to remain with him.”

They said the officers’ primary concern was the child’s safety and welfare and that the father is from Ecuador and subject to deportation.

SAN ANTONIO — A 5-year-old boy and his father must be released by Tuesday from the Texas center where they’ve been held after being detained by immigration officers in Minnesota, a federal judge ordered Saturday in a ruling that harshly criticized the Trump administration’s approach to enforcement.

Images of Liam Conejo Ramos, with a bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack being surrounded by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, have been a rallying point in the outcry over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. It also led to a protest at the Texas family detention center and a visit by two Democratic members of Congress.

U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, an appointee of President Clinton, said in his ruling that “the case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.”

Biery had previously ruled that the boy and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, could not be removed from the U.S., at least for now.

In his order Saturday, Biery wrote: “Apparent also is the government’s ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence,” suggesting the Trump administration’s actions echo those that Thomas Jefferson enumerated as grievances against England.

Biery also included in his ruling a photo of Liam Conejo Ramos and references to two lines in the Bible: “Jesus said, ’Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,’” and “Jesus Wept.”

He’s not the only federal judge who has been tough on ICE recently. A Minnesota-based judge with a conservative pedigree said this week that ICE had disobeyed nearly 100 court orders in the last month.

Stephen Miller, the White House chief of staff for policy, has said there’s a target of 3,000 immigration arrests a day. It’s that figure that the judge seemed to describe as a “quota.”

Spokespersons from the departments of Justice and Homeland Security did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

Neighbors and school officials say that federal immigration officers in Minnesota used the preschooler as “bait” by telling him to knock on the door to his house so that his mother would answer. The Department of Homeland Security has called that description of events an “abject lie.” It said the father ran off and left the boy in a running vehicle in their driveway.

The government says the elder Arias entered the U.S. illegally in December 2024. The family’s lawyer says he has a pending asylum claim that allows him to remain in the country.

During a visit Wednesday to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, by U.S. Reps. Joaquin Castro and Jasmine Crockett, the boy slept in the arms of his father, who said Liam was frequently tired and not eating well at the detention facility housing about 1,100 people, according to Castro.

Detained families report poor conditions including worms in food, fighting for clean water, and poor medical care at the detention center since its reopening last year. In December, a report filed by ICE acknowledged it held about 400 children longer than the recommended limit of 20 days.