Top Homeland Security officials said on Friday that a 5-year-old whose detention near Minneapolis provoked outrage was being “well cared for” as he remains in a Texas detention center with his father.
“That child is in the least restrictive setting possible,” said Gregory Bovino, the official in charge of President Trump’s Border Patrol operations, said at news conference outside Minneapolis.
Bovino and others defended the actions of federal agents after a photo of the prekindergarten pupil, Liam Conejo Ramos, who was wearing a winter hat with floppy ears and a Spider-Man backpack, became a magnet for fury at the government’s drive to detain immigrants in the Twin Cities.
The child and his father are now in a detention center in Dilley, Tex.
Mr. Bovino said ICE officers and Border Patrol agents are probably more experienced at handling young people than “any domestic law enforcement agency.”
“I will say unequivocally that we are experts in dealing with children,” he said. “Not because we want to be, but because we have to be.”
Hundreds of thousands of children have passed through their custody in recent years, he said, including a toddler who he said appeared to have been drugged and was found to have “nonsurgical sutures” in his abdomen and 14 “lost children” working at a marijuana farm in California.
The detention of Liam on Tuesday provoked a storm of public criticism. The child’s school district and the federal government have given conflicting accounts.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for Homeland Security , said this week in a statement that when the agents sought to detain the child’s father, he fled on foot and left Liam behind in a vehicle.
School officials accused immigration agents of then making the child knock on the door of his home as “bait” so they could apprehend others.
School officials who witnessed the detention said that an adult in the home had said, “I will take the child, I will take the child,” and that another relative who was outside had “begged” to take him.
Ms. McLaughlin, by contrast, said that agents had tried to get Liam’s mother to take the boy, but that she had refused.
Mr. Bovino began the news conference by listing several “illegal criminal aliens” that he said ICE agents had apprehended in Minneapolis. “Again, that is what we’re here to do and we’re not going to be deterred,” he said.
A reporter asked Marcus Charles, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, whether Liam’s father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, had a criminal record. Mr. Charles said he would have to supply that information later.
A lawyer for the family has said that both father and son had entered the country legally, had active asylum claims and were “pursuing a legal pathway.” He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Charles, however, said the family had entered the country illegally “a few years back,” and that the father had been ordered to leave.
After the man was detained, Mr. Charles said, Liam had been taken to the door of his home in order to return him to his family. “Tragically, when we approached the door of his residence, the people inside refused to take him in and open the door,” Mr. Charles said.
“My officers stayed with the child, he said. “They cared for him, took him to get something to eat from a drive-through restaurant and spent hours ensuring he was taken care of. Not his father.”
“We have not encountered the mother as of this time,” he added.
Mr. Arias has since requested that his son be with him, Mr. Charles said.
“They are being well cared for at a family residential center, pending their immigration proceedings,” Mr. Charles said.
Shaila Dewan covers criminal justice — policing, courts and prisons — across the country. She has been a journalist for 25 years.
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