Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security is trying to expedite deportation proceedings against the family of a 5-year-old boy who has become the face of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation strategy.
Photos of Liam Conejo Ramos standing in the snow wearing a Spiderman backpack and blue bunny-ears hat went viral last month after the preschooler and his father were detained by ICE in Minneapolis and sent to a detention facility more than 1,000 miles away in Texas.
Before Ramos and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, were released on Saturday on a federal judge’s orders, the boy became feverish, vomited, and grew lethargic, but was denied medication because the detention center said they didn’t have any, Arias told ABC News.
Earlier this week, top officials at the Department of Justice vowed to appeal the order granting the father and son’s release. Arias and his wife, who is pregnant with the couple’s third child, came to the U.S. from Ecuador with Liam and their oldest child in 2024 and legally applied for asylum.
But now, DHS has filed a motion to end the family’s asylum claims and fast-track their deportation, Minnesota Public Radio reported. Their attorney, Danielle Molliver, told the MPR she believed the motion was “retaliatory.”
“There’s absolutely no reason that this should be expedited,” she said. “It’s not very common.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to DHS, which is led by the ICE agent-cosplaying Noem, for comment.
The federal government cannot deport the family to their home country of Ecuador if they would face persecution there, Molliver added. Instead, they could apply for asylum in a third country.
Arias told MPR in Spanish that the government was “doing everything possible to do us harm, so they’ll probably deport us. We live with that fear too.”
Since their release, Liam wakes up crying during the night, reliving the moment on Jan. 20 that immigration agents handcuffed his father while his mother—who neighbors said was too scared to come outside—cried inside the family home, Arias told Telemundo on Thursday.
“He hasn’t been the same since this all happened,” Arias said.
Witnesses later said the agents discussed having Liam knock on the front door to get whoever was inside to come out, leading to accusations they wanted to use the boy as “bait,” NBC News reported.
DHS has disputed the family’s account, claiming that Arias “fled on foot—abandoning his child” and that Liam’s mother refused to take custody of him.
“For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended Conejo Arias,” DHS said.
But while ordering the father and son’s release, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, a Clinton appointee, blasted ICE officials for an “ill-conceived and incompetently implemented case” designed to meet “daily deportation quotas.”
Biery also criticized the department’s use of so-called “administrative warrants”—which are signed by ICE and not a neutral third-party judge—to enter and search the homes of potential deportees.
“Civics lesson to the government: administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster. This is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer,” he wrote.
After the ruling, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement, “ICE did NOT target or arrest a child.”
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