We’re picking up from The Other 98% Facebook page the good news that the five-year-old boy arrested by ICE agents along with his father has been released. The image of Liam wearing a bunny hat quickly went viral and helped expose Trump’s brutal anti-immigrant policy.
Five year old Liam Conejo Ramos is finally going home after a federal judge ordered that he and his father be released from an ICE detention center in Dilley, Texas by Tuesday. The pair were snatched from a Minneapolis suburb and shipped 1,300 miles away, turning a preschooler in a Spider Man backpack into the latest proof that Trump’s immigration machine is built to scare families, not keep anyone safe.
In a blistering opinion, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery wrote that Liam’s case “originates from the ill conceived and incompetently implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.” He went further, warning 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and are bereft of human decency, and the rule of law be damned,” and blasted the government’s “ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence.”
Liam’s release did not happen out of kindness from ICE, it was pried loose by lawyers, organizers, and Democrats who called out a system that used a five year old as bait to get to his parents. Biery still notes Liam’s family could face deportation under what he calls an “arcane” immigration system, but insists that outcome must come through “a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place,” which is judge speak for this whole setup is morally rotten.
