ICE agents seize boy, 5, and his dad outside front door after returning from school run
Liam Ramos was taken into custody with his father Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias on Tuesday
A five-year old boy has been detained by Immigration and Enforcement officers in Minneapolis as he returned home from school.
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Liam Ramos was taken into custody with his father Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias on Tuesday as ICE officers confronted the pair on their driveway moments after arriving home. They have reportedly been sent to a detention centre in San Antonio, Texas.
The move has sparked fierce backlash at a time where tensions in Minneapolis are soaring amid ICE’s immigration crackdown, which this month saw an agent shoot and kill protester and mother Renee Good, 37.
Zena Stenvik, an education official in Columbia Heights, a suburb of Minneapolis, said at a press conference on Wednesday: “Why detain a five-year-old?
“You cannot tell me that this child is going to be classified as a violent criminal.”
She said drove to the father’s home when she found out they had been detained to find his car still running and the pair already apprehended.
An ICE agent had taken Liam out of the car, brought him to the front door and ordered him to knock on the door asking to be let in “in order to see if anyone else was home – essentially using a five-year-old as bait”, Ms Stenvik said in a statement.
Read more: Trump threatens to invoke Insurrection Act and send troops into Minneapolis
Another adult who lives at the property was outside during the confrontation and had “begged” to take care of Liam so the boy could avoid detention, but this request was denied, the superintendent claimed.Liam’s older brother, who is in middle school, returned home 20 minutes later to find his father and brother missing, Ms Stenvik added.
Hitting out at ICE, she said: “ICE agents have been roaming our neighborhoods, circling our schools, following our buses, coming into our parking lots and taking our kids."
"Our children are traumatized. The sense of safety in our community and around our schools is shaken,” Stenvik said.
“I can speak on behalf of all school staff when I say our hearts are shattered. After our fourth student was taken yesterday, I just thought someone has to hear the story. They’re taking children.”
Marc Prokosch, the family’s attorney, said they have an active asylum case and shared paperwork proving the father and son had arrived in the US at a port of entry, meaning an official crossing point.
He said there was no deportation order made against them. “The family did everything they were supposed to in accordance with how the rules have been set out,” Mr Prokosch said.
He added: “They did not come here illegally. They are not criminals.” It comes as the US Army has ordered more military police to get ready for possible deployment to Minneapolis as fears of further disorder grow amid Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Dozens of personnel from a military police brigade Fort Bragg in North Carolina have been issued the prepare-to-deploy orders, according to a defence official.
The troops would offer support to civil authorities in Minneapolis, the official told Associated Press.
Around 1,500 active-duty soldiers from the Army’s 11th Airborne Division based in Alaska have been issued similar orders, the outlet reports.The Trump administration has already deployed thousands of Department of Homeland Security agents after a wave of unrest swept across Minneapolis in defiance to ICE raids.
President Trump has also threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, a rarely used law that would let him deploy members of the army to be used as law enforcement.
"If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don't obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E, who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State," he wrote on social media.