Judge orders 5-year-old boy, his dad be released from immigrant center

Liam Conejo Ramos, 5, and his father are being held at a Texas immigrant center. U.S. District Judge Fred Biery on Saturday ordered they be released while their case proceeds through the court system.

In a ruling that includes a stinging rebuke of the Trump administration, a federal judge in San Antonio has ordered the release of an Ecuadorian man and his 5-year-old son who are being held in a South Texas immigrant detention center.

U.S. District Judge Fred Biery's order, issued Saturday morning, requires that Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias and his son, Liam Conejo Ramos, be released from federal custody while their immigration case proceeds through the court system. Biery's order requires they be released by Tuesday.

Conejo Arias and his son were detained in Minnesota after federal officials said they had overstayed their immigration parole.

Their attorneys say they are in the country under an asylum claim, but in court filings, federal officials that the man and his child are not here legally and that their immigration parole expired in April. Conejo Arias and his son are currently being held at the Dilly Immigration Processing Center in Frio County, about 70 miles southwest of San Antonio.

Biery's ruling accuses the Trump administration of "ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence," and contends that the case against Conejo Arias and his son "has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children."

Biery wrote that "because of the arcane United States immigration system," and Conejo Arias and his son may at some point "return to their home country, involuntarily or by self-deportation. But that result should occur through a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place."

Biery's order requires Conejo Arias and his son be released "under appropriate conditions of release no more restrictive than those in place prior to the detention at issue in this case, to a public place as soon as practicable, but in any event, no later (than) Tuesday."

The Saturday ruling followed a temporary order Biery signed Monday that prohibited federal officials from removing Conejo Arias and his son out of the Western District of Texas while the case proceeded.

In the government's response to that earlier ruling, federal officials argued that Conejo Arias and his son were not entitled to the relief sought. The document says that Arias and his son are lawfully detained, that the other claims should be severed and dismissed, and that the court should deny the petition in its entirety.

The government response did not address the family's claim that they have sought asylum, but says Conejo Arias and his son they arrived at a port of entry in Brownsville on Dec. 14, 2024, and that parole was granted only through April 15, 2025.

Conejo Arias and his son were detained on Jan. 20 in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. They were brought to Texas and have been held at the Dilly Immigration Processing Center in Frio County, about 70 miles southwest of San Antonio.

Their detention came as the nation has watched confrontations between Minnesota protesters and ICE agents and the subsequent deaths of two American citizen protesters in Minneapolis who came into contact with federal officers during demonstrations in the state.

Neighbors and officials from the child's school in a Minnapolis suburb have accused federal immigration officers of using the preschooler as "bait," saying the boy was told to knock on the door to his house so that his mother would answer the door.

Officials with the Department of Homeland Security disputed those accusations and described that depiction as an "abject lie." They say Conejo Arias fled on foot and left his son in a running vehicle in their driveway.

Dozens of people have protested the family detention facility in Dilley since the boy and his father were brought to Texas.

U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, who along with fellow Texas Democrat U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, led a delegation Wednesday to talk with Conejo Arias and his son at the center. At least two protesters were taken into custody after troopers with the Texas Department of Public Safety deployed smoke canisters to contain the crowd.

This is a developing story and will be updated.