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Minnesota officials are condemning Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after agents allegedly used a five-year-old child as “bait” during a detention operation outside a family’s home this week.
According to The Hill, ICE officers detained five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, on Tuesday (January 20) after the child returned home from preschool in Columbia Heights, Minnesota.
Columbia Heights Public School District Superintendent Zena Stenvik told Minnesota Public Radio that another adult in the home pleaded with ICE agents to allow him to take custody of the child. The request was denied.
“Instead, the agent took the child out of the still-running car, led him to the door, and directed him to knock on the door asking to be let in in order to see if anyone else was home,” Stenvik said. “They essentially used a 5-year-old as bait.”
Witnesses said Conejo Arias briefly ran from officers before being detained. ICE later defended the operation, claiming Conejo Arias “fled on foot — abandoning his child,” and said an officer stayed with the five-year-old for safety reasons while others apprehended the father. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin insisted agents “did NOT target a child.”
However, the family’s attorney, Marc Prokosch, disputed that account, saying the family has an active asylum case with no deportation order. Stenvik said she personally reviewed the family’s immigration paperwork.
“Every step of their immigration process has been doing what they’ve been asked to do,” Prokosch said. “This is just cruelty. Something being legal does not make it moral.”
Ramos and his father were taken into custody and are believed to be held at a detention facility in Texas.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz sharply criticized the operation.
“Masked agents snatching preschoolers off the street and sending them to Texas detention centers serves none of those purposes,” Walz wrote on X. “This campaign of retribution has got to stop.”
The case is part of a broader pattern in the Columbia Heights school district, which reports that four students have been detained by ICE this month alone. Those incidents include the detention of two 17-year-old students and a 10-year-old girl who was taken into custody alongside her mother.
The incident has intensified outrage in Minnesota, where tensions with federal immigration authorities have already been high following the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE officer earlier this month.
“Why would you ever put a 5-year-old in the middle of a federal operation?” Prokosch asked. “That question should haunt all of us.”
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