Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) said that the two returned to their home in Minnesota on Sunday morning.
Five-year-old Liam Ramos and his father have returned to Minnesota after a judge on Jan. 31 ordered their release from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility.
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), whose state houses the Dilley detention center where the two were held, said that the boy and his father, Adrian Arias, had returned to their home in Minnesota on Sunday morning.
“Yesterday, five-year-old Liam and his dad Adrian were released from Dilley detention center. I picked them up last night and escorted them back to Minnesota this morning,” Castro wrote in a post on X. “Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack.”
He referenced the photo that brought Ramos’s case to national attention, in which the young boy was wearing a blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack while surrounded by immigration officers.
The administration’s immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis have increasingly become a flashpoint in national politics, with critics calling for the administration to withdraw ICE and other immigration enforcement agents from the city.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin has stated that ICE was only targeting Arias. The government says both Arias and Ramos are nationals of Ecuador.
McLaughlin said Ramos’s mother refused to take custody of him following his father’s arrest and Arias had wanted the boy to remain with him.
“The Trump administration is committed to restoring the rule of law and common sense to our immigration system, and will continue to fight for the arrest, detention, and removal of aliens who have no right to be in this country,” McLaughlin said.
The government has said that Arias entered the United States illegally from Ecuador in December 2024.
Arias’s lawyer said he has an asylum claim pending that allows him to stay in the United States, though the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review’s online court docket shows no future hearings on such a matter.
Ramos and Arias’s return to Minneapolis comes after U.S. District Judge Fred Biery ordered their release the previous day.
By Joseph Lord
