Judge orders 5-year-old Liam Ramos and his father be released from immigration detention

A federal judge ordered the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejos Ramos and his father from the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, according to a source with knowledge of the federal judge’s ruling Saturday.

CNN has not independently obtained a copy of the judge’s ruling.

Liam and his father were taken by immigration agents from his snowy suburban Minneapolis driveway and sent 1,300 miles to a Texas detention facility designed to detain families. They’ve been detaine
The order specifies the preschooler and his father be released by Tuesday as their immigration case proceeds through the court system, according to the San Antonio Express-News, which first reported the ruling.

Liam’s detention – and the striking photo of an agent clutching the boy’s Spider-Man backpack as he stared from under a cartoon bunny hat – fed mounting outrage over the Trump administration’s massive immigration crackdown in Minneapolis and renewed the question: What happens to children when their parents are abruptly taken by ICE?

Though nationwide detentions have swept up some undocumented criminals – whom the Trump administration says they are targeting – they have also ensnared legal residents, families and small children. Liam is the fourth child from his school district to be taken away by immigration agents over a two-week period, Columbia Heights Public Schools said. And over the weekend, a toddler was returned to her mother in Minneapolis after being similarly detained and sent to Texas with her father.

By CNN