A five-year-old boy who spent nearly two weeks detained in US immigration suffers nightmares, terrified his family could be separated again, said his father.
Liam Conejo Ramos, who was born in Ecuador, and his father Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias returned to Minneapolis on Saturday after a federal judge ordered their release pending their asylum cases.
The pair were taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on the driveway of their family home on 20 January.
“He hasn’t been the same since this all happened,” Adrian, an Ecuadorian national, told Telemundo.
“He’s very scared. At night he wakes up several times crying and asking for help… he has nightmares. He calls me when he wakes up and says, ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ so I have to go to him.”
He said ICE agents confronted him outside his home after returning from picking up Liam from nursery, and told his wife, pregnant with the couple’s third child, to stay inside.
A photo of Liam, wearing a bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack as he was surrounded by officers, went viral and caused outrage among protesters and the wider public.
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Their detention came between the high-profile killings of Minneapolis residents Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, both 37 and US citizens.
Adrian told Telemundo that, since returning to Minneapolis, that the family are “in hiding”.
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He said: “We are in hiding. Nobody really knows where we are. We are afraid to go out on the streets and have this happen to us again”.
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Describing his controversial detention, Adrian recalled one agent suggesting that Liam could knock on the front door to get whoever was inside the house out.
Witnesses, including an employee from Liam’s school, would later recall hearing similar discussions among the agents, leading to accusations that they were using the young boy as “bait”.
The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly denied using Liam as “bait”, saying instead that Liam’s father ran off without him to evade capture, and that his mother refused to take custody of him.
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The incident became a flash point in ongoing debates over whether immigration officials had gone too far in detaining a young boy.
An attorney for the family has said Liam and Adrian were following all “established protocols” for pursuing asylum, and should never have been detained.
