Joaquin Castro via AP
When 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos walked off a plane in Minneapolis in early February, he was wearing a bright T-shirt and gripping his father’s hand. He had spent the previous 13 days not in his kindergarten classroom but inside the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, one of the largest family immigration detention facilities in the country. A federal judge had just ordered his release, and a pair of advocates had driven through the night to pick him and his father up and get them on a flight home.
Liam’s case drew national attention not because it was unique in the immigration system but because it put a specific face on a policy question the country has debated for years: should the U.S. government hold young children in locked federal facilities while their parents’ asylum cases are decided?
Thirteen days in Dilley
Liam and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, were taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and transferred to the Dilley facility, a sprawling complex about 70 miles southwest of San Antonio. The center, operated under an ICE contract, is designed to house parents and children together, a practice the government has framed as preferable to the family separations that provoked widespread outrage during the Trump administration’s 2018 “zero tolerance” policy.
But housing families together does not make the facility a home. The Dilley center is a secured compound with controlled movement, surveillance, and scheduled headcounts. Associated Press reporting described Liam as detained by ICE while his father pursued his immigration case. Photographs showed the boy in a large institutional room lined with rows of chairs, a space that resembled a processing center far more than a school or daycare.
Child-welfare advocates who have visited families at Dilley say children as young as Liam cannot meaningfully understand why they are locked inside or when they will be allowed to leave. Meanwhile, Liam’s relatives in Minneapolis were left coordinating with lawyers, fielding media calls, and trying to explain to a kindergartner’s teachers why he had stopped showing up to class.
The judge’s order
The turning point came when a federal judge reviewed the government’s justification for holding the pair and ruled that Liam and his father must be released. According to The New York Times, the judge focused on the child’s age and the conditions of confinement. The Los Angeles Times noted how unusual it was for a case involving a single young child to attract that level of judicial and public scrutiny.
The ruling echoed principles established in the Flores Settlement Agreement, a 1997 consent decree that sets limits on how long and under what conditions the federal government can detain migrant children. Flores requires that minors be held in the “least restrictive setting” appropriate and be released “without unnecessary delay.” Advocates have long argued that holding a 5-year-old in a locked ICE facility for nearly two weeks falls well outside those boundaries.
Earlier that same week, a group of Democratic lawmakers, including U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas, had traveled to Dilley to visit Adrian Conejo Arias and draw attention to the case. Their visit was documented in The Times’ coverage and added political pressure to an already high-profile situation.
The trip home
Once the judge’s order came through, ICE processed the release on a Sunday. But getting Liam and his father from a remote Texas detention center back to Minnesota still required outside help. According to PBS NewsHour, an advocate and Rep. Castro drove to Dilley on Saturday night to meet the family, then escorted them to an airport and onto a flight to Minneapolis the following day.
Relatives and supporters were waiting when Liam and Adrian landed. An ABC News segment captured the arrival: a small boy walking through the terminal, looking tired but holding tight to his father’s hand.
CBS News confirmed that ICE released the pair from custody that Sunday after processing the court order.
Why this case broke through
Thousands of families pass through the immigration detention system every year, and most of their stories never reach a national audience. Several factors made Liam’s case different.
First, his age. Five years old is young enough to be in kindergarten, young enough to need help tying shoes, and young enough to make the abstract concept of “family detention” feel viscerally concrete. Second, the length of his detention, nearly two weeks, tested the limits of what even supporters of family detention consider acceptable for a small child. Third, the case had identifiable advocates and elected officials willing to speak publicly, giving journalists named sources and on-the-record quotes rather than anonymous tips.
Media coverage accelerated the story’s reach. PBS NewsHour’s reporting, amplified through its educational outreach networks, brought the case to audiences who might not follow immigration news closely. ABC’s televised segment put Liam’s face on screen. And social media sharing turned a Minneapolis-area story into a national conversation within days.
The bigger question about family detention
For immigration-policy observers, Liam’s case is a single data point in a much larger debate. The federal government maintains that family detention centers like Dilley keep parents and children together and allow the government to ensure families appear for their court dates. ICE has pointed to high rates of no-shows among families released into the community as justification for detention.
Critics counter that alternatives to detention, such as ankle monitors, regular check-ins, or community-based case-management programs, achieve high compliance rates at a fraction of the cost and without subjecting children to institutional confinement. A 2024 report from the American Immigration Lawyers Association found that families enrolled in community supervision programs appeared for court hearings more than 90% of the time.
The Flores Settlement remains the legal backbone of the debate. Courts have repeatedly ruled that the agreement limits family detention to roughly 20 days, though administrations of both parties have sought ways to extend that window. Liam’s 13-day stay fell just under that threshold, but the judge’s order suggested that even that duration was difficult to justify for a child his age.
What comes next for Liam and his father
The judge’s order did not resolve Adrian Conejo Arias’ underlying immigration case. It moved the setting from a locked facility in South Texas to a home in Minneapolis, where Liam can return to school and his father can attend court hearings while living with family.
The legal road ahead is long. Asylum cases in the U.S. immigration court system routinely take years to resolve, and the backlog, which exceeded 3.7 million cases as of late 2025 according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, shows no sign of shrinking.
For now, the family’s focus is smaller and more immediate: getting Liam back into a classroom routine, helping him sleep through the night without the anxiety of headcounts and locked doors, and giving him space to process what happened in terms a 5-year-old can understand. The policy arguments will continue in courtrooms and on Capitol Hill. For Liam Conejo Ramos, the most important thing that happened in February was simpler than any of that. He went home.
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