Thousands of people on Friday braved icy conditions to protest the immigration crackdown of US President Donald Trump’s administration in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and businesses closed their doors amid anger over the detention of a five-year-old migrant boy.
Dozens of eateries, attraction sites and other businesses shuttered as part of a day of coordinated action to defy the weeks-long federal immigration operation under way in Minnesota.
Images of an apparently terrified preschooler, Liam Conejo Ramos, being held by immigration officers who were seeking to arrest the boy’s father have rekindled public outrage at the federal crackdown, during which an agent shot and killed a US citizen.
Photo: AP
The superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools, where Ramos was a preschool student, said the child and his Ecuadoran father, Adrian Conejo Arias — both asylum seekers — were taken from their driveway on Tuesday as they arrived home.
Ramos was then used as “bait” by officers to draw out those inside his home, superintendent Zena Stenvik added.
One protester, who declined to be named, said he was marching “because if we don’t fight, we don’t win. If we don’t fight, fascism wins.”
Photo: Columbia Heights Public Schools via AFP
The local man held a sign reading “five-years-old, dude,” a reference to Ramos.
Thousands of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been deployed to the Democratic-led city, as Trump presses his campaign to deport undocumented immigrants across the country.
On a visit to Minneapolis on Thursday, US Vice President J.D. Vance confirmed Ramos was among those detained, but he argued that agents were protecting him after his father “ran” from officers.
Photo: Reuters
“What are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to let a five-year-old child freeze to death?” he asked.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk called on US authorities to end the “harmful treatment of migrants and refugees.”
Arias was at a Texas detention facility, according to an ICE database that does not list the whereabouts of under-18s.
Photo: AFP
US Customs and Border Patrol senior official Gregory Bovino defended his officers’ treatment of Ramos, telling reporters on Friday: “I will say unequivocally that we are experts in dealing with children.”
ICE commander Marcos Charles said that “my officers did everything they could to reunite him with his family” and said that Ramos’ family refused to open the door to him after his father left him and ran from officers.
They would be detained “pending their immigration proceedings,” he added after alleging they entered the US illegally and were “deportable.”
Separately, federal immigration agents detained a two-year-old girl and her father in Minneapolis on Thursday and transported them to Texas, according to court records and the family’s lawyers.
The father, identified in court filings as Elvis Joel TE, and his daughter were stopped and detained by officers at about 1pm when they were returning home from the store.
By the evening, a federal judge had ordered the girl be released by 9.30pm, but federal officials instead put both of them on a plane heading to a Texas detention center.
Irina Vaynerman, one of the family’s lawyers, told the Guardian late on Friday afternoon that immigration officials had since flown them back to Minnesota and released the two-year-old into the custody of her mother.
The father remains detained in Minnesota, she said.
“The horror is truly unimaginable,” Vaynerman said. “The depravity of all of this is beyond words.”
As the father and daughter were arriving home on Thursday, agents entered their backyard and driveway area, Kira Kelley, one of the family’s lawyers, wrote in a filing.
The officers did not have a warrant, the attorney said.
One agent then allegedly broke the glass window of the father’s car while the girl was inside.
The mother was by the door and stepped inside the house as the agents approached, Kelley wrote.
The agents refused to allow the father to bring his daughter to the mother or other family members “waiting terrified inside the home.”
The two-year-old and her father were then placed in an immigration agent’s vehicle, which Kelley wrote did not have a car seat.
Lawyers filed an emergency petition, first reported by the Minnesota Star Tribune, demanding that ICE release Elvis Joel TE and his daughter.
A Minnesota-based federal judge issued an order at about 8:10pm prohibiting the government from transferring them outside of Minnesota, and soon after issued a second order that the government immediately release the girl into the custody of Kelley.
Kelley had obtained permission from the girl’s mother to be a temporary guardian “for the purpose of retrieving the infant from immigration detention.”
The federal judge said the release of the girl was necessary due to the “risk of irreparable harm,” saying it was highly likely the underlying petition would succeed on the merits.
“Needless to say, she has no criminal history,” the judge wrote, of the toddler.
However, the US government placed the father and daughter on a flight to Texas at about 8:30pm, the family’s lawyers wrote.
The father, originally from Ecuador, has a pending asylum application and no final order of removal, his attorneys said.
The girl has lived in Minneapolis “since her arrival in the United States as a newborn,” the lawyers wrote.
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to questions on Friday about why the father and daughter were taken to Texas and what steps the government took to comply with the judge’s order.
In a statement, a DHS spokesperson said border patrol had been conducting a “targeted enforcement operation” on Thursday when agents “identified” Elvis Joel TE.
DHS called him an “illegal immigrant,” alleging he had unlawfully reentered the US and claiming he was “driving erratically with a child.”
DHS said that the father refused to open his door or lower his window and said agents “attempted to give the child to the mother who was in the area, but she refused.”
“DHS law enforcement took care of the child who the mother would not take,” the statement said.
Vaynerman said the claim that the mother “refused” to take her daughter was false, saying agents would not let the father return his daughter to the home to be with her mother.
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