A federal judge on Saturday ordered the government to release 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Conejo Ramos, from ICE custody, saying their detention offended the principles of America enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
Liam and his bright blue bunny hat became a national sensation after video of his father being arrested went viral.
Judge Fred Biery, a Clinton appointee to the court in Texas, included a photo of the boy as the walk-off to a scathing opinion denouncing the government’s actions.
“The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” he wrote.
He said the arrest and detention — which included the boy because, the government said, the father chose to keep the family together — failed key tests of due process.
He accused the government of a “perfidious lust for unbridled power.”
And he compared President Trump’s immigration enforcement surge to inciting “domestic insurrection,” sending “hither swarms of officers to harass out people,” “quartering large bodies of troops among us” and keeping “standing armies without the consent of our legislatures.”
Those are four of the complaints Thomas Jefferson wrote in the declaration, which celebrates its 250th anniversary this year.
Judge Biery cast himself as a bulwark against the president, writing that he held his “judicial finger in the constitutional dike.”
He added, “Ultimately, Petitioners may, because of the arcane U.S. immigration system, return to their home country, involuntarily or by self-deportation. But that result should occur through a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place.”
Judge Biery finished his opinion with the photo of Liam in his blue snow hat and citations to Matthew 19:14, where Jesus says to let the children come unto him, and John 11:35, the shortest passage of the Bible: “Jesus wept.”
Mr. Conejo Ramos was targeted for arrest in Minnesota on Jan. 20. DHS officials said he was in the country illegally and when officers went to pick him up, he fled, abandoning Liam in a vehicle.
The man was soon arrested.
The boy’s mother, meanwhile, refused to open the door for officers — apparently fearing Liam was being used as bait so they could arrest her too — so U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took custody of the boy.
Faced with a choice between having Liam go into social services or go with him to an ICE family detention facility, Mr. Conejo Ramos chose the latter, ICE said.
A lawyer for the father said the family came from Ecuador in 2024, making them part of the Biden border surge. They were trying to gain asylum in the U.S. and were following the law while here, the lawyer said.
The issue before Judge Biery was a “habeas corpus” petition, which is a narrow but powerful challenge to government detention.
The fiery rhetoric aside, his ruling joins with hundreds of other decisions by federal judges across the country that have ordered migrants released, rejecting the government’s contention that an administrative warrant is sufficient to hold them in detention while their deportation cases proceed.
“Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster. That is called the fox guarding the henhouse,” he wrote.
