The federal judge for the Western District of Texas, Fred Biery, has ordered the provisional release of the five-year-old boy Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrián Alexander Conejo Ariasinterned in the Dilley immigration detention center, in Texas, while the open immigration procedure is resolved.
The arrest of Conejo Arias and his son in Minnesota during an intervention by federal agents sent by the Administration of President Donald Trump sparked a wave of outrage over the boy’s age. Biery’s order, reported by the San Antonio Express-News, provides for the release of both for next Tuesday.
The lawyers of the two Ecuadorians assure that have formally requested asylum in the countrybut federal agencies maintain that they are not legally in the country and that the deadline to leave the United States ended in April.
Now the judge’s ruling points to the federal Administration for “ignoring an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence” because Conejo’s case “has its genesis in an attempt to apply deportation quotas that were poorly conceived and applied incompetently, even traumatizing children.”
The judge highlights that the “administrative orders issued by the executive do not stand up to evidence of probable cause“. “It is what is called putting the fox to guard the henhouse. The Constitution requires having an independent judicial agent,” he argued.
According to the newspaper, the judge noted that the case against both “has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently implemented search by the government of daily deportation feesapparently even if it requires traumatizing children.”
Last Monday Biery already issued another opinion prohibiting the deportation of the child and his father while examining the case of the minor and his father, arrested on January 20 in Columbia Heights, on the outskirts of Minneapolis. The photograph of the minor detained next to an agent vehicle went around the world.
Neighbors and officials from the boy’s school have claimed that the agents used the boy as “bait” to get him to knock on the door of his house and get his mother to come.
The arrest and the image of the boy wearing a blue hat and a Spider-Man backpack while a masked federal agent stood behind him sent shockwaves through the country, becoming a symbol of repression against immigration carried out by the Trump government.