SAN ANTONIO — Flanked by state and local leaders, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a San Antonio Democrat, and U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Dallas Democrat, on Wednesday called for the immediate release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father Adrian Conejo Arias, whose arrests in a Minneapolis suburb last week have become a flashpoint in the furor over the Trump administration’s deportation tactics.
Photographs of federal authorities detaining the Ecuadorian child, who was wearing a Spider-Man backpack and pale blue oversized winter hat, quickly went viral as some Americans saw it emblematic of the government’s severe practices in Minnesota, where immigration agents shot and killed two people this month. Liam and his father were flown to an immigrant detention center about 70 miles south of San Antonio and on Monday a federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked their deportation.
Recommended Videos
The congressional Democrats met Wednesday with the family, who Castro said entered the U.S. legally through a Biden-era application called CBP One that allowed asylum seekers to seek protection in the country after waiting months for an appointment. The father told the lawmakers that his son was now “very depressed,” wasn’t eating and appeared lethargic.
“His father said that Liam has been sleeping a lot, that he’s been asking about his family, his mom and his classmates, and saying that he wants to be back in school,” said Castro, who told the family that “most of America wants Liam released.”
But, Castro added, “the sad tragedy of all of this is that Liam is emblematic of the inhumanity of our (immigration) detention system.”
Castro said they met with dozens of families in the facility, including the parents of a two-month-old infant, and saw many children younger than 5 who told the representatives that they were receiving no schooling, even though some had been imprisoned for as long as eight months. All the detainees they met had been locked up for longer than two months, a period of detention which attorneys say has skyrocketed under the Trump administration.
“The treatment that these people are suffering under right now is worse than those that are accused and sometimes even convicted of crimes,” said Crockett, a criminal defense attorney who noted that federal officials told her that no one detained in Dilley was accused of any crimes beyond immigration offenses, which is a civil matter.
The transfer of Liam and his father to the South Texas Family Residential Center has renewed attention on the nation’s only detention facility that is permitted to hold families. The Biden administration shuttered the facility, which can hold up to 2,400 people, but Trump reopened it last year. Attorneys say that its population has exploded in recent months as the administration has ramped up arrests of families in the interior of the country.
Dozens of detained immigrant families protested over the weekend chanting, “Libertad,” or “Let us go,” said Eric Lee, a Michigan immigration attorney who represents an Egyptian family at the facility that has been imprisoned for months. Lee and other visitors were forced out of the facility, he said, describing the guards as “white faced” about the uprising. He said the teenage daughter of his clients was separated from her mother and siblings after speaking out about the poor conditions there. In a letter the teen wrote that the attorney shared, she said, “no family should ever be separated or have to stay detained for months … we don’t even know if or when we will get out.”
Those protests continued Wednesday as Castro and Crockett visited the facility. Lee and other attorneys said Department of Homeland Security officials placed the facility on a lockdown, including refusing to allow children to attend medical appointments.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a statement that the facility was not on a lockdown and that ICE would “NEVER deny any illegal alien medical care.”
“These types of smears are leading to our officers facing a more than 1,300% increase in assaults against them,” McLaughlin said.
Outside the heavily secured and cordoned-off facility, hundreds of faith and labor leaders, advocates and residents from across the state marched down the main street of Dilley toward the detention center, demanding the release of not only Liam and his father, but all detainees. At some point, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers deployed tear gas against protesters and news media, witnesses said.
In a statement, DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen said that troopers responded to the protest at the request of Dilley officials. She said that after police ordered protesters to disperse, about 150 people “refused to leave and began to breach the established protest barrier and spit on officers. Despite continued orders to disperse, the group remained and DPS took less-lethal action, deploying pepper ball grenades and pepper ball projectiles.”
DPS troopers arrested two people on charges including resisting arrest and interfering with public duties. At least one woman was later treated by EMS in San Antonio.
The scrutiny on the family detention facility follows years of complaints by advocates, except that the conditions at the Dilley center now are worse, attorneys said.
“Children as young as newborns are being confined for weeks and months on end, often with no explanation beyond bureaucratic shorthand,” said Robyn Barnard, senior director of refugee advocacy at Human Rights First, an international nonprofit.
A two-decade old federal settlement agreement, known as Flores, governs the rights of children in detention and generally holds that they cannot be detained longer than 20 days when they are with their parents. But the Trump administration, which is trying to undo that agreement in federal court, is broadly violating that guidance, according to attorneys and advocates.
“We have found no evidence that ICE is even reviewing the length of detention for children to ensure compliance with their rights under the Flores Settlement Agreement,” Barnard said.
Her organization represents a pregnant woman who has been detained at the South Texas facility for four months despite having a “very strong asylum claim for protection and a place to go if released.” But ICE officials have repeatedly denied that request.
Since March, Barnard said the Trump administration has detained hundreds of immigrant families from dangerous countries such as Afghanistan, Russia, the Ukraine, Cuba and Haiti, “including families that have been uprooted from their communities here in the United States while they’ve been patiently awaiting their day in court to have their asylum case heard and have followed every rule and condition put on their release by DHS, like many that we’ve seen detained and uprooted from Minnesota in the last three weeks.”
She said families detained there have poor drinking water, food and hygiene conditions and are forced to sleep with the lights on 24 hours a day. Attorneys believe that the administration is planning to send some of the families to Mexico under a controversial program known as Remain in Mexico that Trump reinstated after Biden ended it. That initiative, called the Migrant Protection Protocols, forced asylum seekers to wait in dangerous Mexican border towns for their U.S. immigration court hearings and was plagued with problems.
Since the Trump administration launched its mass deportation efforts, deaths of immigrants in detention have reached a new record.
One in four ICE arrests from Trump’s second inauguration through July 2025 occurred in Texas. The state also has the highest concentration of immigration detention facilities in the country Over the last two months, ICE reported four deaths in Texas detention facilities, including a 55-year-old Cuban man whose death was ruled a homicide by the El Paso Medical Examiner’s office.
While none of those have occurred in the Dilley family detention center, Michelle Brane, who served as immigrant detention ombudsman under the Biden administration, said, “every family detention facility that any administration has tried to set up has been found to be inhumane, inappropriate for children, ineffective, incredibly costly, and in the end, has been closed.”
The Trump administration, she said, “returned to this practice after multiple courts, public opinion, medical experts and everybody has in essence agreed that they’re harmful and not effective.”
The scrutiny on the Dilley detention center comes after a violent month in Minnesota where the Trump administration sent federal agents to arrest immigrants. After Border Patrol agents shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti on Saturday, the Trump administration removed the head Border Patrol agent, Gregory Bovino, from the operation and sent in Tom Homan, a former ICE chief and Trump’s designated “border czar,” in what was widely viewed as a rebuke of Bovino’s tactics. Pretti’s death occurred just a few weeks after federal agents in Minneapolis shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good. Both were U.S. citizens.
The U.S. Senate is expected to vote this week on expanded funding for DHS and Pretti’s shooting has caused some senators to say they may reconsider their vote. U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, an Austin Republican who is retiring next year, was one of a handful of congressional Republicans to urge an investigation into Pretti’s killing.
“I am troubled by the events that have unfolded in Minneapolis,” he said on X. “I look forward to hearing from DHS officials about what happened here and how we can prevent further escalation in the future.”
At the press conference Wednesday, Castro, Crockett, and other state and local officials urged Senate Democrats to vote against the DHS funding request.
“We have the power of the purse, not the president,” Crockett said. “It is time for us to flex our power.”
They urged Congress to impeach DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and deputy chief of staff and adviser Stephen Miller while seeking to represent Liam as the face of what they called ICE’s cruelty and racist practices by the administration. Some of their comments were briefly interrupted by a lone protester who broadcasted over a loudspeaker: “We don’t care about illegal aliens. We only care about Americans.”
The speakers noted that the administration has wrongly arrested dozens of U.S. citizens.
“Donald Trump ran for the presidency saying he was going to go after ‘the worst of the worst.’ Today he is holding a 5-year-old in a prison,” said U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, an Austin Democrat. “Imagine that that’s your child, your little boy or little girl. That should break the heart of every American. This does not make anyone safer and it makes us all less free.”