A federal judge has ruled that 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father should be released from a Texas detention center, reported the San Antonio Express-News.
The child and his father, Alexander Conejo Arias, were detained by immigration agents in Minneapolis and sent over a thousand miles away to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. They have been in the center for more than a week.
The order says that Ramos and his father should be released “as soon as practicable” with a deadline of Tuesday while their immigration case moves through the judicial system.
Immigration officials claim that Conejo Arias and his preschool-aged son overstayed their immigration parole, but their attorneys say that the father and son are here under an asylum claim.
U.S. District Judge Fred Biery’s ruling also said that the Trump administration is demonstrating “ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence,” and said that the case against Ramos and his father “has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.”
Not letting up, Judge Biery also noted that the “administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster. That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer.”
The judge’s order also prevents Ramos and his father from being moved to another detention center pending release.
Earlier this week, two Texas lawmakers, Joaquin Castro and Jasmine Crockett, visited Ramos and his father at the detention center. The boy’s father said that the child had been unwell due, in part, to poor nutrition at the facility.
Minnesota Public Radio spoke to the boy’s mother, who is still in Minnesota, echoed those sentiments.
“Liam is getting sick because the food they receive is not of good quality,” said Ramos’s mother, Erika. “He has stomach pain, he’s vomiting, he has a fever and he no longer wants to eat.”
The child’s detention went viral after pictures of him in a Bluey winter cap being led into an SUV belonging to federal agents. The situation was troubling and perhaps is made even worse by the government’s admission in early December that around 400 immigrant children were left in detention longer than the 20-day limit imposed by a 1997 court-ordered standard for children who are detained.
Furthermore, the center where Ramos and his father are detained has a history of problems including poor nutrition and insufficient access to medical care.
“Children get diarrhea, heartburn, stomach aches, and they give them food that literally has worms in it,” someone who has family staying at the facility in Dilley wrote in a declaration submitted to the court for the Central District of California. Another wrote that they were given “broccoli and cauliflower that were moldy and had worms.”
These claims are part of an ongoing civil lawsuit.
