Five year old Liam Conejo Ramos is finally back in Minnesota, wearing that soft blue bunny hat and clutching his Spider Man backpack instead of a detention number.
In the days before his release, his family and school officials warned he was ill in detention, with fever, vomiting and not wanting to eat, the kind of decline you expect from a place built for punishment, not children.
Of course someone from the trump administration said he is AOK with zero “medical concerns,” but that does not erase the image of a five year old getting sick behind barbed wire while adults argue on TV about “deterrence.”
At the airport and on the trip out of Texas, relief kept colliding with a cold fury. Representative Joaquin Castro, who visited Liam in detention and then helped escort him and his dad out, handed the five year old a letter telling him he had “moved the world” and that “your family, school and many strangers said prayers for you and offered whatever they could do to see you back home.
” He also wrote, “Don’t let anyone tell you this isn’t your home. America became the most powerful, prosperous nation on earth because of immigrants not in spite of them,” a quiet rebuke to the whole premise of turning a kindergartner into a cautionary tale.
The truth is their ordeal is not over just because they cleared the fences. The family still has to fight through an asylum system with more hearings and paperwork ahead, while lawmakers and advocates push for humanitarian parole, long term protection and investigations into how this arrest happened in the first place.
Castro is tying that fight to a broader promise he made after escorting them home, writing, “Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack.
Thank you to everyone who demanded freedom for Liam. We won’t stop until all children and families are home.”