On Saturday, United States District Judge Fred Biery ruled that five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father must be released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.

Judge Biery in his ruling wrote:

Before the Court is the petition of asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias and his five-year-old son for protection of the Great Writ of habeas corpus. They seek nothing more than some modicum of due process and the rule of law. 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.

After citing Thomas Jefferson and the Fourth Amendment, Biery ruled to grant the father and son habeas corpus, or judicial review of one’s detention, and their release pending review.

Liam and his father were detained by ICE on January 20 in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights. Columbia Heights public schools superintendent Zena Stenvik told reporters that ICE agents took the child from a running car before having him knock on his family home’s front door, “essentially using a 5-year-old as bait.”

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), posted on X that ICE did not “arrest a child or use a child as bait.” McLaughlin claimed that the child was abandoned by his parents and that ICE agents followed guidelines used by previous administrations to ask parents if “they want to be removed with their children, or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates.” (Sic)

The five-year-old was later moved to a detention facility in Texas. ICE has apparently applied this tactic multiple times during its operations in Minnesota. According to attorney Irina Vaynerman, her client Elvis Joel Tipan Echeverria and his two-year-old daughter were pulled from their car by ICE agents and then put on a flight to Texas within eight hours of their detention. Vaynerman stated: “They’re doing that in order to evade the reach of the federal district court in Minnesota.”

ICE operations in Minnesota have received widespread criticism, including from the UN, raising concerns of ICE operations violating international law. On Wednesday, a US federal court issued a temporary restraining order blocking ICE officers from arresting and detaining refugees who have been  living in Minnesota who are not yet citizens.