The detention of Liam Conejo Ramos, age five, marks the turbocharging of a policy discontinued five years ago
This week, ICE’s detention of a five-year-old boy wearing a Spider Man backpack in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights quickly became a defining image of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration enforcement. Furious critics, including many local politicians, seized on Liam Ramos’s ordeal as glaring evidence that Trump’s mass deportation campaign has little to do with crime and a lot to do with terrorizing children and their families.
A homeland security spokesperson said ICE officers took the boy into custody only after an attempt to arrest his father led to a foot chase. But Liam Ramos’s detention is not an isolated incident. It’s part of a uniquely aggressive push to detain more unauthorized immigrant families, a turbocharging of a policy discontinued five years ago.
ICE booked some 3,800 minors into immigrant family detention from January to October 2025, including children as young as one or two years old, according to a Guardian analysis of records obtained by the Deportation Data Project. More than 2,600 of those minors were apprehended by ICE officers, which usually means they were apprehended somewhere inside the country rather than at the border.
