US federal officials struggled Friday to quell growing outrage over the detention of a five-year-old boy in a massive immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, as businesses in the city shut down in protest at the ongoing raids.
The superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools, where Liam Conejo Ramos was a preschool student, said the child and his Ecuadoran father, Adrian Conejo Arias — both asylum seekers — were taken from their driveway as they arrived home.
Ramos was then used as “bait” by immigration officers to knock on the door of his home to draw out those inside, Zena Stenvik added.
Thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been deployed to the Democratic-led city, as President Donald Trump presses his campaign to deport illegal immigrants across the country.
In defiant comments Thursday, Vice President JD Vance confirmed Ramos was among those detained, but argued that agents were protecting him after his father “ran” from officers.
“What are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to let a five-year-old child freeze to death?” he said.
The UN rights chief Volker Turk called on US authorities to end the “dehumanizing portrayal and harmful treatment of migrants and refugees.”
Democratic congressman Joaquin Castro, whose constituency includes a San Antonio ICE detention center to which it was thought Ramos was taken, rejected Vance’s explanation.
“My staff and I have been trying to figure out his whereabouts, make sure he’s safe, and also to demand his release by ICE,” he wrote on X.
Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino defended his officers’ treatment of Ramos, telling reporters Friday: “I will say unequivocally that we are experts in dealing with children.”
ICE commander Marcos Charles said Friday “my officers did everything they could to reunite him with his family” and alleged that Ramos’s family refused to open the door to him after his father left him and ran from officers.
Ramos and his father were at a “family residential center pending their immigration proceedings,” he added after alleging they entered the United States illegally and were “deportable.”
Charles claimed that “agitators” with shields had gathered outside the federal facility where he was speaking, a flashpoint for anti-ICE protests.
The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office said dispersal orders were issued for an “unlawful protest.”
Ramos’s teacher, whose name was given as Ella, called him “a bright young student.”
“All I want is for him to be back here and safe,” she said in a statement Wednesday.
Calls for a day of action against ICE and a general strike have been gaining traction on social media, with a demonstration expected in downtown Minneapolis on Friday.
Anti-Trump group Indivisible Twin Cities called for a day of “No work. No school. No shopping” as part of a broader anti-ICE protest across the state that will include a march through downtown Minneapolis ending at the Target Center arena.
Hundreds of shops, eateries and attractions closed their doors, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported.
Separately, protesters picketed outside Minneapolis St. Paul airport over the facility’s use for deporting those swept up in immigration raids, with organizers reporting 100 arrests.
‘Just a baby’
Former US vice president Kamala Harris said she was “outraged” by Ramos’s detention and called him “just a baby.”
Ramos is one of at least four children detained in the same Minneapolis school district this month, local administrators said.
Minneapolis has been rocked by increasingly tense protests since federal agents shot and killed US citizen Renee Good on January 7.
An autopsy concluded that killing was a homicide, a classification that does not automatically mean a crime was committed.
Three activists were charged with disrupting a Sunday church service with a protest accusing a pastor of working for ICE.
The officer who fired the shots that killed Good, Jonathan Ross, has neither been suspended nor charged.
Marc Prokosch, the lawyer for Ramos and his father, said they followed the law in applying for asylum in Minneapolis, which is a sanctuary city where police do not cooperate with federal immigration.
Children have long been caught up in federal immigration enforcement, under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Minnesota has sought a temporary restraining order for the ICE operation in the state which, if granted by a federal judge, would pause the sweeps. There will be a hearing on the application Monday.
