Just days after being released from an immigration detention center in Texas, Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old boy in a bunny hat whose image rocketed around the world, is facing an escalating effort to deport him and his father.
The federal government wants to have the family’s asylum claims dismissed without a full hearing, and on Friday, a lawyer for Liam and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, appeared before an immigration judge to contest the government’s effort.
The hearing, held virtually and closed to the public, did not resolve the underlying question of their asylum claim, according to the family’s lawyer, Danielle Molliver. But she said the judge had given her more time to argue for Liam and his father.
“He is not being deported today,” she said. “We are deeply committed to the family and to fighting for them to the end.”
Ms. Molliver called the move to speed up the process “extraordinary” and possibly “retaliatory.”
Tricia McLaughlin, a representative for the Department of Homeland Security, contended the family would receive full due process, despite their latest motion.
“These are regular removal proceedings,” she said. “This is standard procedure, and there is nothing retaliatory about enforcing the nation’s immigration laws.”
Ms. Molliver said Liam and his father, of Ecuador, had legally entered the country through a humanitarian program in December 2024. The Department of Homeland Security had charged that Mr. Conejo Arias had entered the country illegally.
The boy’s detention by federal agents in a Minneapolis suburb last month rattled the community and beyond, after images of Liam standing in a Spider-Man backpack and a bunny hat during an immigration operation circulated around the world. Dozens of immigrants detained at the site in Dilley, Texas, where the boy and his father had quickly been transferred, were captured in drone footage as they walked out and shouted in protest over the conditions in which Liam and other children were being held.
Less than a week ago, Liam and his father arrived back home in Minnesota after Democratic representatives in Texas, lawyers and activists intervened and a federal judge ordered their release in a blistering opinion that denounced their detention as “the imposition of cruelty.”
Representative Joaquin Castro of Texas, who was part of a delegation of Democratic legislators who visited Liam and his father at the detention center, said in a social media post that he had picked up the family from the facility last Saturday and escorted them to Minnesota the next morning.
In a news conference on Friday over conditions at Texas detention facilities, Mr. Castro said Liam’s family had entered the country legally under the nation’s asylum laws, had no criminal record and posed no harm to the community. Liam’s mother, who is pregnant, had a medical emergency when she learned Liam and his father had been taken in, Mr. Castro said.
“They should leave Liam alone,” Mr. Castro said. “That young boy has been through hell, and the Trump administration keeps picking on him.”
Seeking to expedite deportation has become a common action against asylum seekers and other immigrants now battling their removal from the country in immigration courts. Since October, federal government lawyers have increasingly been asking judges to “pretermit,” or dismiss, asylum cases without hearings, asserting that applicants can seek asylum in other countries with which the United States has been working out new asylum agreements, including Honduras and Uganda.
“They are moving very fast,” Ms. Molliver said. “Their deportation could happen in a matter of weeks.”
