ABANDONED OR S;ET U;P? The explosive truth beh:ind the 5-year-old boy sn;;atc;hed by ICE as dad and feds trade blows over ‘cowardly’ escape

Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old boy who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and went viral, has returned to Minneapolis with his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, after they were released from a detention center in Texas.

On Sunday, Feb. 1, the father-son duo boarded a plane to Minnesota, as seen in footage obtained by ABC News. The pair went viral back in January, when ICE agents detained them in their driveway following their return home from Conejo Ramos’ preschool.

“I’m happy to finally be going home,” Adrian told ABC News as he carried his sleeping son onto the aircraft.

Their trip home comes a day after a Minnesota judge ordered that Adrian and Liam be released from the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas.

Judge Fred Biery of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas pointed out an “ill-conceived and incompetently government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” according to the order obtained by The New York Times.

He also called out the “government’s ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence.”

“Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency,” Biery continued, per the Times. “And the rule of law be damned.”

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In the days before their release, Zena Stenvik — superintendent for Liam’s Columbia Heights Public Schools District — told the Huffington Post that Liam was “not doing great” healthwise while he was being held at the detention center.

“He’s been ill,” she told the outlet. “I’ve been told he has a fever. So I’m very, very concerned about his well-being in that facility.”

On Jan. 26, Liam’s mom, Erika Ramos, told MPR News that she found her husband and son’s situation “deeply concerning.”

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“Liam is getting sick because the food they receive is not of good quality,” she explained at the time. “He has stomach pain, he’s vomiting, he has a fever and he no longer wants to eat.”

Two days later, Democratic Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro visited the family residential center himself and said in a post on X that, while Liam’s physical condition wasn’t an “emergency,” the child had been “sleeping a lot because he’s been depressed and sad.”

He added that “the whole country’s been worried about him,” as well as his schoolmates and educators, plus “his legal team and his mom.”

After Liam and Conejo Arias were detained on Jan. 20, ICE agents allegedly asked the child to knock on the door of his home to see if any other people were inside. Stenvik described the agents as “essentially using a 5-year-old as bait.”

“This family is following U.S. legal parameters and has an active asylum case with no order of deportation. I have viewed the legal paperwork with my own eyes,” she said in a statement to The Guardian and Fox 9. “Why detain a 5-year-old? You cannot tell me that this child is going to be classified as a violent criminal.”

The family’s lawyer, Marc Prokosch, also echoed her sentiment at the time.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it was not targeting the child, stating that it is ICE’s policy to ask parents if they want to be removed with their children.

“As agents approached the driver, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias fled on foot—abandoning his child,” DHS previously said in a statement to PEOPLE. “For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended Conejo Arias.”