Defiant protests over US immigration crackdown, 5-y-o’s detention
WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Thousands of people braved icy conditions on Friday to protest the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, and businesses closed their doors amid anger over the detention of a five-year-old migrant boy.
Dozens of eateries, attraction sites and other businesses shuttered as part of a day of coordinated action to defy the weeks-long federal immigration operation underway in Minnesota.
Images of an apparently terrified pre-schooler, Liam Conejo Ramos, being held by immigration officers who were seeking to arrest the boy’s father have rekindled public outrage at the federal crackdown, during which an agent shot and killed a United States (US) citizen.
The superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools, where 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 on Tuesday.
Ramos was then used as “bait” by officers to draw out those inside his home, Superintendent Zena Stenvik added.
One protester, who declined to be named, told AFP he was marching “because if we don’t fight, we don’t win. If we don’t fight, fascism wins.”
The local man held a sign reading “five-years-old, dude,” a reference to Ramos.
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 undocumented immigrants across the country.
On a visit to Minneapolis on Thursday, Vice President JD Vance confirmed Ramos was among those detained. But he 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.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk called on US authorities to end the “harmful treatment of migrants and refugees.”
Arias, the father of the boy, was at a Texas detention facility, according to an ICE database that does not list the whereabouts of under-18s.
