Ok….
Let’s just forget the ‘Softer Approach’ stuff from Trump & Co on immigration….
Thess guys ARE gonna just kee[ pushing this into a media hole that will cost them….
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 spokeswoman 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 immigrant detainees 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 lawmakers 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.”
…
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….
Note….
Liam HAS become the poster kid for what IS wrong with the Trump/Miller Immigration ‘Surge’…
image…Adrian Conejo Arias and his son, Liam Conejo Ramos, in San Antonio after being released from an immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas.Credit…U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, via Associated Press
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