In light of recent turmoil, it can be hard to believe that a year ago, many Americans, arguably a majority, approved of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and promise for a new era of mass deportation.
This general approval — a desire, really, for a secure southern border with Mexico — always came with some important caveats. How the question of mass deportations was framed mattered quite a bit in terms of the responses given.
Or as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, told us in January 2025 before Trump returned to power, “When you do individualized polling on mass deportations, you find the general vibe of the country is, ‘I want to kick out the bad hombres and keep the good ones here who’ve been paying taxes and working for years.’”
As we witnessed last year as immigration courts were turned into traps for asylum-seekers, workers were detained and families split apart, the Trump administration disregarded this important distinction about the immigration policies most Americans want.
Yes, they want a controlled southern border. Yes, they want people accused of violent crimes to be deported.
But most Americans do not want families and communities to be broken up. They do not want ICE sweeping through cities the way they have in Charlotte, N.C., Chicago and Minneapolis.
They do not want innocent Americans such as Alex Pretti and Renee Good to be fatally shot by federal agents. And they don’t want 5-year-olds such as Liam Conejo Ramos to be detained and thrust into the deportation machine. A 5-year-old boy is not a threat. He is a child.
Enter U.S. District Judge Fred Biery and his magnificent order Saturday requiring the release of Liam and his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, from the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Frio County, about 70 miles southwest of San Antonio.
The judge’s order allows the father and son to remain in the country, and at home in Minnesota, as their immigration cases move forward.
The two were detained in Minneapolis with federal officials saying they overstayed their immigration parole. Their attorneys, however, have argued they have an asylum claim.
There also have been widespread concerns — from Liam’s mother and U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, of San Antonio, who recently visited the father and son in Dilley — that Liam’s health deteriorated while in detention.
Biery’s order is as legally sound as it is scathing.
“The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” he wrote. “This Court and others regularly send undocumented people to prison and orders them deported but do so by proper legal procedures.”
Biery continues: “Apparent also is the government’s ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence.”
In three pages he checks the Trump administration’s disregard for the law, quotes Thomas Jefferson’s warning about kings and tyrants, invokes the Fourth Amendment, and closes with a photo of Liam and references to Matthew 19:14 and John 11:35.
Matthew: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”
