NINA MOINI: This is Minnesota Now. Thank you for joining us. Five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos is still in immigration detention, his mother told MPR News. ICE officers detained the boy and his father last Friday in Columbia Heights on their way home from school.
The story of Conejo Ramos’ detention has circulated all over the world, and news of protests this weekend in Minnesota apparently reached the detention center in Dilley, Texas, where the child and his father are being held. Detainees demonstrated there this weekend. Attorney Eric Lee heard the protest and joins me now to tell us more about what he heard. Thank you so much for joining the program, Eric.
ERIC LEE: Hi. Thanks for having me.
NINA MOINI: We’re also happy to have Sam Doiron, an attorney with the Texas-based group RAICES. Thank you as well for being here, Sam.
SAM DOIRON: Yeah, thanks for having me.
NINA MOINI: Eric, would love to start with you. You’re based in Michigan, and I understand you actually went to the University of Minnesota Law School. You do have a connection to this area, and you were at Dilley in Texas meeting with clients. Would you describe for our listeners what you witnessed in the detention center over the weekend?
ERIC LEE: Sure. I was visiting a family that has been detained at Dilley for eight months. Their name is El Gamal. That includes two five-year-old twins who turned five in there. They’ve spent 20% of their lives behind bars. There’s a nine-year-old, a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old, and their mother. This I was visiting this family yesterday, or on Saturday, and while I was waiting for the chance to meet them, guards rushed in and said, get out, get out. I didn’t what was happening. I walked back to my car and heard what sounded like hundreds and hundreds of children shouting, screaming. And I realized they were saying, let us out, let us out.
The conditions in this facility are absolutely abysmal. They mix baby formula with water that is putrid. The food has bugs in it. The guards are often verbally abusive. One of my clients had appendicitis, collapsed in the hallway, was vomiting from pain, and the officials told him, take a Tylenol and come back in three days.
NINA MOINI: With all that in mind, what did you learn about what led to this protest in particular, and in what the families were asking for, Eric?
ERIC LEE: What’s so important about this situation is that they were mobilizing because of the general strike that took place on Friday in Minneapolis and because of the attention that’s been brought on this facility. The fact that these kids who have everything to lose, who can be punished, who can be split up from their families in retribution for participation– in fact, my 18-year-old client was just split up from her family as a result of speaking to the media, and she’s now being denied religious accommodations and the right to daily visitation with her mom and siblings.
But that’s a message to the American people. I don’t think that this is a temporary tactical retreat. The danger of dictatorship is still very, very present in Minneapolis and beyond. And the fact that kids are out there risking their situations should be a message to everybody in Minneapolis and beyond to keep fighting and to bring this government down. It’s a criminal administration that should not be in power.
NINA MOINI: And, Sam, for folks who don’t a lot about these immigration detention centers and how they work in the United States and how they’re growing, can you talk about what they’re like, and specifically who gets to go to a family immigration detention center and how that works?
SAM DOIRON: Sure. So in general, there are primarily adult detention centers throughout the United States. The family detention centers are specifically for families. So it’s mothers, fathers, sometimes a two-parent family, and their children who are held together in an immigration detention facility. And as far as who goes and who doesn’t, I’m not sure how exactly they parse that out because we have seen where a parent will be detained in one place and their children are not detained at all. And then we see many, many, many whole families detained.
NINA MOINI: Do you have a sense for what is supposed to happen, what the process should be like inside of a family detention center? How often do the children see their parents? Are they with them the majority of the day?
SAM DOIRON: Yes. So in Dilley, in this facility, the mothers and fathers are held separately, but during the day they can co-mingle and they can spend time with their families. And the children are with one of the two parents or with the parent that they’re with, and that’s where they sleep with the parent and everything. So as far as family units, they are held together unless there are two parents, and then one of those parents will be held in a separate section of the facility.
NINA MOINI: I wonder, Eric– we’ve heard reports in Minnesota, and you mentioned some of people being arrested and then quickly sent to detention centers elsewhere. Can you describe how that happens or of how you’re able to track your clients?
ERIC LEE: Well, it’s often impossible to track the clients. Oftentimes, clients are being moved in the middle of the night when the ICE and DHS assume that attorneys will not have their phones on. We have to get up in the middle of the night when we hear the phone call ring, we have to file the habeas petition before the plane flies over the state lines and before these people end up in Texas, where you have immigration judges who are Trump loyalists.
In the El Gamal family’s case, an immigration judge denied them bond last week, claiming in part that they had a lack of property and assets and that they were therefore a flight risk. How does a five-year-old have property and assets? What are they supposed to have accumulated at that age, so that they can not be a flight risk and show up to future immigration court proceedings? So it’s a huge issue, and there is often no way to tell where they are until ICE updates their tracker, which often happens many days later.
NINA MOINI: And I know you said, Eric, and both of you, really, that people are speaking out in these situations where it could be dangerous for them or they might feel like they are in danger for speaking out, but we’re doing it nonetheless, and children at that. Do you have a sense, Eric, if that made any sort of a difference in any way?
ERIC LEE: Well, I know that yesterday when Sam and I were at Dilley, when we were being interviewed by a reporter, a guard at the facility, CoreCivic, flipped us off as he or she was driving out. If that’s how they treat the First Amendment rights of attorneys and national news journalists, imagine how they’re treating these children behind closed doors. We haven’t heard signs of retribution yet because the cameras are rolling, but when the cameras go away, and hopefully they won’t this time, hopefully all these kids and their parents will be freed.
But the risk that these kids have taken is certainly immense. And again, I think that what that shows to the population of this country is keep this movement from below going. The Trump administration was forced to temporarily back down, not because of anything that the Democratic Party did, but because this movement from below is growing. The call for a general strike is acquiring increased popularity. That’s the direction that this has to keep going if we’re going to free all these people from these internment camps.
NINA MOINI: And, Sam, just lastly, bringing it back to Dilley in particular, I’m reading here, it was used under the first Trump administration, became adults only under the Biden administration, closed in 2024, then reopened in 2025 under the second Trump administration. Do you have a sense for how this center in particularly may have plans to grow?
SAM DOIRON: Not so far. We have seen signs of a population change, which usually signals something new is going to happen at a detention center. But all we can do right now is speculate, so we don’t what the plans are exactly.
NINA MOINI: All right. I want to thank you both so much for your time and joining Minnesota Now. I appreciate it.
ERIC LEE: Thank you.
SAM DOIRON: Thank you.
NINA MOINI: Eric Lee is a Michigan-based immigration lawyer, and Sam Doiron is an attorney with the Texas-based group RAICES. We’ve reached out for comment from ICE and did not receive a response before this show. However, CoreCivic is the company that operates the family detention center in Dilley. A spokesperson said in a statement that all the company’s facilities, quote, “are subject to multiple layers of oversight and are monitored very closely by our government partners to ensure full compliance with policies and procedures, including any applicable detention standards.”
