Trump’s deportation surge loses big in Texas court, but prevails in Minnesota

The Justice Department plans to appeal a federal judge’s scathing ruling that freed 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father and suggested the Trump administration was acting immorally and violating the founding principles of the Declaration of Independence.

Liam, who became a sensation after video of him wearing a blue bunny hat in the custody of ICE officers went viral, was back in Minnesota on Sunday along with his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, a day after U.S. District Judge Fred Biery ordered them set free.

He heaped scorn on the Trump administration for arresting and detaining Mr. Conejo Arias and bringing Liam along for the ride. He said the government was showing a “perfidious lust for unbridled power” as it failed key tests of due process for the family.

“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,” wrote Judge Biery, a Clinton appointee to the court in Texas.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told ABC’s “This Week” program that they will appeal, but declined to address the judge’s denunciations.

“I don’t have a comment specifically on what that judge said yesterday, but generally speaking, we are complying with the law every single day,” he said.

The administration’s legal loss in Texas was balanced out by a major victory in a federal court in Minnesota, which declined in a ruling Saturday to order the government to shut down its enforcement surge in the state.

Judge Katherine Menendez, a Biden appointee, delivered a scolding to Homeland Security and its two immigration law enforcement agencies, saying the surge into the Minneapolis area has had “heartbreaking” consequences for the region.

She said there’s been racial profiling, excessive use of force and multiple shootings of residents.

But she said higher courts have urged lower judges to show caution in shutting down federal operations.

“The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals recently vacated a much more circumscribed injunction which limited one aspect of the ongoing operation, namely the way immigration officers interacted with protesters and observers,” she wrote. “If that injunction went too far, then the one at issue here — halting the entire operation — certainly would.”

She rejected Minnesota’s request for an injunction halting the surge — though the case will continue.

Officials from the state and a number of its municipalities had filed the unprecedented lawsuit to end the two-month-old surge, arguing the show of federal force was costing the state by scaring residents, increasing their own police service calls and disrupting regular business in schools and courts.

They objected to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s recent letter suggesting the surge could be curtailed if the state agreed to cooperate on several Trump priorities, including turning over deportation targets from their prisons and jails, and providing a complete list of the state’s voters.

Judge Menendez said some of that behavior did seem to reach the line of coercion.

But she said there were also clear law enforcement objectives behind the federal operation. She said the Trump administration’s explanation that it needs to send in more agents because the locals won’t cooperate was reasonable.

The judge said she was “particularly reluctant” to try to balance those arguments, suggesting it was a political question beyond the scope of the courts.

Ms. Bondi called the decision “huge.”

“A Biden-appointed district judge denied Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s attempt to keep ICE out of Minnesota,” she said.

Judge Biery’s ruling, though, is the latest in a string of losses in individual cases where the government has argued it has broad arrest and detention powers when it comes to unauthorized immigrants.

Mr. Conejo Arias was targeted for arrest in Minnesota on Jan. 20. DHS officials said he was in the country illegally and when officers went to pick him up he fled, abandoning Liam in a vehicle.

The man was soon arrested.

The boy’s mother, meanwhile, refused to open the door to officers — apparently fearing Liam was being used as bait so they could arrest her too — so U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took custody of the boy.

Faced with a choice between having Liam go into social services or else go with him to an ICE family detention facility, Mr. Conejo Airas chose the latter, ICE said.

A lawyer for the father said the family came from Ecuador in 2024. They were attempting to gain asylum in the U.S. and were following the law while here, the lawyer said.

Mr. Blanche disputed that version, saying it was in doubt whether Mr. Conejo Arias had properly applied for asylum.

Judge Biery said the family may still end up deported, but he said he did his duty to stick his “judicial finger in the constitutional dike.”

He compared President Trump’s immigration enforcement surge to inciting “domestic insurrection,” sending “hither swarms of officers to harass out people,” “quartering large bodies of troops among us” and keeping “standing armies without the consent of our legislatures.”

Those are four of the complaints Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, which celebrates its 250th anniversary this year.

Judge Biery finished his opinion with the photo of Liam in his blue snow hat and citations to Matthew 19:14, where Jesus says to let the children come unto him, and John 11:35: “Jesus wept.”