Vice President J.D. Vance visited Minneapolis on Thursday to participate in a roundtable discussion with local business leaders and law enforcement amid weeks of violent protesters clashing with and obstructing ICE officers.
His visit also coincided with viral reports that ICE “detained a five-year-old boy in Minneapolis.” As reported on Friday’s AM Update, that was the framing The New York Times and ABC News used to cover the situation involving five-year-old Liam Ramos.
On X, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused ICE of “terrorizing a population using children as pawns,” while and “outraged” Kamala Harris called Ramos “just a baby” who “should be home with his family, not used as bait by ICE and held in a Texas detention center.”
What DHS Says
The Department of Homeland Security has refuted the claims, posting on X that ICE did not target a child, arrest a child, or use a child as bait. Instead, the agency accused the boy’s father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, of abandoning his son during a “targeted operation” conducted by ICE on January 20.
According to DHS, Conejo Arias is “an illegal alien from Ecuador who was released into the U.S. by the Biden administration.” When agents approached him, he apparently fled on foot without the child. “For the child’s safety, one of our ICE officers remained with the child while the other officers apprehended Conejo Arias,” DHS said on X.
The woman believed to be the child’s mother reportedly refused to accept custody of him, and DHS alone was left to care for the boy. Multiple attempts were apparently made to get the alleged mother to take him, with agents even assuring her that she would not be taken into custody.
ICE eventually caught the father, and he chose to have the child remain with him. As DHS explained, parents have the choice to keep their children with them upon removal or to have them placed with a safe person of the parents’ choosing, which is consistent with the policy of past administrations.
DHS said it also allows parents being removed to use the CBP Home app, which gives them a free flight back to their native country and $2,600. Additionally, it reserves them the right to try and come back to the U.S. the legal way.
Late Thursday, the family’s attorney claimed that the family has been seeking asylum through the protocol established by the Biden administration. As Megyn noted on AM Update, proper asylum seekers are not technically considered illegal immigrants. When AM Update asked DHS about that claim, they referred us to their earlier statement, which refers to this man as an illegal immigrant.
Vance Reacts
Speaking to the press on Thursday, Vice President Vance criticized the media coverage of the situation. “I’m a father of a five-year-old… and I think to myself, ‘Oh my God, this is terrible. How did we arrest a five-year-old,'” he said. “Well, I do a little bit more follow-up research, and what I find is that the five-year-old was not arrested, that his dad was an illegal alien, and then when they went to arrest his illegal alien father, the father ran.”
“Are they supposed to let a five-year-old child freeze to death? Are they not supposed to arrest an illegal alien in the United States of America,” he asked. “If the argument is that you can’t arrest people who have violated our laws because they have children, then every single parent is going to be completely given immunity from ever being the subject of law enforcement. That doesn’t make any sense. No one thinks that makes any sense.”
Megyn’s Take
With misinformation about the case running rampant, Megyn addressed the viral claims about the five year old on Friday’s edition of The Megyn Kelly Show and broke down the nuances of the story that the corporate media has ignored. Watch:
You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 1,237 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.