Since Jan. 20, the case of Adrian Conejo Arias and his son, Liam Conejo Ramos, has drawn attention for the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement has moved them through the immigration system. On that date, the father and child were detained by ICE officers in Minnesota and taken to Texas, according to the Associated Press report. The same AP reporting says they were later released on a judge’s order, returned to Minnesota, and then faced an additional turn in the case when an immigration judge denied their asylum request; the family’s lawyer said the family is appealing.
The newest detail in the case comes from video obtained through public records requests and described by the AP. The footage, captured inside Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, shows the father and son escorted through the airport before boarding a Delta Air Lines flight. The AP report says Liam was 5 years old and that in the recording the family appeared calm as they moved through terminal areas that are open to the public.
In the video described by the AP, Liam’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, carries the boy’s Spider-Man backpack while an airline agent interacts with boarding passes. Other people in plain clothes follow the pair onto the jetway, with the escorts described by the AP as not looking like they are in formal custody. The AP report also says the family was flown to San Antonio about a day after they were taken into custody.
The AP report says the video had been identified earlier by Nick Benson, an aviation enthusiast and activist associated with MN 50501, a grassroots group involved in anti-ICE and No Kings protests. Benson told the AP that he had not seen children on ICE charter flights while monitoring airport movements, which led him to suspect ICE might be using commercial travel routes in some instances. The AP says Benson used the time and day of the commercial flight he identified, then filed a public records request for the airport security video to confirm the presence of the father and son.
Delta declined to comment on the specific video, the AP report said. The airline told the AP that most government travel is booked through third-party agencies and that it receives no advance notice about who is flying or why. The report said the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
The reporting also places the video within a broader effort by monitors to track ICE transport. The AP report says ICE Air Operations has been moving detainees using charter flights and that, in practice, ICE transportation arrangements often involve brokered charter services and subcontractors, including airlines such as GlobalX, Eastern Air Express, Bighorn Airways, Key Lime Air, and Avelo Airlines.
Human Rights First and other monitors have documented the scale of immigration-enforcement flights, the AP report said. The AP report cited Human Rights First data covering February enforcement aviation activity, saying monitors documented 1,630 immigration enforcement flights that month, including 183 deportation flights and 1,170 domestic transfer flights, and that the total represented an increase from January. The AP report also said monitors track ICE Air flights through flight-tracking websites, but that those tools cannot identify individual passengers on commercial flights.
“It seems that ICE sometimes uses commercial flights to destinations where they don’t carry out kind of larger scale ICE Air deportation flights,” Human Rights First’s Savi Arvey told the AP, adding that commercial passenger travel is “less in the public eye.” Arvey said that this “adds another level of opaqueness,” according to the AP report.