Protesters clash with police at US detention center housing 5-year-old child

Texas state police officers on Wednesday, Jan. 28, used tear gas to disperse a demonstration outside a US immigration detention facility where protesters gathered to demand the release of a 5-year-old Ecuadoran boy among others picked up in the Trump administration’s immigration clampdown.

Scores of protesters gathered at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley on Wednesday, carrying signs accusing the federal agents of terrorizing communities.

“We want Kristi Noem impeached. We want the US Senate to defund ICE, to not give it any more money. And we need people to pay attention to the midterm elections this year,” local elected official Christina Morales told AFP.

Texas state law enforcement responded to the protest in riot gear, deploying tear gas cannisters, including one that landed near two AFP journalists, striking and temporarily incapacitating one of them.

Earlier, Democratic congressmembers Joaquin Castro and Jasmine Crockett conducted an inspection to visit the child, Liam Conejo Ramos, and 1,100 others detained there.

“His dad said that he hasn’t been himself, and he’s been sleeping a lot because he’s been depressed and sad,” Castro said in a video message posted to X, in which the congressman insists Ramos and his family were “legally in the United States.”

National outcry followed images of the apparently terrified preschooler, dressed in a fluffy blue bunny hat and wearing his school backpack, being held by immigration officers who were seeking to arrest the boy’s father in Minneapolis.

The child and his Ecuadoran father, Adrian Conejo Arias — both asylum seekers — were taken from their driveway as they arrived home on January 20, after the child was used as “bait” by officers to draw out those inside his home, according to the superintendent of the boy’s school, Zena Stenvik.

A federal judge temporarily blocked their deportation Tuesday, Jan. 27.

Castro also demanded the release of everyone else being held at the privately-run facility, saying “there are no criminals in Dilley. Donald Trump said this was about arresting illegal criminal ‘aliens’ — that’s his language. There isn’t a single criminal over there.”