In a statement posted on Thursday<\/a>, the Department of Homeland Security said that agents detained five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos earlier this week because his mother declined to take custody and his father requested that the child remain with him after he was apprehended.<\/p>\nColumbia Heights School Board Chair Mary Granlund, however, said that another adult at the scene of the detention signaled that they could take Liam.<\/p>\n
\u201cI heard, \u2018What are you doing? Don\u2019t take the child\u2019\u2026There was another adult who lived in the home that was there saying, \u2018I will take the child, I will take the child,\u2019\u201d said Granlund, who witnessed part of the incident. \u201cSomebody else was yelling, they saw that I was there and said, \u2018School is here. They can take the child. You don\u2019t have to take them.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was ample opportunity to be able to safely hand that child off to adults,\u201d said Granlund, who did not specify who the other adult in the home was. Granlund said she offered to take Liam as well, to no avail. <\/p>\n
Granlund and Superintendent Zena Stevnik added that they have provided support to Liam\u2019s mother, but have not spoken with her about the DHS claim that she refused to take custody. Liam\u2019s father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, had stressed that she shouldn\u2019t open the door as agents were detaining him, Granlund said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would infer that the mother was probably fearful to open that door,\u201d Stevnik said.<\/p>\n
Stevnik also noted that the school would not have taken custody of Liam, but that they could have taken him back to preschool and identified who to contact if a parent wasn\u2019t available.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I exited my vehicle, I immediately said, \u2018Where is the child, where is the child? That\u2019s what I was there to do, is to collect the child and return them safely to school,\u201d said Stevnik.<\/p>\n
Stevnik raised questions, too, about DHS’s claims that Conejo Arias had “fled” the scene. <\/p>\n
\u201cEverything I\u2019ve heard is that he was handcuffed in the driveway. What we saw when we arrived on scene was the father\u2019s car in the driveway still running. So the car wasn\u2019t turned off,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Columbia Heights Public Schools In a statement posted on Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security said that agents…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":431704,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[64,63,2490,134,10835,43686,5387,427],"class_list":["post-431703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-donald-trump","tag-entertainment","tag-greenland","tag-immigration-and-customs-enforcement","tag-minnesota","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=431703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/431704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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