Boy, 5, and father detained by ICE in Minnesota are released
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This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Varaa aika heti. Nyt tutkimukset ilman rahastusta. Kun me oltiin menossa talvilomalle, niin siellä junassa me oltiin yötä makuvaunussa. Ja siellä oli myös sellainen ravintolovaunu, josta sai kaikkea ruokaa ja myös jälkkäriä. Sit me kävin seikkailemaan eri vaunuissa, ja siellä oli toinenkin lapsi. Se oli kans menossa talvilomalle, ja me mietin, että meissä tulee varmaan kaveri, kun me molemmat tykätään lumilautailusta. Se oli tosi kiva matka. Vapaus matkustaa raiteilla. VR. Yhteisellä matkalla.
This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Wendy Urquhart and at 4.30 GMT on Monday the 2nd of February, these are our main stories. A five-year-old boy detained by US federal immigration agents in Minneapolis has been released alongside his father. A former British cabinet minister resigns from the governing Labour Party over links to Jeffrey Epstein. And the Grammys take place in LA. We'll get a roundup of who won, who lost and who performed on stage. Also in this podcast, the Rafah crossing in Gaza is finally expected to reopen for Palestinians. I'm really happy that the crossing will be opened after waiting for two years of war. When it opens, I shall go for kidney transplant, God willing.
And we delve into the world of the Japanese samurai. One of the defining images of the immigration crackdown in the U.S. city of Minneapolis was the detention of a five-year-old boy wearing a blue bunny hat. Liam Conejo Ramos and his father Adrian were taken to a detention center in Texas. The family are from Ecuador and entered the United States legally as asylum applicants. Immigration agents claim the father abandoned his son when they approached. Now a judge has ordered that both father and son be released. Our correspondent Peter Bowes has been following the story.
Five-year-old Liam and his father were detained a little under two weeks ago from their home in Minneapolis. A little boy had just come home from nursery school when this happened. Now, the precise circumstances are disputed. The authorities say that this was an operation to detain the father, who they say was in this or is in this country illegally. They say that the boy was not the target of the operation. but that he was with his father and that they couldn't get the mother inside the home to answer the door to take him in. The family's version of that is that she didn't want to answer the door because she feared being detained herself, leaving her other child inside. So the boy stayed with the father.
They were both detained and taken over a thousand miles to a detention facility in Texas. And that's where they stayed until this weekend when a judge ordered them to be released. and at the same time issued quite a strongly worded statement, clearly directed at the administration. He said that the boy's detention was cruel and bereft of human decency. He said the case originated in the, just to quote the judge, the ill-conceived and incompetently implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas. Apparently, he said, even if it requires traumatising children. Yeah, quite strong language. But will these releases help calm tensions in Minneapolis? I think it'll calm tensions to a certain extent because this particular case, and in large part because of that photograph of the little boy with his blue bunny hat and his Spider-Man backpack going viral on social media, it had attracted a lot of attention internationally.
People calling for his release and his father's release should say that he isn't the first child to be detained in this way. But this did seem to garner a lot of attention internationally. And people were calling quite aggressively for him to be released. And that has happened now. So I think it'll calm tensions in that area. But in terms of bigger picture, there is still a lot of tension, still a lot of nervousness, I think it's fair to say, in Minneapolis about what's going on and other cities around the country as the Trump administration continues to essentially pursue its immigration policies, even though it appeared to pull back a little from its tactics that it's been using in Minnesota.
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