Five-year-old Liam Ramos and his father have returned to Minnesota after a judge on Jan. 31 ordered their release from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), whose state houses the Dilley detention center where the two were held, said that the boy and his father, Adrian Arias, had returned to their home in Minnesota on Sunday morning.

“Yesterday, five-year-old Liam and his dad Adrian were released from Dilley detention center. I picked them up last night and escorted them back to Minnesota this morning,” Castro wrote in a post on X. “Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack.”

He referenced the photo that brought Ramos’s case to national attention, in which the young boy was wearing a blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack while surrounded by immigration officers.

The administration’s immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis have increasingly become a flashpoint in national politics, with critics calling for the administration to withdraw ICE and other immigration enforcement agents from the city.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin has stated that ICE was only targeting Arias. The government says both Arias and Ramos are nationals of Ecuador.

McLaughlin said Ramos’s mother refused to take custody of him following his father’s arrest and Arias had wanted the boy to remain with him.

“The Trump administration is committed to restoring the rule of law and common sense to our immigration system, and will continue to fight for the arrest, detention, and removal of aliens who have no right to be in this country,” McLaughlin said.

The government has said that Arias entered the United States illegally from Ecuador in December 2024.

Arias’s lawyer said he has an asylum claim pending that allows him to stay in the United States, though the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review’s online court docket shows no future hearings on such a matter.

Ramos and Arias’s return to Minneapolis comes after U.S. District Judge Fred Biery ordered their release the previous day.

Biery said the case had “its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” referencing reports that ICE has set daily arrest quotas in order to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation operation.

He condemned the use of an administrative warrant, rather than a judicial warrant, in apprehending Arias.

“Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster,” Biery wrote. “The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer.”

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires federal agents to obtain judicial warrants, issued by a neutral judge on the basis of law and reasonable suspicion of a crime, to search the “persons, houses, papers, and effects” of anyone on U.S. soil.

Administrative warrants—which describes warrants issued by an individual within the executive branch—have traditionally been understood to authorize an arrest, but not to authorize entry of homes.

In the concluding section of the short order, Biery acknowledged Arias and Ramos “may ... return to their home country, involuntarily or by self-deportation. But that result should occur through a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place.”

The facts surrounding the arrests of Arias and Ramos have been contested.

Neighbors and school officials say immigration agents apprehended the 5-year-old and used him to knock on the door of his house and lure out other adults in the home.

DHS called that description of the events surrounding the arrest an “abject lie,” saying Arias fled on foot and left the boy in a running vehicle in the driveway.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.