Minneapolis ICE Detention of 5-Year-Old Sparks Dispute (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: This is five-year-old Liam Conejo-Romas being taken by ICE agents in his family's driveway after getting home from preschool on Tuesday. Now, what exactly led up to this moment is in dispute tonight. Here's what the Department of Homeland Security is saying. They were targeting the boy's father, who is from Ecuador, but when ICE agents approached them in the driveway, DHS says the dad took off and, quote, fled on foot, abandoning his child. The father was eventually apprehended and both were taken into custody together, the father and the son. The school district released a video of that moment, showing the chaotic scene that many people in Minneapolis say has become all too familiar since those 3,000 federal immigration agents have arrived in their city.

[00:00:54] Speaker 2: Where's your humanity?

[00:00:57] Speaker 1: Where's your humanity? That's a kid. That is a child. It's a story that even the vice president acknowledged today sounded terrible when he first heard it. But while he was in Minneapolis on the ground today, JD Vance argued that after learning more about what happened in the video that you saw, he says the child's detention was justified.

[00:01:20] Speaker 3: I see this story, and I'm a father of a five-year-old, actually, a five-year-old little boy, and I think to myself, oh, my God, this is terrible. How did we arrest a five-year-old? Well, I do a little bit more follow-up research, and what I find is that the five-year-old was not arrested, that his dad was an illegal alien, and then when they went to arrest his illegal alien father, the father ran. So the story is that ICE detained a five-year-old. Well, what are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to let a five-year-old child freeze to death? Are they not supposed to arrest an illegal alien in the United States?

[00:01:57] Speaker 1: Now, attorneys for the family are arguing tonight that they have an active case, an active asylum case, and therefore, they are in the country legally. They also say the dad here has no criminal record. And what we do know also from school district officials, as we're still trying to learn more about this, is that Liam is one of four of their students who have been detained by ICE in the last few weeks. The school board chair who witnessed Liam's detention today rejected how the vice president justified what happened.

[00:02:26] Speaker 4: I heard, what are you doing? Don't take the child. There are people here that can take him. There was another adult who lived in the home that was there saying, I will take the child. I will take the child. Somebody else was yelling. They saw that I was there and said, school is here. They can take the child. You don't have to take them. And there was ample opportunity to be able to safely hand that child off to adults. And mom was there. She saw out the window, and dad was yelling, please do not open the door. Don't open the door.

[00:03:05] Speaker 1: We know Liam and his father are being held at an ICE facility in Texas this evening. And this comes as the Justice Department also announced today that they've arrested the three people who interrupted a church service in St. Paul on Sunday. They were there protesting a pastor who appears to be a top ICE official in the Twin Cities. And the Department of Homeland Security shared the images of all the protesters who were arrested. And then the White House account, though, shared one that stood out. That's because it's a fake version of one of those photos. You can look at them side by side here. The White House implicitly confirmed to CNN that it did, in fact, alter this photo and knowingly posted it. But his officials directed us when we asked about the tweet to another post from a spokesperson that says, enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter. That side by side tonight and also as we are trying to learn more is what leads us to our lead source tonight, the Democratic Senator from Minnesota, Tina Smith, who's been very outspoken about all of this. And so, Senator, it's great to have you back here, given obviously what's been happening in your home state these last few weeks. I want to start, though, this five-year-old who's now in ICE custody with his father tonight. What, if anything, have you heard about what happened here?

[00:04:20] Speaker 2: Well, I spoke with the attorney for this family first thing this morning. And, of course, what they've said is what the eyewitnesses there at the scene have said, which is that there were adults there that were prepared to take this child. It's also really important to understand that this father, the man, is not illegal. He is actively seeking asylum in this country. He is here legally. So we have yet another example of somebody who is here in the United States legally being detained and being shipped off to Texas, this time with his five-year-old child. And I was so struck by what the superintendent of the Columbia Heights School District, who has watched four of her students just in the last week's children be detained, and she said, we have whistles and they have guns. And the heartbreaking message there that these aggressive and sometimes violent ICE agencies are just, agents are just trampling on these agents are just trampling over people's rights. And here we have this five-year-old now in detention in Texas for absolutely no reason.

[00:05:33] Speaker 1: And what the Department of Homeland Security is arguing is, and this is part of their statement, we read part of it earlier in the introduction, but they said, our officers made multiple attempts to get the mother who was inside the house to take custody of her child. They say officers even assured her they would not take her into custody. She refused to accept custody and the father told officers he wanted the child to remain with him. Do you trust the version of what happened that is coming from the Department of Homeland Security tonight?

[00:06:01] Speaker 2: It's very hard to trust anything they say when they are routinely breaking the law and going against people's fundamental constitutional protections. And what I trust is the police chief of Minneapolis who talked about how trained law enforcement, when you have a situation where you have a young child in this kind of a very chaotic and scary environment, trained law enforcement know that their job is to deescalate. It is to make sure that the child isn't traumatized. They are to figure out how to make sure that the child is in a safe place. And yet these federal agents do nothing like that. And as a result, I mean, who knows what kind of disaster this is going to mean for this family. And again, reinforcing this person, this father was in the United States legally. There was no reason to detain him or to send him hundreds of miles away from his home at all.

[00:07:04] Speaker 1: What did you make of the vice president's visit to your state today and what he said in Minneapolis while he was on the ground?

[00:07:12] Speaker 2: Well, you know, I was fearful that what the vice president was going to do was to sort of, you know, show up and have a press availability and not actually try to get to work to deescalate this situation and to try to find a solution. And, you know, certainly his rhetoric today was less hot than we have heard from, you know, other members of the administration at other times. But, you know, the bottom line is that he continues to sort of spread this story that the administration is trying to push out there, that the streets of Minneapolis are unsafe and federal law enforcement is here to address that when that is entirely not the case. In fact, what's making the streets of Minneapolis and the streets in Wilmer and other smaller towns around Minnesota unsafe are these ICE agents, which are showing up and detaining, arresting United States citizens and people who are here legally. So I wish that the vice president and other members of the administration would actually get serious about talking about how to reduce the pressure in my state by reducing the number of agents that are out there creating all of this chaos. And that would be a step in the right direction and something that people that I talked to today would be like so grateful to see happen.

[00:08:35] Speaker 1: Senator Tina Smith, as always, I'm grateful for you for joining. Thank you for being here. And also, as we're looking into everything that happened here, we have two of our most in-demand political sources as well, David Axelrod, who is a senior advisor to President Obama, of course, and Doug High, who's the communications director for the Republican National Committee. And David Axelrod, can I just get your take when we first look at this and we're hearing about this, when you see the images of the five-year-old, I think that is something that is so visceral for people to look at. And even the vice president was saying, you know, when he first heard this, he was a little bit shocked by it. What do you make, are you reassured by anything that the Department of Homeland Security has said?

[00:09:15] Speaker 5: I'm not, Caitlin, because of the track record. You know, I'm informed by my experience as a Chicagoan. I was around for Operation Midway Blitz in the fall, in which the same forces of disorder showed up and we had the same kind of problems. The vice president said we didn't. We did in Chicago. And the court stepped in. And I just want to read you one thing that I think is an answer to your question. In a 231-page decision, a ruling that a judge made there, she said that she couldn't trust DHS to tell the truth. And she said specifically about Bovino, Bovino appeared evasive over three days of his deposition. The guy who ran that operation and this one, either providing acute responses to plaintiffs' counsel's questions or outright lying. So this has been a pattern. We saw it in Chicago. We're seeing it again here, where they represent facts on the ground that turn out not to be true. So, no, I don't have confidence. And that's one of the problems. One of the people, one of the reasons you have people carrying cell phones around and videoing what's going on is because there isn't a trust that the true facts will be known. So I think this is a problem that needs to be addressed.