Liam and the other Ecuadorian children trapped between Trump’s immigration crusade and Noboa’s silence

January 20 began like any other day for the Conejo family in Minnesota. Five-year-old Liam got into the car, shouldering his Spider-Man backpack, and went to school. A few hours later, his dad picked him up. When they arrived at their home, everything changed. It was at that moment that ICE agents detained both father and son. When he was released, after 11 days of detention, Adrián Conejo recalled in interviews with several media outlets how, “The agents ordered Liam to ring the doorbell of our house, so that the people inside would come out.” On the other side of the door, Adrián’s wife, who was four months pregnant, screamed desperately, helplessly, in response to her husband’s request that she stay in the house. Although the family is together once again, they remain in hiding, afraid.

As the face of Liam in his blue hat and Spider-Man bag made international media headlines, becoming a symbol for the most cruel aspects of U.S. immigration policy, in Ecuador, President Daniel Noboa chose to remain silent. This was no improvised decision. It was a political choice, and it was painfully telling.

Liam’s is no isolated case. Two-year-old Chloé was also detained in Minneapolis alongside her father, and sent to a detention center in Texas on January 22. Three days later, only the young child was set free. According to official data from the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry — the little information that exists amid increasing opacity — at least 32 Ecuadorian children remain in U.S. immigration centers. Between 2013 and 2023, close to 28,690 Ecuadorian kids migrated to the United States, according to Dixon Jiménez, of Ecuador’s Council for Human Mobility.

For political analyst Caroline Ávila, Noboa’s silence when it comes to human rights is anything but neutral. “It can be clearly read as submission to President Trump’s power, which has proven itself superior,” she says. During his campaigning, Noboa did not hesitate to crow about his ties to the Republican’s inner circle, seeking the migrant vote. At the time, he even assured Ecuadorians that they would not be prioritized for deportation by the U.S. government. Today, the numbers tell a different story: 23,215 deportations in just two years.

Noboa prioritizes trade relations with the United States, access to markets and financial stability. Ecuador has a dollarized economy and that dependence carries weight, says Ávila. However, it harms the country when it comes to human rights, immigration and social issues. “Defending migrants does not seem to be on the agenda of a government that is focused on the tariff issue with Colombia and on promoting the country with its trading partners. It will not upset Trump,” she says.

Government messaging has also focused strongly on highlighting trade agreements with other countries, justifying Noboa’s 34 international trips in two years. Just one day after Liam’s detention, the president surprised the country by imposing a 30% tax on Colombian products. Noboa justified the measure by citing the neighboring country’s lack of reciprocity in the fight against drug trafficking.

“What kind of president doesn’t fight for his country’s people?,” asks Ávila. “There are other things that cause him more damage, such as the fact that children in Ecuador are turned over, dead in cardboard boxes, in health centers,” she says, referring to the national health system’s serious supply crisis. Focus on such issues speaks to why the tragedy of migrant children like Liam does not become the subject of national attention.

Through a post on X, the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry stated that it was monitoring the cases of detainees. The situation became more tense on January 27, when ICE agents tried to enter the Ecuadorian consulate in Minneapolis, where diplomatic staff assist undocumented individuals. The incident prompted Ecuador to issue a letter of protest, demanding respect for international law regarding diplomatic spaces—as if it had forgotten its own April 2024 order to raid the Mexican embassy in Quito. “Hence the importance of precedent in the framework of international law and respect for agreements,” says the international affairs expert Esteban Santos.

A decade fleeing

Since 2023, 7,361 Ecuadorian children, either accompanied or alone, have crossed the U.S. border, according to U.S. Border Patrol. The majority of them made their way via the treacherous Darién Gap. “These children carry too much violence for a single body,” says Soledad Álvarez, an expert on undocumented migration and professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago. “First they leave a country overtaken by organized crime; then they cross the Darién; then they survive Mexico which is at its most violent point in recent decades; and when they finally arrive to the United States, another kind of terror begins.”

Many of the Ecuadorian children who are currently detained in the United States crossed the jungle in the company of their parents or strangers. “Children stripped naked, locked away in security houses, held by drug traffickers who demand ransoms,” as Álvarez puts it. She has provided close accompaniment to migrants, particularly those from the Indigenous communities of Cotpaxi who have settled in Chicago. The families arrive heavily indebted to the Ecuadorian banking system, and go to work in construction, cleaning, or selling candy on the subway. They pay taxes, send remittances home and had begun — just barely — to put their lives back together. And then the migrant hunt began.

Since January, immigration raids have intensified in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis. Álvarez says that the strategy is to detain the men first, crippling the family’s economic stability and pushing them towards “voluntary” departure. “It is a deliberate policy of family separation,” she says. And children are paying the highest price.

“Five, seven or eight-year-old children who cry at night because their father is not coming home. Who speak with him through a screen from prison. Who urinate on themselves out of fear. Who have to adapt to an educational system in another language while living under the constant threat of ICE knocking on their door,” says Álvarez, summing up nearly 100 cases with which she has become familiar.

“The psychological damage is deep and lasting,” says the professor. “And that’s not really being talked about.” Among the testimonies she has collected from deported migrants, there are the torture conditions to which they are subjected in a system that, according to Álvarez, was created to benefit large corporations within the prison systems to which migrants are transferred. Individuals are traded like merchandise between detention centers until they arrive at the Alexandria Staging Facility, a Louisiana institution known as the “cooler” whose freezing rooms are designed to break bodies and spirits. “That is done so that they don’t ever want to come back,” says Álvarez, who criticizes the lack of information around what happens with migrant children.

For Ingrid Echeverría, a U.S. immigration lawyer, the situation is devastating. “Today, a child receives exactly the same legal treatment as an adult,” she says. “They could be a baby. The laws are the same.”

Echeverría tells of the case of a young man who was a minor, had a valid work visa and no criminal record, who was detained on his way to work. The judge ignored federal precedent, and the system pushed the young man to accept “voluntary departure”. “Not even status as a minor guarantees you protection,” Echeverría says.

The future of Ecuadorian children detained in the United States is uncertain. Even those who have a possibility of asylum face nearly impossible requirements, and many others are unaware of their options to protect themselves from removal.

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