Where is Liam now, the 5-year-old boy detained by federal ICE agents on his way home from school

Dozens of immigrant families protested Saturday behind the fences of the Texas detention center where a 5-year-old Ecuadorian boy and his father were taken this week after being detained in Minnesota, the Associated Press reports.

Liam Conejo Ramos, who was detained on his way home from school, was taken to the South Texas Family Residential Center, the largest immigration detention center in the United States. The image of the boy being picked up by federal agents quickly went viral and sparked fresh criticism of the immigration service, which has been criticized for its crackdown on migrants.

The Ecuadorian government confirmed the location of the minor and his father on Saturday. “The Consulate of Ecuador in Houston, Texas, maintains constant contact with the ICE officer in charge of the center to protect the welfare of the minor and his father,” the State Department said in a statement.

Protest inside the center for migrants

On Saturday night, children and parents dressed in jackets and sweaters, some of them holding signs that read in Spanish “Libertad para los niños” (“Freedom for the children”), protested inside the detention center in Dilley, Texas.

Families could also be heard outside chanting “Libertad!” or “Let us go,” said Eric Lee, an immigration attorney who was there to visit a client.

“The message we want to send is to treat us with dignity and according to the law. We are immigrants with children, not criminals,” Maria Alejandra Montoya Sanchez, 31, told the AP in a phone interview after the protest. She and her 9-year-old daughter have been held at the center in Dilley since October.

Montoya Sanchez said the protest was organized internally by families exhausted by long detention and conditions that supporters say included feeding on worms, constant illness and insufficient medical access. Lee said he later learned from his clients in jail that the demonstration was related to the case of Liam Conejo Ramos.

Hundreds of children were held at the facility beyond the court-ordered limit, according to a report filed in December by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in an ongoing federal lawsuit.

ICE, criticized for the way the detention took place

Preschooler Liam Ramos and his father were detained outside their home, the superintendent of the school district in Columbia Heights, a suburb of Minneapolis, said at a news conference Wednesday.

An ICE agent pulled Liam out of the car, led the boy to the front door and told him to knock on the door and ask to be let in, “to see if anyone else was home — basically using a five-year-old as bait,” the school superintendent said in a statement.

The detention of the 5-year-old and his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, in Minnesota on Tuesday has become another cause of protest over the Trump administration's anti-immigration policy. Government officials, the family's attorney and neighbors offer conflicting accounts of whether the parents were given an adequate opportunity to leave the child in someone else's care.

The child's detention is just one of a series of incidents that have roiled the US and intensified criticism of how federal immigration enforcement (ICE) intervenes. A federal immigration officer fatally shot a man in Minneapolis on Saturday, drawing hundreds of protesters to the streets and heightening tensions in a city already rocked by another fatal shooting weeks ago.