How Delta Flew a 5-Year-Old to Prison

The footage is unremarkable at first glance. A father and son moving through an airport terminal. A small boy spreading his blanket across the floor, then wandering over to press his face against the window. Standard airport tedium, except that five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrián Conejo Arias, were not heading to a family vacation. They were heading to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, flanked by three escorts whose official capacity has never been publicly confirmed.

Nick Benson is a Minneapolis-based activist and aviation enthusiast with MN50501, a grassroots organization that has been pushing back against the Trump administration's immigration operations in the region. For months, he had been showing up at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, logging ICE deportation flights, watching shackled passengers board charter planes. One thing he never saw during all of that: a child. That absence nagged at him after Liam's detention made national news in January 2026. Benson filed a public records request with the airport, paid $359.04 in processing fees, and received dozens of hours of surveillance footage from six cameras covering the Delta passenger terminal on the morning of January 21.

What he found was Liam and his father moving through the terminal alongside three plainclothes individuals who guided them away from other travelers while one approached the gate counter and presented identification to a Delta employee. The group eventually lined up with the rest of the passengers and boarded a nonstop flight to San Antonio, the nearest major city to Dilley. Liam was still wearing the black-and-white coat he had on the day before, when ICE agents detained him outside his home in Columbia Heights after he returned from prekindergarten at Valley View Elementary.

Benson passed the footage to independent journalist Gillian Brockell, who broke the story. Brockell, a former Washington Post staff writer and former flight attendant, has spent considerable time tracking ICE enforcement flights to destinations across multiple continents, including third-country removals to Eswatini and Equatorial Guinea. She told Benson this was the first documented instance she had encountered of what amounts to a quieter, less visible arm of ICE Air: detained individuals, including children, moved through ordinary commercial terminals on regular passenger flights, surrounded by people headed to business meetings and long weekends, with no visible indication of what is actually happening.

Delta's response to Brockell's reporting was that federal government travel is typically arranged through third-party booking agencies, and that carriers generally do not receive advance information about the nature or purpose of government passengers' travel. That explanation is technically plausible. It also conveniently sidesteps the question of whether Delta has taken any steps to find out, particularly given that it operates the only nonstop service between Minneapolis and San Antonio.

On February 1, 2026, after U.S. District Judge Fred Biery ordered Liam and his father released, condemning the detention as an imposition of cruelty that violated constitutional protections, the two flew home to Minneapolis on Delta. An ABC News crew was aboard. Video of the pilots welcoming Liam into the cockpit and presenting him with a pair of wings spread across social media within hours. Delta said nothing to correct the impression that it had played any part in a heartwarming homecoming story. It also said nothing about the outbound flight.

Texas Representatives Joaquin Castro and Jasmine Crockett visited Liam at Dilley during his roughly ten days of detention and described him as lethargic, not eating, and calling out for his mother. A federal judge found those conditions sufficiently cruel to warrant emergency release. Delta found those conditions sufficiently unrelated to its brand to stay quiet, right up until the moment a better story came along.

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Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.

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