Rep. Joaquin Castro thinks Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be disbanded amid increasingly aggressive immigration operations, including the killing of Alex Pretti and detainment of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos.
“I think when you put out as an agency a memo that says that you can go into people’s homes without a warrant, when you allow your agents to kill somebody, Alex Pretti, on the street, and then you won’t even tell the public who they are, confirm who they are, or hold anybody accountable — when you become that lawless, then I think you should be disbanded,” Castro told NOTUS’ Reese Gorman in the latest episode of the On NOTUS podcast. “I don’t think that you should have a role in immigration enforcement.”
Joaquin Castro on Liam Conejo Ramos and Why He Thinks ICE Should Be ‘Disbanded’
Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro recently escorted 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father out of an ICE detention facility in Dilley, Texas. He joins NOTUS’ Reese Gorman to talk about the effort to get the child out of detention, his thoughts on funding ICE, the state of the Senate race in Texas and what it’s like being identical twins with another politician.
Castro, who has represented a San Antonio district since 2013, helped escort Ramos and his father from an immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas, back to their home in Minnesota last week. Ramos’ detainment sparked national outrage when a photo of an ICE official holding the preschooler’s backpack as he entered an SUV went viral, raising questions about the treatment of children whose parents are detained by ICE.
“When that story broke, I knew that I was gonna be there the next week, and so I said, ‘OK, well I’m gonna do everything that I can to try to help and try to get this boy out of there,’” Castro said.
On the plane ride from San Antonio to Minneapolis, Castro wrote Ramos a letter, which he later shared on social media.
“It would be a real shame if this young boy who did nothing wrong, who spent a week in this trailer prison, if he defines America by that experience,” Castro said. “And I thought, just as an American, mostly, I just want to write him and say, ‘Hey, I hope you won’t judge America by your days in Dilley but by all of the people all over the country who offered toys and clothes and money and legal services and everything to help him get out.’”
The federal government filed a motion Feb. 6 to expedite Ramos’ deportation. Ramos and his father entered the United States legally in 2024 as asylum seekers, according to their attorneys.
Castro said the country’s landscape has shifted since ICE and the Department of Homeland Security were established in the aftermath of 9/11, so the government should rethink how it handles immigration enforcement.
“ICE and DHS were creations of the war on terror. It was a mix of counterterrorism with immigration, and so it really affected the way that the government spoke about, approached, treated immigrants,” Castro said. “When you go door-to-door or business-to-business and start looking for who’s speaking Spanish or which brown person is there, you’re violating the Constitution. We’re not going to be doing it that way. We shouldn’t do it that way.”
On NOTUS is a weekly podcast in which host Reese Gorman talks to lawmakers about how they got to Washington and what motivates them. You can download or listen here.
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