Minnesota girl, 10, released from ICE custody after a month in detention

A 10-year-old Minnesota girl has been released from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody after a month in detention in Dilley, Texas, school officials said, one of hundreds of children detained at the facility.

Elizabeth Caisaguano, a fourth-grader, and her mother walked free from the immigration detention center in Dilley, Texas, on Tuesday night. Elizabeth is a student in the school district of Columbia Heights, a Minneapolis suburb, which is also home to five-year-old Liam Ramos, who was released from Dilley over the weekend amid widespread outrage about his detention.

Elizabeth and her mother were taken by federal agents on 6 January, the first of five students from the Columbia Heights district to be detained by ICE during the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown in the region, school leaders said. The family, originally from Ecuador, has an active asylum case, school officials said.

The girl and her mother were at a Texas shelter as of Wednesday morning, a family attorney said, and would be heading back to Minnesota to reunite with her father.

There have been growing concerns about Elizabeth’s health as federal officials confirmed that Dilley, which houses families, is now the site of a measles outbreak. Hundreds of children are detained at the facility.

Carolina Gutierrez, principal secretary at Highland elementary, Elizabeth’s school, has been assisting the family and told the Guardian on Wednesday that the girl was experiencing flu-like symptoms and her mother had broken out in hives, but they had not yet received a medical assessment.

“I’m just excited to see Elizabeth come back to school. I’m extremely happy and relieved, and we have to continue advocating and speaking up for other people to come home,” Gutierrez said.

Elizabeth and her mother had been picked up by agents on the way to school, and the girl was able to call her father during the arrests, acting as an interpreter for her family and telling her dad that officers would drop her off at school, Gutierrez said.

The father has said he rushed to the elementary school and waited for hours with school staff, but Elizabeth never arrived. By the end of that day, Elizabeth and her mother had both already been flown to Texas. Tracy Xiong, a school social worker, recounted the episode at a press conference on Tuesday with Tim Walz, Minnesota’s governor, saying the father had been inconsolable after his family was picked up, according to the Sahan Journal, a local news outlet.

“That image of Elizabeth’s father will stay with me forever,” Xiong said. “I watched him sit in his car, bury his head in his hands and cry uncontrollably.”

When Elizabeth was detained, she assumed she was being sent back to Ecuador, Gutierrez said: “When she was flown to Texas, she thought her dreams were over. She dreams of being a doctor. She’s pleaded with her dad: ‘Get me out of here. I want to go back home. I want to go back to school. I want to eat good food.’ … Mom and Dad didn’t understand why they were being treated like this. They were like, we didn’t do anything wrong.”

Gutierrez, who has been working with the father and raising funds for the family, said: “He has been sad and desperate for answers. He hasn’t been able to sleep. He doesn’t have an appetite. He felt very helpless.”

Elizabeth’s case was assigned to the US judge Fred Biery, who had ordered Liam Ramos’s release. The judge argued that the boy’s case “has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children”.

Adrian Conejo Arias and his son, five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, in San Antonio, Texas, on 31 January after being released from the Dilley detention center. Photograph: Joaquin Castro via AP

On Monday, Biery issued an order blocking the removal or transfer of Elizabeth and her mother and giving the federal government five days to respond to the family’s release petition.

Their sudden release the following day came as something of a surprise, said Bobby Painter, managing attorney with the Texas Immigration Law Council, a non-profit representing the family.

Elizabeth and her mother should never have been detained, he said: “This didn’t have to happen. This is a family going through the process as it was intended. They presented at the border as asylum seekers and were admitted to the country. That case is still ongoing. They did everything they were supposed to do and still found themselves detained and separated.”

Painter said Elizabeth was an “avid reader” and “really wants to get back into that routine”.

In the wake of growing backlash against the detention of Elizabeth, Liam and other Minnesota students, including a two-year-old girl, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said it gives arrested parents an opportunity to have their children detained with them or placed into the custody of another adult.

But Columbia Heights officials have countered that agents have made it difficult or impossible for parents to place their children with others during often chaotic arrests.

The DHS defended the detention of the girl in a statement, saying that after Elizabeth’s mother was arrested, “officers allowed her to make phone calls to place the child in the custody of someone she designated”. The DHS’s statement said: “She failed to find a trusted adult to care for the child, so officers kept the family together for the welfare of the child.”

That account is contradicted by the assertions of her family and school officials who said the father was ready to take custody, and the DHS did not respond to questions about the discrepancies.

The DHS also said Elizabeth’s mother had a “final order of removal”. Painter disputed that characterization, saying one judge had denied asylum, but the family filed a timely appeal, which is still pending, meaning there is no final removal order.

Liam’s case received international attention after his photo went viral, but his case is not unique, advocates say.

ICE booked about 3,800 minors into immigrant family detention from January to October 2025, including children as young as one or two years old, according to a Guardian analysis of detention data.

“Family detention is very traumatic for children, even for relatively short periods,” Painter said. “Children should not be detained under any circumstances, period. The entire practice of family detention is immoral and bad policy, and I hope there is continued public attention on this until we don’t have any more kids in this position.”

Gutierrez said the community had stepped up to defend families, but that the detention of Elizabeth and others had taken a toll on families: “The trauma is following these kids into classrooms. The students fear for themselves and their classmates. Every day, they wonder if they are going to see their classmates tomorrow.”