02/09/2026
Seven year old Diana Crespo was picked up by ICE in an Oregon parking lot when her parents tried to get help for a nosebleed that would not stop, and the whole family was taken into detention instead of into the clinic. She has been in the same detention center as Liam Ramos for 3 weeks. They came from Venezuela a little over a year ago, fleeing a government they were afraid of, and they had done what the system told them to do by filing an asylum claim and getting work permits. Now Diana is in a Texas style family facility where she recently ran a fever for days before seeing a doctor, and relatives say she sounds tired and confused on the phone.
Her story is not an outlier, it is part of a machine that has swept around 3,800 children under 18 into ICE detention in 2025 alone, including 20 infants, with hundreds held for weeks and some for months. Those are just the kids in ICE custody, not the ones held by Border Patrol or in federal shelters, and on some days around 400 children are locked up at once. As Oregon legislator Ricki Ruiz put it, “situations involving children require heightened care, compassion, and coordination” and agencies have a duty to act “swiftly and humanely” when a seven year old’s health is on the line.
The country just watched five year old Liam Conejo Ramos become a symbol of that cruelty, with Rep Joaquin Castro saying Liam “has moved the world” and telling him no child should have to endure what he did. That kind of spotlight and moral pressure helped get Liam home, but the truth is Diana’s story and the stories of about 3,800 other children dragged into this system need that same energy, the same outrage, the same refusal to look away.
