GOP Rep. Releases Footage to Preemptively Crush Democrats’ ICE Detention Facility Stunt

Democrats determined to find a new way to smear President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration have a new poster child in mind — but a Texas Republican is beating them to the punch.

The latest leftist cause célèbre involves the case of a 5-year-old picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in a suburb of Minneapolis on Tuesday while they were arresting his father, an Ecuadoran national.

Versions of exactly how the boy was taken into custody vary sharply between the Department of Homeland Security and anti-ICE activists, but Rep. Tony Gonzalez of Texas launched a preemptive strike on social media on Friday about one key part of the tale.

In the coming days, you’ll see a lot of grandstanding by politicians at the Dilley ICE Center in my district, #TX23. It’s all for show.

I’ve been there & seen the state-of-the-art facilities & protocols that @ICEgov follows.

Our ICE agents & CBP personnel are doing their… pic.twitter.com/9fEAOEEyIW

— Rep. Tony Gonzales (@RepTonyGonzales) January 23, 2026

Gonzales published a post on the social media platform X showing footage of the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas, about 70 miles south of San Antonio.

“Our ICE agents & CBP personnel are doing their jobs, & yet again, Democrats are doing everything they can to spin the truth against law enforcement,” he wrote.

The processing center is the new — albeit temporary — home of Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias and his son, Liam.

Both were picked up Tuesday in Columbia Heights, Minnesota. And that’s pretty much the only thing all sides agree on.

To the family’s attorney, according to CNN, and to anti-ICE activists and Democratic politicians, the boy was brutally taken from his mother while ICE agents were arresting his father for no reason.

To the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, the boy was essentially “abandoned” by his mother when she refused to take over his care as his father was detained.

It will surprise literally no one who has followed the news lately that Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett is among those who claim the boy was “kidnapped” by ICE.

It will also surprise no one to learn that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the very picture of lying incompetence in American politics today, used a post on X to call the case an example of “masked agents snatching preschoolers off the street and sending them to Texas detention centers.”

The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, described the case as the story of an illegal alien, Arias, who fled on foot when ICE agents approached him in the driveway of his home, leaving the boy alone.

As Fox News noted, DHS officials say agents knocked on the door of the house trying to get the mother to take over the boy’s care, but she refused.

This is a horrific smear pushed by the media and anti-ICE activists.

The child was ABANDONDED by his father, and the alleged mother REFUSED to take custody of her own child. Our law enforcement took care of the child, got him McDonald’s and played him his favorite music to… pic.twitter.com/A6u9Wi9rfZ

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) January 23, 2026

“The child was ABANDONDED by his father, and the alleged mother REFUSED to take custody of her own child,” DHS declared in an X post published on Friday.

At this stage of the saga, it’s difficult to say for sure what the actual facts of the case are, but it’s a good rule of thumb in the United States in 2025 that whatever Democrats say — on any issue, at any time, in any context — is either a distortion, an exaggeration, or an outright lie.

Given the track record of the duplicitous Tim Walz, he’s hard to take seriously. He’s a man who’s lied about his military service. He’s more recently lied about the multi-billion fraud scandal in his state.

He almost certainly lied about his own reasons for not seeking re-election. Walz claimed it was because he wouldn’t have time to run for office and still protect Minnesota taxpayers, according to NBC News.

The truth is far more likely that Walz knew the scandal was engulfing his career and fellow Democrats wanted him out of the way as quickly as possible, the way top Democrats got rid of former President Joe Biden in the middle of the 2024 election campaign.

Crockett’s ludicrous takes on hot-button issues also need little elaboration here, as is true of pretty much every national-name Democrat who has or is likely to weigh in on the topic.

Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, for instance — a woman whose suspicious financial life almost overshadows her equally questionable marital history — used an X post to call ICE’s act “absolutely vile.”

To anyone who has followed Omar’s career, that’s an excellent sign that what ICE did was not only rational and defensible, but was also probably the most moral thing that could have been done.

But the dogs have barked and the caravan is likely to move on — to the detention center in Dilley.

And that’s where Gonzales’ preemptive strike comes in.

Democrats love to moan about ICE facilities when Donald Trump is in the White House. (Remember Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s infamous crying jag outside a holding facility in Texas in 2019?)

It’s almost a given that Democrats and their media allies are going to try to paint the detention center in Dilley in the bleakest possible terms — a Dickensian workhouse that abuses adults and leaves young children warped. (The “kids in cages” propaganda all over again.)

Gonzales’ post proves it’s nothing of the sort — and beats the leftists pundits to their all-too-predictable punch.

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