5-year-old boy detained by ICE released, back in MN after judge's order

Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old boy who became one of the symbols of theTrumpadministration'simmigration raids in Minnesota, has been released from a Texas detention facility, where he was held for over a week with his father.

"Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack. Thank you to everyone who demanded freedom for Liam,"Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said on X.

Ramos and his father, asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias,were taken by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents while in their drivewayafter the boy came home from school on Jan. 20. Agents at the timerefused an offermade by another adult living in the home to take the child.

Instead, the agents led the boy to his front door and ordered him to knock – "essentially using a 5-year-old as bait," according to anews release from Columbia Heights Public Schools.

Gov. shutdown or ICE accountability?Sen. Padilla says that's 'bottom line'

WhileICE has disputed this claim,Vice President JD Vance defended the agencyon Jan. 22, saying that the federal officials were targeting Conejo, an undocumented immigrant from Ecuador accused of trying to flee from immigration agents. As for the boy, Vance said, "Are they supposed to let a 5-year-old child freeze to death?"

The pair's releasewas ordered by U.S. District Judge Fred Bieryon Jan. 31. Castro said he picked them up later that night, and they returned to Minnesota Feb. 1.

"The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children," Biery wrote in his order. "With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike, it is so ordered."

Bieryin his rulingalso compared the administration's actions to those of King George III cited by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence.

"Thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson enumerated grievances against a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation ... 'We the people' are hearing echoes of that history," Biery wrote.

Castro's post included a photo of a handwritten note to Ramos where he asked the child to judge the United States "not by your days at Dilley (immigration detention center) but by the millions of Americans whose hearts you touched."

After the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good by federal immigration agents (ICE), communities across the U.S. are protesting against Trump's surge of immigration enforcement actions.

Pictured here, Demonstrators gather for a protest calling for the removal of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Jan. 30, 2026 in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Protests were held across the United States in response to ICE enforcement activity.

" style="max-width:100%; height:auto; border-radius:6px; margin:10px 0;" loading="lazy" /> Hundreds of people gather to protest ICE at the corner of Palafox and Garden Streets in downtown Pensacola, Florida, on Jan. 30, 2026.

" style="max-width:100%; height:auto; border-radius:6px; margin:10px 0;" loading="lazy" />

'ICE Out' protests spark marches, confrontations across US

After the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good by federal immigration agents (ICE), communities across the U.S. areprotestingagainst Trump's surge of immigration enforcement actions.Pictured here, Demonstrators gather for a protest calling for the removal of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Jan. 30, 2026 in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Protests were held across the United States in response to ICE enforcement activity.

Photos of the arrest, which showed Ramos outside the home in a character hat with a Spiderman backpack, circulated widely online. The arrest, along with the fatal shootings ofRenee GoodandAlex Prettiby federal agents, sparkedintense protests in Minneapolisandacross the country.

PresidentDonald Trump's border czarTom Homanlast week described plans to"draw down"the federal presence in the Midwestern state. The Trump administration has deployed thousands of agents in Minnesota as part of its wide-reaching,and often contentious,deportation surge.

USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for the boy's family for comment.

Contributing: Jonathan Limehouse, USA TODAY

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Liam Ramos returns to Minnesota after judge orders release

byNeo

in Celebrity, Lifestyle, Politics, ShowBiz, Sport

February 01, 2026

5-year-old boy detained by ICE released, back in MN after judge's order

Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old boy who became one of the symbols of theTrumpadministration'simmigration raids in M...

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Pakistan says it has killed 145 'Indian-backed terrorists' in Balochistan after deadly attacks

QUETTA, Pakistan (AP) — Pakistani police and military forceskilled over a 100 "Indian-backed terrorists" in counterterrorism operations across the restive southwestern province of Balochistan over the past 40 hours, government officials said on Sunday, a day after coordinated suicide and gun attacks killed 33 people, mostly civilians.

Pakistan Militant Attacks

The raids began early Saturday at multiple locations across Balochistan, and left 18 civilians, including five women and three children, and 15 security personnel dead, authorities said.

Sarfraz Bugti, the provincial chief minister, told reporters in Quetta that troops and police officers responded swiftly, killing 145 members of "Fitna al-Hindustan," a phrase the government uses for the allegedly Indian-backed outlawed Baloch Liberation Army, or BLA. The number of militants killed over the past two days was the highest in decades, he said.

"The bodies of these 145 killed terrorists are in our custody, and some of them are Afghan nationals," he said. Bugti claimed that the "Indian-backed terrorists" wanted to take hostages but failed to make it to the city center.

He spoke alongside senior government official Hamza Shafqat, who often oversees such operations against insurgents in the province, and praised the military, police and paramilitary forces for repelling the assaults.

Militant attacks erupted on Saturday in a resource-rich region where Pakistan is seeking to attract foreign investment in mining and minerals. In September 2025, aU.S. metals company signed a $500 million investment agreementwith Pakistan, a month after the U.S. State Department designated BLA and its armed wing as a foreign terrorist organization.

Residents described scenes of panic after a suicide bombing killed several police officers on Saturday.

"(It) was a very scary day in the history of Quetta," said Khan Muhammad, a local resident. "Armed men were roaming openly on the roads before security forces arrived."

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Bugti repeatedly accused India and Afghanistan of backing the assailants and said senior leaders of the BLA, which claimed responsibility for the latest attacks in Balochistan, were operating from Afghan territory. Both Kabul and New Delhi deny the allegations.

He said on Sunday Afghanistan's Taliban had pledged under the 2020 Doha agreement not to allow Afghan soil to be used as a base for attacking other countries, but "unfortunately, the Afghan soil was still being used against Pakistan."

Tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan have persisted since early October when Pakistan carried out airstrikes on what it described as Pakistani Taliban hideouts inside Afghanistan, killing dozens of alleged insurgents.

Bugti said militants stormed the home of a Baloch laborer in Gwadar and killed five women and three children. He condemned the killings. He said the attackers had planned to seize hostages after storming government offices in Quetta's high-security zone but were thwarted. "We were aware of their plans, and our forces were prepared," he said.

The BLA is banned in Pakistan and has carried out numerous attacks in recent years, often targeting security forces, Chinese interests and infrastructure projects.

Authorities say the group has operated with support from the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP. The TTP, a separate group, is allied with Afghanistan's Taliban, who returned to power in August 2021.

Balochistan has long faced a separatist insurgencyby ethnic Baloch groups seeking greater autonomy or independence from Pakistan's central government. The BLA regularly targets Pakistani security forces and has also attacked civilians, including Chinese nationals among the thousands working on various projects in the province.

Ahmed reported from Islamabad.

byNeo

in Celebrity, Lifestyle, Politics, ShowBiz, Sport

February 01, 2026

Pakistan says it has killed 145 'Indian-backed terrorists' in Balochistan after deadly attacks

QUETTA, Pakistan (AP) — Pakistani police and military forceskilled over a 100 "Indian-backed terrorists" in cou...

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Leftist and liberal gun groups are seeing a rush of new members

Several niche, left-leaning gun advocacy groups said that since the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, they can hardly keep up with the surging demand for firearms training.

With President Donald Trump sending armed federal agents into communities around the country, even more once gun-shy liberals and leftists are considering getting armed. And while Americans tend to think of gun owners as leaning more Republican and male, already more women, gay people and people of color havetaken up armsin recent years, particularly after 2020.

Weekend classes at L.A. Progressive Shooters are sold out through March. Registrations for permit-to-carry courses at Pink Pistols Twin Cities, which serves LGBTQ people in Minneapolis and St. Paul, are up from an average of five people per class to 25 — the group recently added seven more courses to accommodate increased interest, and those are filling up, too. To paraphrase a recentmeme: The right is arguing for gun control, and the left is buying guns.

"In the past couple of days, there has been a shift," Lara Smith, national spokesperson for the Liberal Gun Club, says. "This changed views on the left."

Alex Pretti, a beloved ICU nurse who cared for ailing veterans and an outdoorsman who was concerned about the environment, was also, likeone-third of Americans, a gun owner. He was carrying his lawfully owned weapon in a holster before federal agents disarmed him and then fatally shot him.

Jordan Levine, founder of the inclusive gun community A Better Way 2A, says his organization has seen an influx of gun groups and instructors asking to join its resource page in the last few weeks — Ready Rainbow in Chicago, Grassroots Defense in Iowa and Solidarity Defense in Sacramento are a few recent additions. "People are scared and angry and want to equalize the power imbalance that we're seeing on the news, where you've got ICE steamrolling people with no recourse," he adds.

Philip Smith, founder and president of the National African American Gun Association, says membership in his organization has grown since Trump's second term began and since Pretti was killed. "People join when they're scared," Smith says. "People join when certain people get in office, because it scares them. People join when they see these shootings across the country, and it seems like it's just madness starting to grow more and more."

Fear and politics are big motivators for gun sales. Gun purchases go up aftermass shootingsand domestic terror attacks, or when people sense that legislative gun restrictions are on the horizon, as when aDemocrat is elected president. The reverse tends to be true when a Republican is president, says Matt Lacombe, a political scientist who studies gun culture and who is the author of "Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force" — gun saleswent downafter Trump was first elected in 2016, and they've largely stayed down in his second term (the gun industry calls it the "Trump Slump"). But Lacombe says that national data could be obscuring smaller trends that are underway in parts of the country.

"It doesn't seem to be the case anymore that buying guns and carrying guns in response to perceived threats is a solely conservative thing," he adds.

As the Trump administration continues to wage an immigration crackdown in US cities, people are showing up to anti-ICE protests and neighborhoodwatch patrolsarmed, and some gun groups are encouraging people to become armed observers. In onevideoon X, two armed men could be seen at the back of a vigil for Pretti in Minneapolis last weekend. Speaking to independent journalist Talia Jane, one of them invoked the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara and said, "Force is not going to be stopped by a lack of force, unfortunately. And I want to see everybody else around us that's on our same side, I wanna see them get armed as well. So right now we're here primarily to keep everybody safe but also to serve as an example that everybody around us can do this too."

In anothervideocirculating on social media, an armed man can be seen standing guard outside his neighborhood in St. Paul. "This is my block," he tells the interviewer. "This is my area. I don't go into other people's neighborhoods and try to intimidate them. I protect my people."

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"This is the thing that gun owners have been talking about forever: the 'tyrannical government,'" Levine says. But the people who usually warn about the dangers of government tyranny, as he sees it, are "somehow taking the side of the tyrannical government."

The administration's assertions that Pretti was in the wrong for carrying a gun have also turned off some Trump supporters. The White House, for its part, referred to recent remarks from press secretary Karoline Leavitt. "While Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms, Americans do not have a constitutional right to impede lawful immigration enforcement operations," Leavittsaidon January 26. "Any gun owner knows that when you are carrying a weapon, when you are bearing arms and you are confronted by law enforcement, you are raising the assumption of risk and the risk of force being used against you."

Maj Toure, founder of Black Guns Matter and a self-identified libertarian who voted for Trump in the last two elections, says he's never considered Trump to be a strong defender of the Second Amendment, citing the bump stock ban during the president's first term (later struck down by the Supreme Court), as well as Trump'sremarksin 2018 that guns should be confiscated from dangerous people even if it violates due process rights. The comments about Pretti, Toure says, are just "par for the course."

"Now this administration is blatantly saying it: If you are in opposition to our political aims and you are armed, we will view you as a criminal," he says, adding that this "1,000% is going to impact how I vote."

Some onlookers also drew comparisons to another gun owner killed by law enforcement in Minnesota: In 2016, Philando Castile was killed by a police officer who opened fire on him during a traffic stop after Castile informed him that he had a firearm in his vehicle. The NRA initially stayed silent on the killing — afterintense pressurefrom its Black members, it issued avague statementthat didn't mention Castile by name.

The Trump administration's rhetoric on Pretti is merely the latest example of its inconsistent stance on gun control, notes Patrick Eddington, senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute. This past fall, there werereportsthat the Justice Department was considering proposals to ban trans people from purchasing guns. And just last week, the Washington Postreportedthat the DOJ is planning to change the firearm purchase form to require applicants to list their biological sex at birth, raisingfurther alarmamong trans rights advocates. "When you start telling one group of people they can't have guns, who's going to be the next group?" Eddington says.

Conservatives' selective support for gun rights has historic precedent. In the late 1960s, theBlack Panther Partybegan "copwatching," observing police interactions with community members in Oakland while visibly carrying guns — a practice that bears some similarities to today's ICE watch patrols. In response, Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, enacted the Mulford Act, which repealed a law that allowed people to carry loaded firearms in public. The NRA also supported the law at the time.

"The standards that seem to apply to gun carriers, gun owners who are Black or who are more broadly on the left seem to be different than the standards applied to gun owners on the right," Lacombe says.

In aTruth Socialpost early Friday morning, Trump called Pretti an "agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist." Gun owners across the spectrum aren't buying it.

"He's a gun guy. He's a guy who carries. He trains," Lara Smith, from the Liberal Gun Club, says. "And when I say one of us, I mean one of the gun community."

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byNeo

in Celebrity, Lifestyle, Politics, ShowBiz, Sport

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Leftist and liberal gun groups are seeing a rush of new members

Several niche, left-leaning gun advocacy groups said that since the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapol...

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A luge love story: These Olympics have a lot of meaning for Emily and Dominik Fischnaller

Long-distance relationships can be difficult, especially when they go on for years and years. And the one between Olympic luge athletes Emily Sweeney of the U.S. and Dominik Fischnaller of Italy was no different.

It was challenging. It pushed them to the limit at times. They wondered if it was going to work.

And in the ultimate moments, they would ask each other the same question:

"Are we worth it?"

"It was always a 'Yes,'" Emily Fischnaller said.

Her last name changed last year, so yes, their luge love story got a happy ending. The couple, after dating for about 15 years — basically half their lives — finally got married. And in about a week, at Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy, not far from their now-permanent home, the Fischnallers will slide for different countries at anOlympicswhere both are expected to be serious medal hopefuls.

It'll be the fourth Olympics for Dominik, the reigning men's singles bronze medalist, and the third for Emily.

"It's like a huge family fest, or party I would say, which just makes it great," Dominik Fischnaller said. "And I think we will have more time, I think, than other Olympics where we be more together. I want to enjoy this more than I did in other Olympics. Then, I was just focused on sliding, sliding, sliding. I didn't really experience the atmosphere or anything. I hope this will be different for me this time and Emily is for sure a big part of that."

There are more than a few couples who'll be together for these Olympics, some of them teammates, some of them competing against each other.

— U.S. alpine skiing star Mikaela Shiffrin — that sport's all-time wins leader — is engaged to Norway's Aleksander Aamodt Kilde, who returned to racing this season after dealing with major injuries for almost two years.

— Latvia's luge team includes the husband and wife pair of Martins Bots and Elina Bota, both singles sliders.

— American figure skatersMadison Chock and Evan Bates, the favorites to win ice dancing gold, married in 2024.

— U.S. women's hockey star Hilary Knight and U.S. women's speedskating great Brittany Bowe — with six Olympic medals between them — started dating in 2022.

— In women's skeleton, Kim Meylemans of Belgium and Nicole Rocha Silveira of Brazil have the dynamic of being opponents who are married to each other. When Meylemans clinched this season's World Cup title, Silveira — a three-time World Cup bronze medalist, two of those coming with her now-wife in either the gold or silver medal spot — was the first to run to her side for a congratulatory embrace. "Don't think anyone truly understands how much I needed her with me (pushing & supporting me) to achieve this," Meylemans wrote on Instagram.

USA Bobsled has a power couple as well, with reigning women's monobob world champion Kaysha Love getting engaged last year to Olympic men's push athlete Hunter Powell. She's in the Olympics for the second time; he is making his Olympic debut.

"We have love for one another, but at the end of the day, he's my teammate when we're out there training or practicing," Love said. "For me, it's a secret weapon, to have a teammate that you know only has trust and belief in you. When I know that I am supported, I just feel like I'm able to do unthinkable things."

Dominik and Emily Fischnaller say they relate to that.

They began dating when they were teenagers. They would see each other all season, of course, since the luge World Cup tour is basically one big traveling road show hopping between tracks in Europe, North America and Asia. They would find time in the summers to connect as well.

Eventually, they decided to get married. It's not always that simple in Italy; rules and regulations make the process of scheduling a wedding somewhat complex. When the couple got the approval last spring, they pulled it off in nine days — rings were bought quickly, a dress was found fast and off to a courthouse they went with just a few relatives in tow.

"The actual day, it was pretty perfect," Emily Fischnaller said. "Even at the end of the day, Dominik said he had his perfect wedding, which I never thought was possible for him to say."

They've built a home in Italy by basically rebuilding his childhood home. There's talk of starting a family; the Fischnallers are closer to the end of their competitive careers than they are the beginning, but sliders often say they're going to retire and then find a reason to stick around or come back. In short, what happens after these Olympics isn't totally clear.

"It just feels like we're setting up a future instead of just living in the present," Emily Fischnaller said. "It's exciting."

He is an Olympic medalist. She's the bronze medalist from last year's world championships. On any given day, both have proven they can be the best in the world. And they've overcome plenty along the way; Emily Fischnaller broke her neck and back in a run at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics and still deals with aftereffects of that crash at times.

"I tell her she can't get hurt because I feel the pain even 10,000 times more than she feels her own pain," Dominik Fischnaller said. "I'm extremely nervous when she's sliding. I almost can't watch the race."

But he'll watch her at the Olympics. She'll watch him, too. And if all goes right, they'll watch each other make their way to the medal stand.

Either way, when it's over, they might just ask each other their go-to question one more time.

"Are we worth it?"

The answer, once again, surely will be yes.

"We're here. We're happy," Dominik Fischnaller said. "And we're having a good life."

AP Olympics:https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics

byNeo

in Celebrity, Lifestyle, Politics, ShowBiz, Sport

February 01, 2026

A luge love story: These Olympics have a lot of meaning for Emily and Dominik Fischnaller

Long-distance relationships can be difficult, especially when they go on for years and years. And the one between Olympic...

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Patriots' Malcolm Butler Details 2015 Super Bowl-Winning Interception: 'Never Seen a Group of Grown Men Cry Like That' (Exclusive)

AP Photo/Kathy Willens

NEED TO KNOW

• With less than 30 seconds left, and the Seattle Seahawks on the goal line, it looked like Super Bowl XLIX was over for the New England Patriots

• However, Malcolm Butler made a game-ending interception, which is still regarded as one of the best moments in Super Bowl history

• Over a decade later, the cornerback now talks to PEOPLE about how the play came to be

It's rare in a Super Bowl for a rookie to change the outcome of the game, but in 2015, the last time the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots faced off on football's biggest stage, that's exactly what happened.

DuringSuper Bowl XLIX,deep into the fourth quarter, Russell Wilson and his team were right on the goal line, and the clock was ticking. The Patriots were only up by four points, expecting their dreams to be crushed, but then the unthinkable happened — all thanks to undrafted rookie cornerback Malcolm Butler.

Now, a decade later, Butler talks to PEOPLE abouthis famous interceptionthat secured the victory for the Patriots.

"A couple plays before, I made a great pass breakup, and the wide receivers still caught it," Butler, now 35, reflects. "In my head, I'm like, 'Hey, this game is over with, man. I know I'm not going to get another opportunity to show what I got or make a play,' but I was wrong."

Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe via Getty I

The retired NFL player says the Patriots had gone over the exact defensive play in practice before the big game — and he had done it incorrectly.

"We went over this play in practice, and I didn't execute the play right. I wentbehindthe wide receiver instead of over the top of the wide receiver," he explains.

However, after realizing his mistake in practice, he knew what to look for during the game.

"The formation looked very similar, and I told multiple people over and over, 'if they run the ball, the cornerback is most likely not gonna make that tackle.' There's always a chance somebody can do something different, no matter what you think this thing is gonna do that is supposed to be right."

With just 29 seconds left in the game, the Seahawks had the ball at the Patriots' goal line, needing a touchdown to win. When Wilson hiked the ball, he threw a short pass intended for wide receiver Ricardo Lockette.

While the Seahawks were "thinking outside the box," Butler notes that he "was thinking outside the box, too."

"I knew that the wide receiver can't run too far because we were close to the goal line, so his route's gonna be quick," he explained. "It was man-to-man. I ain't had no business looking at the run anyway."

George Gojkovich/Getty

Butler came from behind Lockette and intercepted the ball, resulting in victory for the Patriots. Once he took a knee and his teammates piled on top of him, the reality of the win settled in.

"I really couldn't feel anything because it happened so fast, but I ain't never seen a group of grown men cry like that after I caught that ball," he shares. "They just piled on top of me, they were crying and [saying], 'Oh, I can't believe you did it.' "

While Butler always thought of himself as a "tough guy," he admits he "cried" too.

"It felt great," he tells PEOPLE.

At the time, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady said, "It wasn't the way we drew it up. It was a lot of mental toughness. Our team has had it all year. We never doubted each other, so that's what it took."

The Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots areset for a rematch in Super Bowl LXon Feb. 8.

Read the original article onPeople

byNeo

in Celebrity, Lifestyle, Politics, ShowBiz, Sport

February 01, 2026

Patriots' Malcolm Butler Details 2015 Super Bowl-Winning Interception: 'Never Seen a Group of Grown Men Cry Like That' (Exclusive)

AP Photo/Kathy Willens NEED TO KNOW With less than 30 seconds left, and the Seattle Seahawks on the goal line, it looked like Super Bowl ...

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