Lawyers for the federal government have filed a motion to expedite the deportation of Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old boy in a bunny hat whose image rocketed around the world after he was detained by federal agents in Minnesota last month during an immigration enforcement operation.In an interview Friday morning, Danielle Molliver, the immigration lawyer representing Liam and his father, confirmed the filing of the government motion, which she called “extraordinary” and possibly “retaliatory.”A hearing in the case is set for later Friday, and Molliver said she planned to request more time to plead the asylum case for Liam, and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, who are from Ecuador and entered the United States in December 2024.Molliver said the family had legally entered the country through a humanitarian program. The Department of Homeland Security had charged that Conejo Arias had entered the country illegally.A request to the department for comment was not immediately answered Friday.Get Starting PointA guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.Enter EmailLiam’s detention last month prompted outrage in Minneapolis and beyond, and drew expressions of support for immigrant families caught in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown across the Twin Cities. Dozens of immigrant detainees at the site in Dilley, Texas, where the boy and his father had quickly been transferred, were captured in drone footage as they walked out and shouted in protest over the conditions in which Liam and other children were being held.Less than a week ago, Liam and his father arrived back home in Minnesota after state lawmakers, lawyers, and activists intervened and a federal judge ordered their release in a blistering opinion that denounced their detention as “the imposition of cruelty.”But seeking to expedite deportation has become a common action against asylum-seekers and other immigrants now battling their removal from the country in immigration courts. Since October, federal government lawyers have increasingly been asking judges to “pretermit,” or dismiss, asylum cases without hearings, asserting that applicants can seek asylum in other countries with which the United States has been working out new asylum agreements, including Honduras and Uganda.“They are moving very fast,” Molliver said. “Their deportation could happen in a matter of weeks.”Meanwhile, questions are arising about another young person in Minneapolis. The principal in a suburban elementary school feared the worst when he lost contact with one of his fifth-grade students in early January as the Trump administration began surging federal immigration officers to the area.The girl stopped coming to class and her family didn’t answer the phone, said Jason Kuhlman, who oversees Valley View Elementary School in Columbia Heights. The family’s landlord went to the house but found no one, Kuhlman said. The girl’s school-issued Chromebook laptop was still there.It took a month, and a chance encounter more than 1,000 miles away, for Kuhlman to learn that the missing girl, along with her family, was being held by immigration authorities in a Texas detention center. Two of her Valley View classmates — brothers in second grade and fifth grade who had also been sent to Texas with their mother — recognized her in the detention center cafeteria, Kuhlman said.The boys told Kuhlman about the girl after they and their mother were released on a judge’s order and returned to Minnesota on Wednesday, he said. The school district declined to share the names of the students.“It was surreal,” Kuhlman told The Washington Post. “It was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ I wonder ... how many kids are MIA?”Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the department cannot verify the detention of the students without their names. “No one in ICE custody is missing” as detainees are searchable online and can contact their families by phone, she said, and ICE does not target children or schools.“Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with a safe person the parent designates,” McLaughlin said. “This is consistent with past administration’s immigration enforcement.”