WASHINGTON - Newly released video footage shows that Delta Air Lines was responsible for transporting 5-year-old Liam Ramos and his dad to a Texas immigration detention center the day they were detained by federal immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis.
Nick Benson, a Minneapolis plane enthusiast and activist with the grassroots pro-democracy organization MN50501, obtained the video footage via a public records request. It shows Ramos and his father waiting to board a Delta flight at the Minneapolis airport on the day they were shipped off to the notorious South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas.
"I believe this is the only known film documenting the process ICE uses to fly children to detention centers on regular, public commercial flights," Benson wrote on social media.
Independent journalist Gillian Brockell was the first to report on Benson's video footage.
Delta Air Lines declined to comment. Instead, it offered guidance on how the federal government books air travel "via third parties" and deferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for comment on how they book air travel.
"Carriers do not have advance notice or detail as to who may be flying and for what reason," reads the guidance shared by Delta.
Delta also touted that ABC News reported on Feb. 1 that Delta was the airline that flew Ramos and his dad back to Minneapolis from the detention center that Delta also apparently sent them to. However, the ABC News story does not mention Delta anywhere.
An ICE spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Benson's video footage is surprisingly clear and shows Ramos and his dad at different points in Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport. You can see at least two apparently plainclothes federal agents boarding a Delta flight with Ramos and his father on Jan. 21 - a day after federal agents detained Ramos in his blue hat and Spiderman backpack, a photo of which went viral and spread globally.
Ramos and his dad went on to spend nearly two weeks locked up at the Dilley facility, where Liam's health rapidly deteriorated. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) later helped to get them released and returned to Minneapolis. Ramos' parents, originally from Ecuador, are not in the U.S. illegally and have no criminal record.
Last month, in a move that some viewed as retaliation against Ramos' family, the Department of Homeland Security abruptly tried to end the family's asylum claim, which could have resulted in them being deported as quickly as that day. But a judge granted them a continuance, giving them more time to make their case for asylum.
HuffPost talked to Benson in February about his efforts to track ICE deportation flights out of the Minneapolis airport, at which time he mentioned being suspicious of Delta Air Lines' role in quietly transporting detained residents to immigration detention facilities in Texas.
The airline did not respond to a request for comment at the time.
Ramos' detention by ICE came at the peak of the Trump administration's monthslong surge of immigration agents in the Minneapolis area that traumatized immigrants and communities. The administration last month declared it was officially ending its surge, but Benson is still posting photos of immigrants in shackles being loaded onto planes at the airport there.
"As of last week, we're down to two weekly ICE Air flights at MSP, on Tuesdays and Fridays," he wrote Wednesday on social media. "Our volunteers continue to observe; recent snow hindered the view, but we counted ten detainees loading today."