The Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday featured a little boy accepting a Grammy award from Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny. Social media users speculated that the child was 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos.
But Liam is in hiding with his family, after the boy and his father were detained and then released from a Texas detention center.
Liam is now no longer going to school — let alone a Super Bowl.
During the Bad Bunny show, a young boy and his parents watch TV. It is replaying Bad Bunny’s anti-ICE speech at the Grammy Awards from earlier this month. Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, hands a Grammy award to the child.
The rapper then rubbed his head and said in Spanish, “Always believe in yourself.”
Adding to the misinformation was a store sign that read “Conejo” — Liam’s last name. That Spanish word means “rabbit” or “bunny,” like the rapper.
Many online observers of the much-watched performance were under the impression that the former pre-K student at Valley View Elementary School had a cameo in Bad Bunny’s high-energy dance production.
He did not.
A representative for the Conejo Ramos family confirmed to MPR News that the featured boy was not Liam.
Liam and his father were detained in front of their Columbia Heights home Jan. 20. Two days later, they were sent to a family detainment facility in Dilley, Texas. They returned Feb. 1 to Minnesota.
In an interview with MPR News last week, Liam’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, said the family was in hiding. He cited a bomb threat at his son’s former elementary school and ICE agents patrolling the Columbia Heights home they no longer live in. And he recently learned that the Department of Homeland Security seeks to end the family’s asylum claims.
“The truth is, we’re very scared,” he said in an MPR News interview conducted in Spanish. “My family, my children, are very scared of what might happen to us and of what we're going through now. We’re still hiding. And we’re still getting bad news.”
Conejo Arias said Liam was thrilled to leave the detention center.
“He was so excited, he started crying too. He said, ‘Daddy, we’re finally going to be back with mommy and my brother,’” he said. “Then, when we arrived, we hugged each other … Many times, we thought we’d never see each other again.”
Still, Liam has suffered and continues to suffer, he said.
“The truth is, he’s not the same boy he was before. Ever since he went in there, he’s suffered psychological trauma; he’s very scared,” Conejo Arias said. “He can’t sleep well at night. He wakes up three or four times a night screaming, ‘Daddy, Daddy.’”
Liam tells his father about nightmares featuring police officers. The boy also “remembers the moment the ICE agents detained us.”
An attorney in the family’s asylum case, Paschal Nwokocha, said last week that the law firm is “fully committed” to fight for the family and do what it can to keep them in the country.
