When 5-year-old Liam Ramos – the child with the bunny hat and Spiderman backpack who became, for a time, the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown in Minnesota – was released from a Texas detention center in late January, the family’s drama appeared to end. Ramos had been suffering in detention, but now he was free to return home; the status quo had been restored.
It was really more of an intermission.
A second act has played out in immigration court in the weeks since Liam’s release – and the Trump administration is set to win this time. An immigration judge issued deportation orders for the Ramos family – Liam; his father and pregnant mother; and his 13-year-old brother – earlier this month.
But while there’s been some reporting on the case, reporters have often struggled to articulate exactly what the government did to the Ramos family. It’s hard to blame them. Liam and his family were high-profile victims of one of the most confusing tricks the administration has developed to swiftly deport asylum-seekers – something that’s gone from hardly ever used under prior administrations, to being used literally a thousand times a day.
The tactic is called “pretermission.” Technically, it terminates an open immigration court case – meaning an asylum claim isn’t actually denied, it’s simply never considered – and results in an order of removal for the asylum-seeker. Think of it as a pocket veto for asylum claims. The government doesn’t say that you don’t qualify for asylum; it says that it doesn’t even need to answer that question.
In the case of the Ramos family, ICE prosecutors filed a motion to pretermit days after Liam was returned home from detention. At a hearing two days after the motion was filed, the family’s lawyers successfully argued for more time to fight it – but they couldn’t change the outcome. The judge issued removal orders for the family in early March, which the family’s lawyers have already appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals. (A relevant sidenote for Throughline readers: a federal judge has stopped many of the Trump administration’s proposed changes to the appeals process from going into effect, so the BIA is still only mostly a rubber stamp for removal orders.)
It will not surprise you to learn that pretermission has never been used en masse in the way it’s been used under this administration. In 2024, prosecutors filed about 50 motions to pretermit a month; between November 2025 and February 2026, judges granted 23,000 of them (not counting thousands more that they denied or that were still pending as of the end of February). In other words, what happened to Liam Ramos’ family was happening to thousands of other families at the same time – a sudden motion to kick them out of court, which they couldn’t persuade a judge to deny.
But these motions weren’t all happening for the same reasons. The government has been fighting its pretermission war on two fronts – one of them a slow and steady advance, one of them a carpet-bombing campaign that is now mysteriously on hold.
The Trump administration argues that pretermission is appropriate when a filed asylum application is insufficient. Either there are specific problems with the completion of the application (for example, a lack of identity documentation or a failure to provide the correct signatures). Or the application as a whole fails to provide sufficient evidence of a valid asylum claim. (The legal standard here is “prima facie” – Latin for “on the face of it.”)
The regulations governing applications make it clear that applicants are supposed to get a chance to fix a problem before it sinks their entire case. And traditionally it’s been understood that immigration judges have an obligation to ask questions that might flesh out an asylum claim – especially given how many asylum-seekers don’t have lawyers of their own. But the BIA issued one ruling in March 2025 stating that judges had a right to dismiss incomplete applications, followed by one in September 2025 that specifically OK’d pretermission for any failure to meet the “prima facie” standard.
This is what happened to Liam Ramos’ family. The public doesn’t know what exactly the judge found insufficient about their application; in other pretermission cases, the problems have been as minor as sending a declaration as an attachment rather than filling it in on the form itself.
Relatively few people have had their cases pocket-vetoed because of supposed insufficiencies, though. In most cases, judges have pre-termitted cases without any reference to the actual application at all.
The second front in the pretermission fight relies on another weird trick the Trump administration is trying to use as a widespread policy for the first time: third-country removals, or deporting someone to a country that isn’t the place they’re from.
The administration has signed a series of “Asylum Cooperative Agreements” with countries around the world, such as Uganda and Ecuador. (Ecuador is Liam Ramos’ home country, but don’t let that confuse you – this isn’t what happened to the Ramos family.) Those agreements allow the U.S. to offload asylum-seekers onto the other country, with the other country promising to let them apply for asylum there instead.
At the end of October 2025, yet another BIA decision established that a judge could terminate an asylum case based on the ICE prosecutors’ assertion that the asylum-seeker could be sent to another country under an Asylum Cooperative Agreement. (Instead of being ordered deported to their home country, they would be ordered deported to whichever country the government named.) That ruling opened the floodgates. At the end of 2025 and beginning of 2026, it was extremely common for someone with an upcoming hearing on their asylum application to instead be slapped with a motion to pretermit based on a third-country agreement.
In the first two months of 2026, almost 8,000 non-Ecuadorians were ordered deported to Ecuador after a pretermission request. What makes this number especially notable is that, while the text of the U.S.’s agreement with Ecuador doesn’t provide any details about how many people Ecuador has agreed to accept, Ecuadorian officials have stated that their negotiations centered around a quota of 300 people per year.
In other words, the existence of an agreement with Ecuador has already been used as the basis for so many terminations of U.S. asylum cases that it could take over 25 years for all of them to actually be sent to Ecuador to file a new asylum claim. (In the meantime, of course, they remain in detention, where – like everyone else – the pressure to accept deportation as quickly as possible can outstrip any fear they have of going home.)
Then, as suddenly as the pretermission flood started, it stopped. ICE leadership sent a memo on March 12 telling prosecutors to stop filing motions to pretermit based on third-country agreements. It’s not clear whether this is a temporary pause or a permanent shift in tactics – and it’s entirely possible that prosecutors will simply pivot to filing more motions based on the supposed insufficiency of the application, like they did in Ramos’ case.
It’s all an enormous mess. How are you supposed to fight a motion filed at the last minute, that argues your application is deficient and therefore doesn’t need to be considered – without a chance to fix the application? How are you supposed to prepare for deportation to a country you didn’t even know you could be deported to before setting foot in the courtroom – and where you might not actually be taken for years, anyway?
Lawyers on the ground are working to devise answers to these questions in real time – fighting for delays, asking the appellate board to force the judge to at least address the case on the merits, filing nationwide lawsuits over third-country removals in general and Asylum Cooperative Agreements in particular. But there’s simply so much we don’t know: the details of the agreements, whether judges are under orders to approve pretermission requests, even what the standard is for an insufficient application. When one side has all the information and all the power, what happens isn’t a legal proceeding – it’s just a cruel trick.
