WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A U.S. federal judge extended a block on a Trump administration attempt to deport Guatemalan unaccompanied children with active immigration cases, keeping the policy frozen until Tuesday to provide more time to consider the dispute.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, based in Washington, D.C., issued the ruling after a September 10 hearing where he grilled a Justice Department attorney over a colleague’s inaccurate statement that all of the children’s parents had requested their return to Guatemala.
The lawsuit stems from an attempt by President Donald Trump’s administration to suddenly deport 76 unaccompanied Guatemalan minors on August 31, waking the children in the predawn hours over a holiday weekend and hustling them onto planes only to be blocked by a judge’s emergency order.
Drew Ensign, a Justice Department lawyer, told the judge during an emergency hearing that day that the parents had requested the deportations. Two days later, Reuters published a report by the Guatemalan attorney general’s office that said most of the parents of some 600 minors in U.S. custody could not be located. Of 115 located, many did not want their children returned to Guatemala.
Kelly, a Trump appointee, cited the report in a September 10 hearing, leading a separate Justice Department lawyer to withdraw Ensign’s earlier statement.
Lucrecia Prera, head of the Guatemalan Attorney General’s Office for Children and Adolescents, which produced the report, said Guatemalan authorities regularly receive one or two unaccompanied minors per day from Mexico or the U.S., but had never been asked to accept as many as 100 at any given time.
Most of the children the U.S. seeks to return are from Huehuetenango, San Marcos, Quiche and Alta Verapaz, she said. Those regions in Guatemala are characterized by a majority Indigenous population and farming communities with high rates of malnutrition and poverty.
Prera said some families had mortgaged their homes to pay for their children’s trip to the United States.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington and Emily Green in Guatemala City; Editing by Mary Milliken and Rosalba O’Brien)
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