Colombia expels members of ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect Lev Tahor

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Colombia said Monday it sent 26 members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect Lev Tahor to the United States after determining that the rights of some of the children in the group were at risk.

Authorities detained the group of 17 children and nine adults on Nov. 22 following a raid on their hotel in Yarumal, a city in northwestern Colombia.

Immigration officials said that while all of the children in the group were accompanied by at least one parent, there were five children with American and Guatemalan passports for whom Interpol yellow notices had been issued. The notices are global alerts issued for people who have been reported as missing or those considered victims of parental or criminal abduction.

Colombia’s national immigration agency said the group spent the past week in one of the agency’s buildings in Medellin, where the children were provided with support from Colombia’s National Institute for Family Welfare.

The group was then flown to New York, according to the agency. They were received there by U.S. officials, who will check if there are any pending investigations against the adults while the children will be in the care of Child Protective Services.

Lev Tahor has run into legal problems in several countries, with its members accused of kidnapping children and forcing them into marriages with adults.

Last year, police in Guatemala raided a Lev Tahor compound in the Central American country, following reports of sexual abuse, taking at least 160 minors and 40 women into protective custody.

In 2022, Mexican authorities arrested a leader of the sect near the Guatemalan border and removed a number of women and children from their compound. In 2021, two leaders of the group were convicted of kidnapping and child sexual exploitation crimes in New York.

The sect was founded in the 1980s and is known to have members in Canada, the U.S., Mexico, Guatemala and Israel.

Gloria Eperanza Arriero, the director of Colombia’s national immigration agency, said last week that officials decided to question Lev Tahor members after getting a tip from locals about their presence in the town of Yarumal. Arriero said the sect’s members had arrived in Colombia in October and were searching for a rural property where they could set up a compound.

“The positive thing in all of this is that we got to the children before they had a compound,” Arriero said. “Because in that case, we would have required a search warrant.”