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Gloria Esperanza Arriero, the director of Colombia’s national
immigration service, told The Associated Press on Monday that
her agency questioned nine members of the Lev Tahor sector
during a hotel inspection Sunday.
“We will likely deport them,” Arriero said, “because there are
no arrest orders for them in Colombia."
She said that the group of 17 children and nine adults arrived
in Colombia during the last week of October, and were staying in
a hotel in the small northwestern city of Yarumal while they
searched for a rural property they could use to start up a new
site in the South American country.
Arriero said that there were Interpol yellow notices for five
children in the group, who have American and Guatemalan
passports. The notices are global alerts issued for people who
have been reported as missing or those considered victims of
parental or criminal abduction.
The official said that her agency decided to act after residents
informed police about the presence of members of the sect in
Yarumal, a town in northwest Colombia.
“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.”
In Colombia, immigration officials can conduct searches in
hotels and check whether foreigners staying there have entered
the country legally, or are wanted by law enforcement agencies.
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.
The sect has run into legal problems elsewhere.
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.
Lev Tahor is known to have members in Canada, the United States,
Mexico, Guatemala and Israel.
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