High Court judge Jus­tice James Aboud has blocked im­mi­gra­tion au­thor­i­ties from de­port­ing a 14-year-old Cuban teenag­er who was re­fused en­try at Pi­ar­co Air­port last Sun­day.

In an emer­gency hear­ing, on Mon­day night, the judge grant­ed an in­junc­tion and or­dered that the teenag­er Bhalia Massiel Perez Del­ga­do be re­leased in the cus­tody of her moth­er Lu­cre­cia De La Cari­dad Del­ga­do Lopez.

The child was de­nied en­try af­ter she re­turned from Cu­ba and was sched­uled to be de­port­ed yes­ter­day on a Co­pa flight back to Cu­ba.

Her at­tor­neys, Owen Hinds Jr and Renu­ka Sagram­s­ingh-Sook­lal, had at first sought to get the Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty to over­turn the im­mi­gra­tion au­thor­i­ty or­der and when that failed they pe­ti­tioned the High Court for a hear­ing.

Jus­tice James Aboud heard the mat­ter be­fore grant­i­ng the in­junc­tion short­ly be­fore 7 pm. Im­mi­gra­tion au­thor­i­ties on­ly re­leased the child around 11 pm af­ter the Reg­is­trar of the High Court in­ter­vened.

The child’s moth­er has been grant­ed refugee sta­tus in this coun­try in 2017. Her daugh­ter came to Trinidad that same year and was al­lowed en­try on the con­di­tion that she re­port to the Im­mi­gra­tion Di­vi­sion pe­ri­od­i­cal­ly.

Against the ad­vice of her at­tor­ney, the child’s moth­er al­lowed her daugh­ter to trav­el to Cu­ba to vis­it her ail­ing fa­ther but she en­coun­tered dif­fi­cul­ties when she at­tempt­ed to re­turn.

No date has yet been set for the hear­ing of the ju­di­cial re­view law­suit chal­leng­ing the de­ci­sion of the im­mi­gra­tion au­thor­i­ties.