Nebraska high court backs Guatemalan mom

OMAHA, Neb.: A Nebraska court ruled in favor of a Guatemalan mother in a custody case that immigrant advocates say illustrates a nationwide problem.

The state Supreme Court said a lower court judge was wrong to terminate the parental rights of Maria Luis, who came to Grand Island in 2004 with two of her children, including one born around the time she entered the United States illegally. Luis was deported a year later after lying about her identity to authorities who were looking into the welfare of the two children. Her parental rights were later terminated by the judge.

Attorneys for the state had argued that Luis is an unfit parent. For one, they said, she has ignored her daughter's health problems on multiple occasions.

"While we recognize and express concern over Maria's medical judgment, we disagree that such error in judgment warranted termination of her parental rights,'' Judge Michael McCormack wrote for the court. ``We have repeatedly said that the law does not require the perfection of a parent.''

The state also argued the children's American foster parents could give them a better life than they would have in Guatemala. But the court ruled it has never terminated a parent's custody based on financial or other grounds a stranger might provide.

The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that the state failed to prove that terminating Luis' rights was in the best interests of her children. But it also said that the state was right to involve itself in the case.

Attorneys for Luis had argued that the state didn't have jurisdiction because Nebraska authorities violated the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, which provides that people arrested abroad should have access to their home country's consular officials.

The high court has never considered whether state courts have jurisdiction over child custody disputes when a parent faces deportation, McCormack wrote for the court. But other courts have deemed that child custody problems are within the state's authority, he added.

"We cannot conclude, simply because a party to this case faces deportation, that federal immigration laws pre-empt this state's authority to decide matters involving child custody,'' he wrote.

Luis' lawyers and other immigrant advocates have said the case shows what is increasingly happening across the country when state courts take action in child welfare cases that clash with federal immigration law.