A FEDERAL judge blocked US President Donald Trump’s administration on Thursday from immediately deporting Guatemalan migrant children who came to the US alone back to their home country.

The decision by US District Judge Timothy J Kelly comes after the Republican administration’s Labour Day weekend attempt to remove Guatemalan migrant children who were living in government shelters and foster care.

US government officials said they were seeking to reunify children with parents who wanted them returned home. “But that explanation crumbled like a house of cards about a week later,” Mr Kelly, who was nominated by Mr Trump, said.

“There is no evidence before the court that the parents of these children sought their return.”

Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin in a statement insisted on the administration’s initial claims that parents requested being reunited with their children.

“This judge is blocking efforts to reunify children with their families. Now these children will have to go to shelters,” Ms McLaughlin said.

“All just to ‘get Trump.’ This is disgraceful and immoral.”

Advocates for the children also submitted a whistleblower account to the court that suggests many of the children who were found eligible for deportation had likely been victims of child abuse, like death threats, gang violence, and human trafficking, Mr Kelly noted in his order.

“The court saw through the government’s repeated misrepresentations of critical facts to try to justify the indefensible targeting of vulnerable children who would have faced danger if forcibly sent to other countries,” Efren C Olivares, vice-president of litigation and legal strategy at the National Immigration Law Centre, said in a statement.

There was already a temporary order in place preventing the removal of Guatemalan children. But that was set to expire on Tuesday.

Mr Kelly granted a preliminary injunction extends that temporary protection indefinitely, although the government can appeal.

Mr Kelly did rebuff advocates’ push to block the removal of children from additional countries, though he said any attempt to remove those children similarly would likely be unlawful.

Legal advocates working with Kids in Need of Defence visited Honduras last week and found government officials and non-governmental organisations working “furiously” to receive as many as 400 children back from the United States.