By Jane Sutton
MIAMI, Jan 11 (Reuters) - An immigration official said on Tuesday U.S. authorities would not immediately try to send home Elian Gonzalez following a Florida judge's controversial ruling the 6-year-old Cuban should stay for now with relatives in Miami.
The Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) was reviewing Monday's decision. But it did not rule out the possibility it could in due course enforce its own decision last week that Elian should go home to his father in Cuba, INS spokeswoman Maria Cardona told Reuters from Washington.
The political and legal manoeuvres aimed at keeping the boy in the United States continued Tuesday as his Miami relatives refiled a political asylum claim with the INS and Washington lawmakers urged Attorney General Janet Reno to halt any attempt to return the boy to Cuba.
Legal confusion surrounds the young survivor's future after Florida judge Rosa Rodriguez said he should remain in Miami until a March 6 custody hearing -- a ruling that legal scholars said she had no authority to make.
The case has caused a political firestorm across Miami, Havana and Washington ever since Elian was plucked from the ocean on Nov. 25, two days after a boat carrying his mother, Elisabet Broton Rodriguez, and 14 other Cuban migrants capsized en route to Florida. Eleven drowned, including Elian's
mother.
Juan Miguel Gonzalez, a hotel worker on the communist-ruled island, has demanded his son be sent home. Miami relatives want him to stay with them, saying he should grow up ``in freedom.''
Rodriguez, who is Puerto Rican, awarded temporary custody of Elian to his great-uncle Lazaro Gonzalez pending the March hearing on whether he would suffer ``serious and unnecessary emotional harm'' if returned to his father.
The Miami relatives and Cuban exile leaders, who have embraced the boy as a symbol of their opposition to Cuban President Fidel Castro, hailed the decision as a victory.
``Today is a great day for freedom, a great day for justice,'' said Jorge Mas Santos, leader of the influential Cuban American National Foundation exile group.
An attorney for Elian's Miami family, Roger Bernstein, said the family renewed an application for political asylum for Elian Tuesday. A previous asylum petition was withdrawn after the INS ruled that Elian's father was his legal custodian.
The Miami court ruling defied that INS decision, which said Juan Miguel Gonzalez is a fit father and the only person who can speak for Elian. The INS decision had sparked street protests by Cuban Americans in Miami and drew threats of wider unrest from exile leaders.
``Right now we are in the process of reviewing the finding the state court put out yesterday to see what impact it might have, if any, on the INS ruling that Juan Miguel Gonzalez has the sole right to speak for his son,'' Cardona said. ``While we review that decision, the INS is not going to
forcibly remove Elian Gonzalez from the house of his great uncle.''
She said while INS hoped to resolve the issue in cooperation with the family, ``that does not mean we will not enforce our decision'' depending on its review of the ruling.
Experts said Rodriguez had no jurisdiction over Elian.
Reno is the ultimate authority on custody issues involving migrant children unaccompanied by adults, said David Abraham, a law professor at the University of Miami. Reno supports the INS decision to return Elian to his father by Jan. 14.
``According to the well-established supremacy doctrine, as well as the federal monopoly in immigration matters, the attorney general is under no obligation to heed this invalid order,'' he said.
Elian's mother took him out of Cuba without his father's permission and attempted to smuggle him into the United States illegally, lawyers said. Failing to return him to his father violates the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The experts said the Florida judge's ruling was clearly based on politics, not law.
Bernard Perlmutter, director of the University of Miami's Children and Youth Law Clinic, said Florida law says child custody rests with the natural parent unless there is clear proof the parent is unfit.
Elian's Miami relatives appear to base their case on Cuba's political system, arguing he would be harmed if returned to a Communist country.
``We don't put governments on trial,'' Perlmutter said. ``We put parents on trial when we take children away.''
In Washington, both Republican Representative Dan Burton, chairman of the Committee on Government Reform, and Sen. Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent letters to Reno asking her to forestall any INS effort to send Elian back pending a Florida court ruling.
``We believe that such a course of action would be a serious mistake,'' Burton's letter said.
20:54 01-11-00
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