Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a 19-year-old college student at Babson College, was detained by ICE while trying to make a surprise trip to see her family in Austin. Within about 48 hours of her arrest, the agency deported her to Honduras.
Courtesy of Todd Pomerleau
Francis thought the phone call was an extortion at first — or, at the least, a sick prank. But as his daughter’s crying voice on the other side of the line continued, Francis realized it was all much worse.
On the morning of Nov. 20, Francis’ 19-year-old daughter and Boston-area college student Any Lucia Lopez Belloza set off to surprise her Austin-based parents with a trip home from college for Thanksgiving. But at the Boston airport, federal immigration agents arrested her, telling the surprised college freshman she had a deportation order. It was all confusing to Francis, too.
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“In reality, we didn’t think she had a deportation order,” the father of three, whose last name the Statesman is not publishing due to his immigration status, told the Statesman on Friday. “If we had known, I don’t think we would have sent her.”
The family’s life changed just as fast as the facts began to emerge.
Despite a federal judge issuing a stay on Lopez Belloza’s removal from the country the day following her detention, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported Lopez Belloza approximately 48 hours after her arrest.
In quick succession, the agency moved Lopez Belloza to its Boston-area immigration processing center, a military base, a detention center in Texas, and finally — with her ankles and wrists shackled — to her native Honduras, her lawyer Todd Pomerleau told the American-Statesman. Lopez Belloza’s family brought her from Honduras to the United States when she was 7, eventually settling in Austin. She graduated from IDEA-Rundberg and gained acceptance to the prestigious Babson College.
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Pomerleau, a Boston-based lawyer who specializes in immigration habeas litigation, which challenges the government’s power to detain people unlawfully, said Lopez Belloza’s arrest is the first he has worked on where a client was detained while flying domestically — signaling what he believes to be an expansion of ICE arrests at airports.
Pomerleau argues that the government violated several of his client’s rights to due process, including by detaining her without showing her a removal order and by impeding her right to counsel. Pomerleau said he was informed of the case through friends of Lopez Belloza’s family and agreed to take it on, but that ICE impeded his attempts to communicate with her until after she was deported.
He called the events leading to the deportation “an alphabet soup of constitutional violations.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to the Statesman’s request for comment in time for publication. They told the Boston Globe, who first reported the story, that Lopez Belloza had a deportation order going back to 2015.
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Pomerleau cast doubt on this claim, saying the family had asylum proceedings under way until 2017. Francis said that his family was denied asylum, but that they had been assured by the judge that they did not have deportation orders.
Some in President Donald Trump’s circle applauded the deportation. Border Patrol Operations Commander Gregory Bovino replied on X to an ABC News report on the proceedings, saying “Why even mention this illegal alien was an 18 year old college student? Completely irrelevant except that an illegal alien may have taken a university slot from an American citizen.”
A quick deportation
Lopez Belloza made it as far as her boarding gate on Thursday, Nov. 20. It was there, before the morning sun rose, that attendants told her to go to customer service because her boarding pass wasn’t working. At the customer service desk, Pomerleau said his client “was immediately surrounded, handcuffed.”
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Within a day of learning of Lopez Belloza’s detention, Pomerleau secured a deportation stay from a federal judge through a habeas petition arguing his client’s rights were violated. A Massachusetts judge signed off on the stay at 6:10 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 21, according to a copy of the order reviewed by the Statesman.
At around that time, ICE was flying Lopez Belloza to Texas, Pomerleau now believes; though at the time that information was not on ICE’s detainee locator.
On Monday, when Pomerleau contacted Francis, the lawyer said he was shocked to hear Lopez Belloza had already been deported and was in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula with her grandparents.
Pomerleau said he plans to continue to fight Lopez Belloza’s case in federal court to try to force the agency to return her to the United States. He pointed to the fact that federal court orders eventually required the agency to bring migrant Kilmer Abrego Garcia to the United States after it ignored a judge’s orders and deported him to El Salvador.
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Lopez Belloza, Pomerleau said, does not have a criminal record.
In the months before she left for college, Francis, a tailor, sewed his daughter black and navy blue suits. He was proud of his daughter’s dreams and aspirations and of the scholarship she received to go to school so far away and study business. Lopez Belloza told her father that she wanted to help him start his own business when she graduated.
“We would talk to her every day,” Francis said.
It was Francis’ boss, a family friend, who paid for Lopez Belloza’s surprise trip home for Thanksgiving as a thank you to his employee. His family cherished the Thanksgiving tradition of preparing a meal together, Francis said.
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This year, Francis and his wife had not made any homecoming plans for their daughter. Worse than a holiday without their eldest daughter, the couple spent their Thanksgiving receiving friends arriving to console them.
“We know this is our reality, a lot of others are going through this too,” Francis said. “We want others to know what’s happening. So others can be ready.”
