College student deported during Thanksgiving trip could’ve fought removal as a kid, US says

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A Massachusetts college student who was deported while trying to visit family for Thanksgiving missed multiple opportunities to fight a removal order issued when she was a young child, according to a government attorney.

Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a 19-year-old freshman at Babson College, was flown to Honduras two days after being detained at Boston’s airport on Nov. 20, despite a court order on Nov. 21 that she remain in Massachusetts.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Sauter filed a response Wednesday in the case, saying the Boston judge who issued the order lacked jurisdiction because by then, Lopez Belloza was already in Texas on her way out of the country.

Her attorney argues she never knew about the longstanding removal order let alone how to challenge it, and that Immigration and Customs Enforcement made it nearly impossible to locate her as she was being deported.

The U.S. attorney said that although Lopez Belloza’s case could’ve been transferred to Texas, that isn’t necessary because the government has already released her from custody — in Honduras.

“ICE did not ‘spirit’ Petitioner to an unknown place or fail to disclose her whereabouts after her arrest on Nov. 20,” Sauter wrote. He said she was able to call her family that afternoon, give notice of where to file a petition, and that her transfer to Texas was to prepare for her removal, not to obscure her location.

Her lawyer, Todd Pomerleau, says that after the initial call home, ICE provided no meaningful way to find her. He said an ICE database that showed that she was in Massachusetts on Nov. 20 had no information about her whereabouts the next day, no one answered the phone at the local field office, and calls to the office hung up after an automated message.

“We literally have to guess no only where our client is, but why they’re being held because they don’t give us any information,” he said in a phone interview Friday.

Lopez Belloza, who is now staying with her grandparents, came to the U.S. in 2014 at age 8 and was ordered removed several years later. Her attorney says the order was issued “without her personal knowledge.”

According to the government, a judge ordered the removal of Lopez Belloza and her mother in March 2016, and the Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed an appeal in February 2017. Sauter wrote that she could have appealed to the Fifth Circuit, filed a motion to reconsider or sought a stay of removal from ICE.

Pomerleau argues those options were meaningless because Lopez Belloza was a child and unaware they existed. Another lawyer told her parents “not to worry about it,” he said. “She had all these ways of winning but was completely living her life with blindfolds on.”

The court has given Pomerleau until Dec. 11 to formally respond. He said his client remains traumatized but is working with Babson College to take her final exams and finish her freshman year remotely.

“She’s just a remarkable young woman,” he said, “and we’re gonna ensure she continues to have a bright future.”