College student deported during Thanksgiving travel describes ICE officer’s intimidation

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A Massachusetts college student who was deported while trying to visit family for Thanksgiving said an immigration officer told her it wouldn’t matter if she spoke to a lawyer, she was going to be removed from the country anyway.

Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a 19-year-old freshman at Babson College, was flown to Honduras on Nov. 22, two days after she was detained at Boston’s airport and one day after a judge ordered that she remain in the country.

In a court document filed Saturday, she described two sleepless nights — first, staying awake with excitement in anticipation of seeing her family, and then later, being crammed with 17 other women in a cell “which was so small that we did not even have enough space to sleep on the floor.”

Lopez Belloza, who is now staying with her grandparents, came to the U.S. in 2014 at age 8 and was ordered deported several years later. Though the government has argued that she missed multiple opportunities to appeal, Lopez Belloza said her previous attorney told her there was no removal order.

“If I had been aware of my 2017 deportation order, I would not have traveled with my valid passport,” she wrote. “I would have dedicated significant time and effort during the past eight years to hiring an attorney who could help me resolve my immigration situation.”

The government also argues that the judge who issued the Nov. 21 order preventing her removal lacked jurisdiction because by then, Lopez Belloza was already in Texas on her way out of the country. But lawyers for the student argue that Immigration and Customs Enforcement made it all but impossible to locate her.

According to Lopez Belloza, when she refused to sign a form consenting to deportation and asked to call her parents or a lawyer, a “tall, muscular, intimidating” ICE officer “said it didn’t matter if I spoke to a lawyer because I was going to be deported anyway.” She later was allowed to call her family from Massachusetts, but that was before she knew she would be flown to Texas and then Honduras.

In a separate filing, lawyers for Lopez Belloza said the government acted “in bad faith and with furtiveness” by failing to answer phone calls to the Boston-area ICE office or update its detainee locator database and by moving her without allowing her to notify her parents or counsel. They asked a judge to schedule a hearing and allow Lopez Belloza to return to the U.S. to testify.

The filings came a day after a group of seven retired judges submitted a letter to the court supporting Lopez Belloza’s request for a hearing on whether the government should be held in contempt for violating the order. They said allowing the government to willfully disobey orders makes a mockery of the Constitution.