CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A Massachusetts college student who was deported while trying to visit family for Thanksgiving says an immigration official told her it didn’t matter if she talked to a lawyer and that she would be deported anyway.
Lucia Lopez Belloza, a 19-year-old freshman at Babson College, flew to Honduras on Nov. 22, two days after she was detained at a Boston airport and a day after a judge ordered her to stay in the country.
In a court document filed on Saturday, she described two sleepless nights – first staying up all night excited to see her family, and then being crammed into a cell with 17 other women “so small we didn’t even have enough room to sleep on the floor.”
Lopez Belloza, who now lives with her grandparents, came to the United States in 2014 when she was 8 years old and was ordered deported a few years later. Despite the government’s argument that she missed multiple opportunities to appeal, Lopez-Belosa said her former lawyer told her there was no deportation order.
“Had I known about the 2017 deportation order, I would not have traveled with a valid passport,” she wrote. “Over the past eight years, I have invested considerable time and energy in hiring an attorney who could help me resolve my immigration issues.”
The government also argued that the judge who issued the Nov. 21 order blocking her deportation lacked jurisdiction because Lopez-Belosa was already in Texas preparing to leave the country. But the student’s attorneys argued that it would be nearly impossible for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to find her.
Lopez Belloza said that when she refused to sign a form agreeing to deportation and asked to call her parents or an attorney, a “tall, muscular, intimidating” ICE officer “said it didn’t matter if I talked to an attorney because I was going to be deported anyway.” She was later allowed to call her family from Massachusetts, but that was before she knew she would be flown to Texas and then Honduras.
Lopez-Belosa’s attorneys said in a separate filing that the government acted “maliciously and furtively” by failing to answer calls to the Boston-area ICE office or update its detainee location database and transferring her without allowing her to notify her parents or attorneys. They asked the judge to schedule a hearing and allow Lopez Bellosa to return to the United States to testify.
The filing comes a day after seven retired judges submitted a letter to the court supporting Lopez Bellosa’s request for a hearing on whether the government should be held in contempt for violating the order. Allowing the government to deliberately disobey orders would make a mockery of the Constitution, they said.