CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A Massachusetts college student who was deported while trying to visit family for Thanksgiving missed multiple opportunities to fight a deportation order issued as a child, a government lawyer said.
Lucia Lopez Belloza, a 19-year-old freshman at Babson College, was flown to Honduras two days after being detained at a Boston airport on Nov. 20, despite a court order on Nov. 21 that she stay in Massachusetts.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Sauter responded to the case Wednesday, saying the Boston judge who issued the order lacked jurisdiction because Lopez Bellosa was already out of state in Texas at the time.
Her attorneys argue that she never knew about the long-standing deportation order, let alone how to challenge it, and that it would have been nearly impossible for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to find her when she was deported.
U.S. prosecutors said that while Lopez Bellosa’s case could be transferred to Texas, it would not be necessary because the government had already released her from custody in Honduras.
“ICE did not ‘lure’ petitioner to an unknown location or disclose her whereabouts following her arrest on November 20,” Sauter wrote. He said she called her family that afternoon to let her know where to file the petition and that she was being transferred to Texas in preparation for deportation, not to cover up her location.
Her attorney, Todd Pomerleau, said ICE offered no meaningful way to find her after the first call home. He said an ICE database showed she was in Massachusetts on Nov. 20, but there was no information about her whereabouts the next day, no one at the local office answered the phone and calls to the office were hung up after receiving an automated message.
“We’re literally having to guess not only where our clients are but why they’re being held because they haven’t given us any information,” he said in a phone interview Friday.
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. Her lawyer said the order was issued “without her personal knowledge.”
According to the government, a judge ordered the deportation of Lopez Bellosa and her mother in March 2016, and the Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed the appeal in February 2017. Sauter wrote that she could have appealed to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, filed a motion for reconsideration, or sought a stay of deportation from ICE.
Pomeroy thought the choices were pointless because Lopez-Belosa was a child and didn’t know they existed. Another lawyer told her parents “not to worry,” he said. “She has all these ways of winning, but she lives her life completely blindfolded.”
The court gave Pomerleau until December 11 to formally respond. He said his client remains traumatized but is working with Babson College to take final exams and finish her freshman year remotely.
“She is an outstanding young woman,” he said, “and we will ensure she continues to have a bright future.”
