A 19-year-old college student was about to board a flight to surprise her family for Thanksgiving when she was detained at Boston Logan International Airport and deported to Honduras two days later, her father and lawyer said on Sunday.<\/p>\n
The student, Any Luc\u00eda L\u00f3pez Belloza, was brought by her parents from Honduras to the United States when she was 7. Her father, Francis L\u00f3pez, said in a telephone interview on Sunday that neither Ms. L\u00f3pez nor her parents knew there was an order for her deportation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen they arrested Any, that\u2019s when they told her,\u201d said Mr. L\u00f3pez, a tailor.<\/p>\n
He said his employer had arranged and paid for his daughter\u2019s travel to Austin, Texas, to surprise him at work.<\/p>\n
Ms. L\u00f3pez\u2019s lawyer, Todd Pomerleau, described an opaque process for obtaining information about her case, including the grounds for her deportation.<\/p>\n
He said she had been deported in violation of a court order that a federal judge signed on Friday that said Ms. L\u00f3pez could not be removed from the United States while her case was pending.<\/p>\n
Ms. L\u00f3pez, a freshman studying business at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., was about to board a Southwest Airlines flight to Texas early on Nov. 20.<\/p>\n
She was told there was a problem with her ticket, so she went to customer service and was surrounded by immigration agents, Mr. Pomerleau said.<\/p>\n
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency told The Boston Globe<\/a> that an immigration judge had ordered Ms. L\u00f3pez deported in 2015, when she was a child. The agency did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday.<\/p>\n Mr. Pomerleau said he checked her information in the Executive Office for Immigration Review database and could not find any record of her original deportation order.<\/p>\n \u201cSo I\u2019m not convinced she has a removal order, and if she did have one, she should have been notified of it, because she\u2019s completely unaware of this situation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n On Saturday, after she spent a night detained in Texas, she was put on a bus with shackles on her wrists, waist and ankles before being put on a flight to Honduras, Mr. Pomerleau said.<\/p>\n Ms. L\u00f3pez, who is staying with her grandparents in Honduras, asked that her father speak on her behalf, her father said. He said she had found it upsetting to recount the details of her removal, in particular being detained and shackled.<\/p>\n He said his daughter told him she had not signed any paperwork authorizing her removal from the United States, as some people do to avoid lengthy detentions.<\/p>\n Ms. L\u00f3pez lived in Texas with her parents and two younger siblings, who are 2 and 5, before going to college.<\/p>\n The family emigrated nearly 12 years ago because of the rampant crime and insecurity in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Mr. L\u00f3pez and his wife feared for their daughter as the news was filled every week \u201cwith deaths and murders,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s the reason we left.\u201d The family had applied for asylum, he said, but it was denied, and they were never told they had to appeal to avoid a deportation order.<\/p>\n Mr. L\u00f3pez described his daughter as organized and studious.<\/p>\n \u201cShe had that responsibility \u2014 of being the first to graduate from college and being an example to others,\u201d said Mr. L\u00f3pez, who had sewn her business suits for interviews and internships.<\/p>\n Now, he said, his daughter was reeling being back in the country she left behind so long ago. \u201cShe\u2019s trying to assimilate to her new reality,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Ms. L\u00f3pez told The Globe she was worried about how she would continue her education.<\/p>\n \u201cI have worked so hard to be able to be at Babson my first semester, that was my dream,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m losing everything.\u201d<\/p>\n A spokeswoman for Babson College did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday.<\/p>\n At the time the L\u00f3pez family left Honduras, migration from Central America was growing<\/a> as people, particularly in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, fled violence, crime and economic stagnation.<\/p>\n In recent years, migration from Honduras surged, with thousands joining migrant caravans and camping at the U.S.-Mexico border.<\/p>\n President Trump made stopping immigration and expelling migrants a central message of his campaigns, even more so in his push for a second term.<\/p>\n In recent days, he again turned his attention to Honduras, endorsing a right-wing candidate in this weekend\u2019s election and seeking to pardon<\/a> a former president whom many experts blame for spurring mass migration from his country to the United States.<\/p>\n The president in office, Xiomara Castro, has spent the end of her term trying to balance her obligation to undocumented migrants<\/a> in the United States \u2014 of which there are estimated to be more than half a million<\/a> \u2014 with a need to cooperate with the Trump administration, which has come down hard on leaders who do not back its agenda.<\/p>\n By Nov. 20, nearly 30,000 Hondurans had been deported this year, about 13,000 more than in the same period last year, according to Honduran government data.<\/p>\n Honduran officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the case of Ms. L\u00f3pez.<\/p>\n Her father said he felt it was important to share his family\u2019s ordeal at a time when so many are facing deportation amid Mr. Trump\u2019s immigration crackdown.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve decided to speak because it\u2019s a reality we are facing right now,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 19-year-old college student was about to board a flight to surprise her family for Thanksgiving when she…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56767,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[30736,9207,9208,9205,11595,9204,8163,30737,25444,9,11,10,1777,1876],"class_list":["post-56766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-babson-college","tag-deportation","tag-honduras","tag-illegal-immigration","tag-immigration-and-customs-enforcement-us","tag-immigration-and-emigration","tag-immigration-detention","tag-logan-international-airport-boston","tag-mass","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-texas","tag-united-states-politics-and-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}