ICE deports Austin college student despite judge’s stay, lawyer says

Francis at first thought the phone call was extortion – or, at least, a nasty prank. But as her daughter’s crying continued on the other end of the line, Francis realized it was all much worse.

On the morning of November 20, Francis’s 19-year-old daughter and Boston-area college student Annie Lucia Lopez Belloza set out to surprise her Austin-based parents with a trip home from college for Thanksgiving. But at the Boston airport, federal immigration agents arrested him, and told the surprised college freshman he had a deportation order. It was all confusing, even for Francis.

“Actually, we didn’t think he had a deportation order,” the father of three, whose last name the Statesman is not publishing because of his immigration status, told the Statesman on Friday. “If we had known, I don’t think we would have sent him.”

As the facts began to emerge, the family’s life changed rapidly.

Despite a federal judge issuing a stay on López Belloza’s deportation the day after his detention, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported López Belloza approximately 48 hours after his arrest.

In quick succession, the agency transferred Lopez Belloza to its Boston-area immigration processing center, a military base, a detention center in Texas, and finally — with her ankles and wrists shackled — to her native Honduras, her attorney Todd Pomerleau told the American-Statesman. When López Belloza was 7, her family moved her from Honduras to the United States and eventually settled in Austin. He graduated from IDEA-Rundberg and gained admission to the prestigious Babson College.

Pomerleau, a Boston-based attorney who specializes in immigration detainer litigation that challenges the government’s power to unlawfully detain people, said Lopez Belloza’s arrest is the first he has worked on where a client was detained during a domestic flight — indicating what he considers an expansion of ICE arrests at airports.

Pomerleau argues that the government violated several of his client’s rights to due process, including detaining him without showing him the removal order and interfering with his right to counsel. Pomerleau said he had learned of the case through friends of López Belloza’s family and agreed to take it on, but ICE disrupted his efforts to communicate with him until he was deported.

He called the events leading to the deportation an “alphabet soup of constitutional violations.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to the Statesman’s request for comment in time for publication. He told the Boston Globe, which first reported the story, that Lopez Belloza had a deportation order in 2015.

Pomerleau cast doubt on this claim, saying that the family had ongoing asylum proceedings as of 2017. Francis said his family was denied asylum, but the judge assured him they did not have deportation orders.

Some in President Donald Trump’s circle applauded the deportations. Border Patrol Operations Commander Gregory Bovino, responding on ABC News’ report on the proceedings, said, “Why mention that this illegal alien was an 18-year-old college student? Completely irrelevant, except that an illegal alien may have taken a university slot from an American citizen.”

On Thursday, November 20, López Belloza reached her boarding gate. While there, before the morning sun rose, the attendants asked him to go to customer service as his boarding pass was not working. At the customer service desk, Pomerleau said his client was “immediately surrounded, handcuffed.”

Within a day of learning of López Belloza’s detention, Pomerleau sought a stay of deportation from a federal judge through a habeas petition, arguing that his client’s rights had been violated. A Massachusetts judge signed the stay at 6:10 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 21, according to a copy of the order reviewed by the Statesman.

Around the same time, ICE was flying López Beloza to Texas, Pomerleau now believes; However, that information was not on ICE’s detainee locator at the time.

On Monday, when Pomerleau contacted Francis, the lawyer said he was shocked to hear that Lopez Belloza had already been deported and was with her grandparents in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula.

Pomerleau said he plans to continue fighting López Belloza’s case in federal court to pressure the agency to return him to the United States. He pointed to the fact that federal court orders ultimately required the agency to bring migrant Kilmer Abrego Garcia to the United States after it ignored a judge’s orders and deported him to El Salvador.

Lopez Belloza has no criminal record, Pomerleau said.

In the months before she left for college, Francis, a tailor, sewed black and navy blue suits for his daughter. They were proud of their daughter’s dreams and aspirations and the scholarship she received to go to school so far and study business. Upon graduation, López Belloza told her father that she wanted to help him start his own business.

“We’ll talk to him every day,” Francis said.

It was Francis’ boss, a family friend, who paid for a surprise home visit to López Belloza for Thanksgiving to thank his employee. Francis said his family cherishes the Thanksgiving tradition of preparing a meal together.

This year, Francis and his wife had made no plans for their daughter to return home. Even worse than spending the holidays without their eldest daughter, the couple celebrated their Thanksgiving Day with their friends coming over to console them.

“We know this is our reality, many other people are going through this too,” Francis said. “We want others to know what’s happening. So other people can be prepared.”