A 19-year-old college freshman who was deported the week before Thanksgiving says she was handcuffed, taken into custody, and forced to sleep on the floor of a detention center — even after a federal judge blocked her removal.
“ I burst into tears because I couldn’t believe it, and spending the night there, sleeping on the floor,” Any Lucia Lopez Belloza told ABC News in an interview from Honduras.
Lopez Belloza came to the United States from Honduras with her family when she was 8 years old. She said she was at a Massachusetts airport last Friday, about to board a flight to Texas to surprise her parents for the holiday, when immigration officials stopped her.
“When they told me, ‘You’re going to come with us’ … I was like, ‘Oh, I have a plane that I literally have to be there right now,’” she recalled. “They’re like, ‘No, you’re not even going to go on the plane.’”
She said immigration officers refused to tell her why she was being detained or where she was being taken, despite her repeated questions.
According to court documents obtained by ABC News, a federal judge issued an order within hours of her being taken into custody, instructing the government not to remove Lopez Belloza from the U.S. and not to transfer her outside Massachusetts.
Despite that order, she was moved that same evening to a detention facility in Texas and deported to Honduras the following day.
Asked by ABC News how it felt to be deported despite a judge’s ruling, Lopez Belloza replied, “It feels unfair. If there was an order, then why did everything happen to me so fast, within three days?”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told ABC News that Lopez Belloza had been under a removal order since 2015, a claim she said she was unaware of until authorities informed her.
“On November 20, CBP arrested Any Lopez-Belloza, an illegal alien from Honduras, as she was attempting to board a flight at Boston Logan International Airport,” the DHS spokesperson said. “This illegal alien entered the country in 2014 and an immigration judge ordered her removed from the country in 2015, over 10 years ago. She has illegally stayed in the country since.”
“Illegal aliens should use the CBP Home app to fly home for free and receive $1,000 stipend, while preserving the option to return the legal, right way,” the spokesperson continued. “It’s an easy choice — leave voluntarily and receive $1,000 check or stay and wait till you are fined $1,000 day, arrested, and deported without a possibility to return legally.”
Lopez Belloza said her parents had no idea she was flying to Texas for the holidays.
“They didn’t know that I was at the airport,” she said. “They didn’t know nothing … and I just thought … now the surprise is going to be that I got arrested. It shouldn’t have been this way.”
“I feel like I made a mistake by me going to the airport … I’ve never lied to my parents in that kind of way,” she added.
This is her first time back in Honduras since her family left more than a decade ago. Lopez Belloza said her family believes her deportation is unjust because she has no criminal record and was focused on her education.
She said she felt she was finally living her American dream.
“My parents, who they work so hard to be able to send me to college,” she said. “And I got really good financial aid. I really got a good college that basically wanted me, and I wanted them.”
“My dream was for me to be in college, fulfill not only mine but also my family dream … for me to be in college, be one of the first ones in my family to be there,” she continued. “It was like … wow … I’m doing this. It’s happening.”
Lopez Belloza’s removal took place against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement efforts, under which hundreds of thousands of migrants have been deported and many more have self-deported.
When asked what she would say directly to President Donald Trump, Lopez Belloza responded, “Why is he getting people who are living in the United States working day and night, people, people like me, who are in college, doing their dreams, having an education?”
