Instead of having everyone home for the holidays, one Austin family spent Thanksgiving reeling from tragedy. Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a 19-year-old student at a Massachusetts university, was deported after attempting to board a plane in Boston to surprise her family in Austin.
Lopez Belloza is not a criminal. She is a business major at Babson College, the country’s top ranked school for entrepreneurship.
Her heartbreaking experience serves as further proof that the Trump administration’s insistence it is going after the “worst of the worst” has been nothing but the spoonful of sugar helping its xenophobic policy go down.
While trying to board her Nov. 20 flight, Lopez Belloza was told there was an issue with her ticket and sent to a customer service desk.
Once there, she was surrounded by federal immigration agents who wouldn’t tell her why she was being detained, her lawyer told the Statesman’s Emiliano Tahui Gómez. They flew her to Texas, where she was put in wrist, waist and ankle shackles for a flight to Honduras, a country she hadn’t seen since she was 7.
Her family said they were unaware of a removal order for her. They never would have sent her to study so far away had they known about it, they said. Her lawyer found no record of the removal order in the government’s Executive Office for Immigration Review database.
Deporting her anyway wasn’t just inhumane. It defied a court order, issued the day after she was detained, barring her from being removed from this country. That should alarm every American — regardless of politics.
The Department of Homeland Security has not explained why it ignored the judge’s order, but said that Lopez Belloza received “full due process.” That assertion is untenable. Due process requires notice. It requires the opportunity to be heard. It requires compliance with judicial orders. None of those occurred here.
Instead, the Trump administration showed callous disregard for this college student pursuing the American dream, with Border Patrol Operations Commander Gregory Bovino posting on X (formerly Twitter) that Lopez Belloza was “an illegal alien (who) may have taken a university slot from an American citizen.”
Paul Hunker, a Dallas-based immigration lawyer who formerly worked as chief counsel at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said immigration officials must obey court orders, just like any other American citizen. A judge could order the government to bring her back, he said, noting her deportation may have been a mistake.
Former immigration judge Daniel H. Weiss told us that such mistakes “shouldn’t happen, but it’s possible.” But they can be rectified. “In the same way the government can remove people, they have vehicles to locate them and bring them back,” he said.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said this past weekend that the buck stops with her on deportation decisions. If that is true, then she should be held accountable when her agency violates a judge’s order, traumatizes a family and upends a young woman’s life for no defensible reason.
Until that day, families like Lopez Belloza’s will have to endure the dehumanizing deportation machine operating in our name. History will view it with shame. We do, too.
— The Austin American-Statesman
