By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, Feb 13 (Reuters) – A U.S. federal judge on Friday ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of a Honduran college student who was deported in violation of a court order, a step the government had previously refused to take.
Boston-based U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns gave the administration two weeks to enable the return of Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a student from Babson College in Massachusetts who was deported after being detained at Boston’s Logan Airport while traveling to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with her family in Texas.
“Wisdom counsels that redemption may be found by acknowledging and fixing our own errors,” Stearns wrote. “In this unfortunate case, the government commendably admits that it did wrong. Now it is time for the government to make amends.”
Stearns, who was appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, said he had hoped to avoid holding anyone in civil contempt by giving the administration a chance to correct what he said everyone acknowledged was a “mistake.”
But the State Department last week called the judge’s recommendation to issue her a new student visa “unfeasible,” and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined to facilitate her return, prompting Friday’s order.
Stearns gave the administration until February 27 to facilitate the student’s return. Todd Pomerleau, Lopez Belloza’s lawyer, welcomed the ruling, calling her a “remarkable, resilient young woman deserving of this outcome.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, in a statement did not address whether or how it would comply with Stearns’ order but said Lopez Belloza had received due process.
“There was no ‘mistake,'” the spokesperson said.
The 20-year-old college freshman is a Honduran national who was brought to the U.S. by her mother, who was seeking asylum, when she was 8 years old. Babson is located in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Lopez Belloza has said she was unaware she was subject to a final order of removal, which was the basis for her arrest.
She was flown to Honduras on November 22 even though her lawyer had secured a court order in Massachusetts on the previous day barring Lopez Belloza from being deported or transferred out of the state for 72 hours. She remains in Honduras with her grandparents.
A lawyer for the government at a January hearing apologized for the violation of the court’s order, attributing it to a “mistake” by an ICE officer who did not properly flag it.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Ethan Smith and Jonathan Oatis)
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