A courtroom in Boston has become the unlikely bridge between Massachusetts and Honduras.
A federal judge has directed the administration of former President Donald Trump to take steps to return a Honduran college student who was deported even after a court order barred her removal.
The student, Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, had been studying at Babson College when immigration authorities detained her at Boston’s Logan Airport. She was preparing to travel to Texas for the Thanksgiving holiday. Instead, she was placed on a flight out of the country.
One day before her deportation, a federal court in Massachusetts had ordered that she not be removed or transferred for 72 hours. Despite that directive, she was flown to Honduras on November 22. She remains there with her grandparents.
U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns, presiding in Boston, has now given the government two weeks to facilitate her return. In his order, he wrote that the government had acknowledged wrongdoing and must now correct it. The judge signaled that he had hoped voluntary compliance would resolve the matter, but action had not followed acknowledgment.
Efforts to secure a new student visa hit resistance. The State Department described the proposal as “unfeasible,” while Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined to arrange her return. That refusal prompted the court’s latest directive, setting a February 27 deadline.
Lopez Belloza, now 20, was brought to the United States from Honduras at age eight by her mother, who was seeking asylum. According to her account, she did not know she was subject to a final order of removal — the legal basis authorities cited for her arrest.
At a January hearing, a government attorney apologized for violating the court’s earlier order, attributing the deportation to an internal error by an ICE officer who failed to properly flag the restriction. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security later pushed back on the characterization of events, insisting there had been no mistake and that due process had been observed.
For now, the case stands as a test of whether an admitted misstep can be undone — and whether a young student’s interrupted education in Massachusetts will resume where it left off.
