A federal courtroom in Boston has delivered a pointed rebuke to the Trump administration, ordering officials to help bring back a Honduran college student who was deported despite a standing court order shielding her from removal.
The ruling centers on Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a freshman at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She was detained at Boston’s Logan Airport while traveling to Texas for Thanksgiving and placed on a flight to Honduras—one day after a judge had explicitly barred her deportation or transfer out of the state for 72 hours.
U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns has now given the administration until February 27 to facilitate her return to the United States. In a sharply worded order, he said the government had acknowledged wrongdoing and should move beyond admission toward remedy.
The administration had previously resisted that path. The State Department described the prospect of issuing Lopez Belloza a new student visa as “unfeasible,” while U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined to take steps to bring her back. That refusal prompted the court’s directive.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security maintained that Lopez Belloza received due process and disputed that any error occurred. Yet at an earlier hearing, a government lawyer had apologized for violating the court’s order, attributing the deportation to an internal mistake—specifically, a failure to properly flag the judge’s temporary protection.
Lopez Belloza, 20, was brought to the United States at age eight by her mother, who was seeking asylum. She has said she did not know she was subject to a final order of removal—the legal basis cited for her arrest. Since her November 22 deportation, she has remained in Honduras with her grandparents, her first semester in Massachusetts abruptly cut short.
Her attorney called the ruling a long-overdue correction, describing her as a resilient young woman who had earned the chance to continue her education.
For now, the court has drawn a clear line: a mistake acknowledged must also be repaired. Whether the government complies—and how swiftly—will determine whether Lopez Belloza’s academic life in Massachusetts resumes or remains suspended by bureaucracy.
