Judge issues stay after ICE deports Austin college student flying home for Thanksgiving, lawyer says

Francis thought the phone call was coercive at first — or, at the very least, a sick prank. But as her daughter’s cries continued on the other end of the line, Frances realized it was all too bad.

On the morning of November 20, Francis’ 19-year-old daughter and Boston-area college student Annie Lucia Lopez Belloza set out to surprise her Austin-based parents with a trip home from college to thank them. But at the Boston airport, federal immigration agents arrested him, telling the surprised college freshman he had a deportation order. It was all confusing even for Francis.

“Actually, we didn’t think he had a deportation order,” the father of three, whose last name the Statesman is not publishing because of his immigration status, told the Statesman on Friday. “If we had known, I don’t think we would have sent him.”

As the facts began to emerge, the family’s life changed.

Although a federal judge issued a stay of removal for López Beloza the day after he was taken into custody, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported López Beloza about 48 hours after his arrest.

In quick succession, the agency moved Lopez Beloza to its Boston-area immigration processing center, a military base, a detention center in Texas, and finally — with his knees and wrists shackled — to his native Honduras, his attorney, Todd Pomerleau, told the American-Statesman. López Belloja’s family brought him to the United States from Honduras when he was 7 years old, eventually settling in Austin. He graduated from IDEA-Rundberg and received acceptance to the prestigious Babson College.

Pomerleau, an expert in immigration detainer litigation who challenges the government’s power to detain people illegally, said Lopez Belloza’s arrest was the first time he had worked where a client was detained on a flight home — indicating that he was an extension of ICE airport arrests.

Pomerleau argues that the government violated several of his client’s due process rights, including by detaining him without showing him a removal order and by disrupting his right to counsel. Pomerleau said he was informed about the case through friends of Lopez Belloza’s family and agreed to take it on, but ICE blocked his attempts to communicate with him until he was deported.

He called the events leading up to the deportation an “alphabet soup of constitutional violations.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to The Statesman’s request for comment in time for publication. They told the Boston Globe, which first reported the story, that Lopez Beloza had a deportation order going back to 2015.

Pomerleau cast doubt on the claim, saying the family had an ongoing asylum process until 2017. Francis said his family was denied asylum, but was assured by a judge that there were no deportation orders.

Some in President Donald Trump’s circle praised the deportation. Border Patrol Operations Commander Gregory Bovino responded to ABC News’ report of the proceedings at X, “Why even mention that this illegal alien was an 18-year-old college student? Completely irrelevant except that an illegal alien might have taken a university slot from an American citizen.”

Expedited Deportation

Lopez Belloza walked up to her boarding gate on Thursday, November 20. Before the morning sun rose, the attendants told him to go to customer service because his boarding pass wasn’t working. At the customer service desk, Pomerleau said his client was “immediately surrounded, handcuffed.”

Within a day of learning of Lopez Belloza’s detention, Pomerleau secured a stay of deportation from a federal judge through a habeas petition, arguing his client’s rights had been violated. A Massachusetts judge signed the stay at 6:10 a.m. on Friday, Nov. 21, according to a copy of the order reviewed by the Statesman.

At the time, ICE was flying Lopez Beloza to Texas, Pomerleau now believes; However, at the time that information was not in ICE’s detainer locator.

On Monday, when Pomerleau contacted Francis, the lawyer said he was surprised to hear that López Beloza had already been deported and was with his grandparents in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula.

Pomerleau said he plans to continue to fight Lopez Belloza’s case in federal court to try to force the agency to return him to the United States. He pointed to the fact that a federal court order ultimately required the agency to bring immigrant Kilmer Abrego Garcia to the United States after it ignored a judge’s order and deported him to El Salvador.

Lopez Belloza, Pomerleau said, has no criminal record.

In the months before she left for college, Francis, a tailor, made her daughter a black and navy blue suit. She was proud of her daughter’s dreams and aspirations and the scholarship she received to go to school far away and study business. Lopez Belloza told her father she wanted to help start her own business after graduation.

“We talked to him every day,” Francis said.

It was Francis’s boss, a family friend, who paid his employees a Thanksgiving dinner at Lopez Belloza’s house as a thank you. His family cherished the Thanksgiving tradition of preparing meals together, Francis said.

This year, Francis and his wife had no plans for a homecoming for their daughter. Worse than the holiday without their eldest daughter, the couple spent it thanking friends who came to comfort them.

“We know this is our reality, many others are going through it as well,” Francis said. “We want others to know what’s going on. So others can be prepared.”