Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a 19-year-old college freshman in Boston, thrilled to be starting your higher education journey as the proud first college student of your immigrant family. As you prepare to step on board a flight at Logan International Airport, traveling home to Texas for Thanksgiving to surprise the parents who first brought you into the country 12 years earlier as a 7-year-old, fleeing rampant violence and drug cartels, you find yourself surrounded by agents of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They tell you that in accordance with a deportation order that you’ve never known existed, you’re being sent to Honduras in handcuffs, and within 48 hours you find yourself adrift in a country you can barely even recall from hazy childhood memories, totally uncertain of your future, your education or how you’ll ever be able to see your parents again. That scenario is how the Thanksgiving holiday window played out for Any Lucía López Belloza, just one traumatized soul among countless numbers now facing the performative ire of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration push.
As first reported by The Boston Globe, only a few hours earlier López Belloza had been a giddy 19-year-old freshman at Babson College exceling in her first semester of pursuing a business degree–something that she hoped would one day help her start a tailoring business alongside her father Francis. You would likely have depicted López Belloza, in fact, as a representation of the American dream—not a citizen, but a young woman who had spent the majority of her life in America, dreaming of obtaining a college degree and being a role model for her two younger sisters, both born into citizenship in the U.S. She was seemingly well liked, to the point that her father’s employer had apparently arranged and paid for López Belloza to travel back home to Austin, Texas to surprise her family for Thanksgiving, according to the New York Times. She never made it there, and is now reeling at the thought of losing her opportunity at education.
“I have worked so hard to be able to be at Babson my first semester, that was my dream,” said López Belloza to the Globe from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where she’s fortunate enough to be able to stay with grandparents who still live in the country. “I’m losing everything. I was so happy when I got there [to Babson]. I was just living the college life—going to events, going everywhere … everything there was really great. I really loved the school.”
From her initial detainment at the airport, López Belloza’s processing and deportation moved so quickly that family barely had any opportunity to react before she had been summarily shipped out of the country. Allowed minimal communication with the outside world as she was brought in handcuffs and ankle shackles to Texas and then loaded on a plane to Honduras, López Belloza maintains that she had no idea that any order for her removal ever existed, something echoed by her parents in their own statements. According to her lawyer Todd Pomerleau, the family had been in the asylum-seeking process until 2017, when asylum was denied, but “they had been assured by the judge that they did not have deportation orders,” according to the Austin American-Statesman. Nor was Pomerleau ever able to contact López Belloza until after she had already been deported to Honduras, robbing her of the right to counsel, something he refers to in the same story as “an alphabet soup of constitutional violations.”
The deportation of López Belloza may even have been carried out in direct defiance of a court order. According to Pomerleau in NYT, a court order was signed by a federal judge on Nov. 21, ordering that López Belloza could not be removed from the U.S. while her case was playing out. She was subsequently deported on Nov. 22, the next day.
The timing of this story, and the destination of Honduras in particular, could hardly be more apropos as an illustration of the Trump administration’s blatant double standard in the application of the law, depending upon whether that person can be of any value to Trump’s capricious goals and underlying, constant quest for personal influence. Mere days after López Belloza was sent away, Trump announced his intentions over the Thanksgiving holiday break to pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández (2014-2022), who presided over the most recent period of mass migration from Honduras to the U.S., before ultimately being extradited to the U.S. and convicted by a jury of massive corruption and conspiring with the cartels to move more than 400 tons of cocaine in the direction of the U.S. during his presidency. It is speculated that the Hernández pardon was announced in an attempt to influence voters toward Trump’s chosen candidate in this weekend’s presidential election in Honduras, the results of which have still not been decided. But there’s something wickedly ironic in pardoning the drug trafficking conviction of a former president whose policies spurred mass migration and asylum-seeking of Hondurans toward the United States, while simultaneously deporting record numbers of those Hondurans (almost 30,000 this year, per NYT). Apparently, it’s wrong to flee cartel violence in Honduras, but it’s commendable to conspire with those same cartels as president, a piece of hypocrisy that online Trump critics were more than happy to point out.
Now, López Belloza is left wondering what she’s supposed to do in Honduras, a country she barely knows, and whether there’s any way she’ll be able to continue the course of education she started. Her parents are left feeling guilty for allowing their daughter to pursue her business dreams, even as their own immigration status remains uncertain, and as they raise two young daughters who are U.S. citizens. College was supposed to be a grand adventure for their eldest daughter, and they were beyond proud of being able to send her away to spread her wings. The last thing they expected was that she would end up trapped in Honduras, effectively a foreign land.
“For us, it was something really, really beautiful … because she was going to study, and get ahead in life, something that we [as parents] were not able to do,” said Francis López to Austin American-Statesman. “She said it was going to be a really wonderful experience.”
When will the parents of Any Lucía López Belloza see their daughter again? The cruelty of this administration doesn’t have us holding out for a holiday miracle.
