A U.S. judge on Friday gave the Trump administration three weeks to fix what he called a serious error after a college student was deported to Honduras while she was traveling home to Texas to spend Thanksgiving with her family.
U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns, who is based in Boston, set the deadline and suggested that the government reissue the student visa that would allow 19-year-old Any Lucia Lopez Belloza to return to the United States.
Earlier this week, a government lawyer acknowledged in court that the deportation violated an existing court order that should have stopped her removal in the first place.
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Lopez Belloza is a Honduran citizen who came to the United States with her mother at the age of 8 while they were seeking asylum. She has said she did not know she was under a removal order at the time she was deported.
Addressing the case, Stearns said, “There is happily no one-size-fits-all solution for seeing that justice be done in what all agree was an amalgam of errors that ended badly for Any.” He added that the “simplest solution” would be for the U.S. Department of State to issue her a student visa.
As an alternative, the judge said he could direct President Donald Trump’s administration to take steps to bring Lopez Belloza back to the United States, warning that the government could face contempt proceedings if it failed to comply.
The judge gave the administration 21 days to tell the court how it plans to move forward.
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Her lawyer, Todd Pomerleau, welcomed the decision. In an email, he said the ruling would allow him to work with the government “to come up with a solution to bring Any to the United States in the near future.”
Lopez Belloza is a freshman at Babson College in Massachusetts. She was arrested on November 20 at Boston’s airport as she was getting ready to fly to Texas, where she planned to surprise her family for Thanksgiving. The following day, her lawyer filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts challenging her detention, and a judge issued an order on November 21 blocking her deportation or transfer out of the state for 72 hours.
By then, however, Lopez Belloza had already been moved to Texas. She was deported to Honduras on November 22 and is currently staying there with her grandparents.
Stearns, who was appointed to the bench by Democratic President Bill Clinton, said on Friday that because Lopez Belloza was already outside Massachusetts by the time her lawyer filed suit, he no longer had jurisdiction to hear the broader case.
Even so, the judge said the government still has the power to correct what he called a “tragic (and preventable) mistake” stemming from the violation of his court order.
Earlier this week, a government lawyer apologized in court, describing the deportation as a “mistake” by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who failed to properly flag the order after concluding it no longer applied once Lopez Belloza was moved out of Massachusetts.
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