'Traumatized': A Mistakenly Deported College Student Says Her Life Has Turned Upside Down

The 19-year-old college freshman's case is the latest involving a deportation carried out despite a court order.

BOSTON (AP) — As she sat on a deportation flight headed to Texas, Any Lucia Lopez Belloza kept asking herself why. She was a college student with no criminal record and no reason to believe she was at risk of being sent back to her native Honduras.

“It just shocked me. I don’t know, like I was numb,” Lopez Belloza told The Associated Press on Friday in a phone interview from Honduras, where she’s staying with her grandparents. The 19-year-old freshman at Babson College was detained at Boston’s airport on Nov. 20 as she was preparing to fly home to Texas to surprise her family for Thanksgiving. She was deported two days later, returning to Honduras for the first time since she was 8.

Although the government has apologized for a federal immigration authorities mistakenly deporting her even after a Massachusetts judge said she must not leave the U.S., her future is unclear. Her lawyer asked a federal judge on Friday to order the Trump administration to come up with a plan to return her to the U.S.

Far from home

Lopez Belloza and her mother were ordered deported several years after arriving in the United States. Although the government says she missed multiple opportunities to appeal, Lopez Belloza said her previous attorney told her there was no removal order. She insists she never would have tried to fly home in November if she’d known about it.