Last Monday a US district judge ordered the Trump administration to halt the deportation of Any López Belloza, a 19-year-old Honduran national. She was deported despite a temporary restraining order from a federal court barring her transfer. López Belloza fled to the United States with her mother at eight years old, seeking asylum. Today, she is a first year student at Babson College in Massachusetts.
On November 20, López Belloza was arrested at Boston’s Logan Airport. She’d been attempting to fly home to Texas to surprise her family at Thanksgiving. After her detention, her lawyer brought an action in Massachusetts to contest her immigration detention and free her from detention. Judge Richard Stearns steered the case in a better direction on November 21. He signed a temporary restraining order against her deportation for 72 hours.
An officer from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) failed to honor the court order. This occurred because they incorrectly interpreted it as no longer being in effect after López Belloza left the state of Massachusetts. Consequently, she was deported back to Honduras before any of her legal representatives were able to enforce the ruling.
We’re grateful that Judge Stearns has acted. He has ordered the Trump administration to tell the court within 21 days how it plans to address the issue. He emphasized the need for a resolution, stating that “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.”
Stearns has a simple, commonsense fix. He’s been in touch with the US State Department, and he thinks they should go ahead and issue López Belloza a student visa. We are glad to see this recommendation acknowledge this key reality. By the time her attorney got the court order, she had already rented a place and moved to Texas.
Stearns believes in the importance of justice being done. As he explained, he no longer had the jurisdiction to keep hearing López Belloza’s case since she is currently outside of Massachusetts. Yet this limitation on standing creates a significant hurdle to addressing the broader impact of her case.
The judge remained clear that should the administration continued to not fulfill its obligations as needed, the judge might order it take the steps to bring López Belloza back. He further hinted that he might impose contempt penalties for noncompliance.