The Babson College student who Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported to Honduras after she tried to fly to visit her parents for Thanksgiving is speaking out about her ordeal.
That’s where it kind of hit me — this was ICE.”
Any López belloza
Any Lucia López Belloza, a 19-year-old first-year student attending the Massachusetts school on a scholarship, never imagined she would be sent back to the country she left as a 7-year-old child, she told MS NOW senior political and national reporter Jacob Soboroff in an interview on Wednesday. While she described herself as “really aware” of the mass deportations that have been unfolding nationwide during President Donald Trump’s second term, she said she “never thought that it was going to happen to me.”
López Belloza, who is currently staying with her grandparents in northern Honduras, said that she was preparing for finals prior to her Nov. 20 deportation. “My life, it was just mainly to focus on my studies,” she said.
That changed soon after she arrived at Boston Logan Airport a week before Thanksgiving, with the plan to fly to Texas, where her father works as a tailor. López Belloza came to the country with both of her parents as a child and was targeted as part of the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive deportation efforts aimed at both illegal and legal immigrants. She was raised in Texas.
When it was her turn to have her boarding pass scanned at the airport gate, she was directed to the customer service counter, where two ICE agents were waiting for her, she told Soboroff.
“They were like, ‘Any, right’?” López Belloza recounted. “I was like, ‘yes.’ They were like, ‘OK, you’re going to come with us because you’re going to have to sign a bunch of paperwork.’”
When she told the agents she had to board her flight, she said they replied, “Oh, you’re not even gonna be on that plane.”
“That’s where it kind of hit me — this was ICE,” she said.
The agents did not tell López Belloza that there were plans for her deportation, she said. After they detained her, she told them she was planning to fly to Texas to see her parents, she said.
In ICE custody, López Belloza was transferred to Texas the following day — the same day a federal judge signed a court order mandating she be kept in the country while her case was pending. Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin has said that López Belloza had a deportation order stemming from a decade ago, adding that she “received full due process” with regard to her recent removal. A spokesperson for ICE did not respond to questions from MS NOW on Wednesday night.
López Belloza’s lawyer, Todd Pomerleau, told The New York Times on Sunday that she was “completely unaware” of the alleged deportation order and that he is skeptical it even exists. López Belloza also told Soboroff she did not know about the alleged order.
On Nov. 22, López Belloza was shackled, handcuffed and deported to Honduras. “It felt like if I was a criminal when I’m not,” she told Soboroff of that experience. “And it just felt really awful … not only seeing me, but seeing a bunch of us being treated like that, being treated like criminals.”
When she arrived in Honduras, at her grandparents’ home, López Belloza was finally able to call her parents. Through tears, she told Soboroff what she said to her mother on that call: “Mom, I got deported, I’m here.” Her mother tried to comfort her, she said: “She was just like, ‘It’s OK. We already knew. We found out; everything’s gonna be fine.’”
Of Trump’s claims that he is deporting “criminals” and “the worst of the worst,” López Belloza said: “Not all of us are criminals. … Many of us want to just work and provide for their families. We are here also to go to college, because we want a better education. We just want a better kind of lifestyle. But not all of us are criminals, and he says that all of us are criminals. He’s extremely wrong because many of us just want a better life with an education, a job.”
“The president was elected based on his promise to carry out the largest mass deportation operation in history. As the administration continues arresting and deporting illegal aliens with additional criminal charges, anyone illegally present in the United States is eligible for deportation,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told MS NOW in response.
The dream she and her parents shared before her story became a national headline, López Belloza said, “was for me to be able to go to a university, and not only that, but a university that will give me really good financial aid, because we’re not a rich family.”
They are not giving up on that hope.
“My hopes for the future is to, first, see my family, be able to hug them, and also to be able to finish my college,” she told Soboroff. A Babson College official has told the school community that faculty and staff are focused on “supporting [López Belloza] and their family, as well as the well-being of our community.”
After graduating, López Belloza added, she wants to fulfill her “dream” of opening a business “and try to live a better life.”
But whether she can do that in the U.S. remains to be seen.
Julianne McShane