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“The sad truth is that when Any declined the flight she also waived this court’s only remaining basis for jurisdiction,” the judge ruled.
Babson college student, Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, at her high school graduation. Family photo
A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit of the Babson student who was deported to Honduras after she was detained at Logan Airport on her way to visit family in Texas for Thanksgiving last year.
Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a first-year student at Babson College in Wellesley, grew up in Texas before moving to Massachusetts for college. In November, she was detained by federal immigration agents, taken to an ICE facility in Burlington, and flown to Texas.
Within days, she was deported — in violation of a filed court order — to Honduras, where she remains with her grandparents.
In the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts, Judge Richard Stearns dismissed Lopez Belloza’s habeas lawsuit Friday aiming to bring her back to the United States. He said that after the 19-year-old student declined to board a government flight back to the United States, the jurisdiction left Boston.
“The sad truth is that when Any declined the flight she also waived this court’s only remaining basis for jurisdiction,” Stearns ruled. “Any civil contempt dissolved when the government complied with the facilitation order.”
Her lawyer, Todd Pomerleau, said federal immigration officials use tactics like rapidly transferring detainees and not updating the government’s online detention tracker to obscure detainees’ locations, which makes it difficult for attorneys to know where to file habeas petitions to keep them in the country.
“ICE is grabbing people, throwing them in vans, not answering phone calls, not responding to emails. They lied to Any,” Pomerleau said. “There needs to be clarity in the law. It’s not just about Any. She’s more than a case. She’s a beautiful person, but what happened to her has happened to countless others. It’s really unfair for lawyers to rush right away and file an incomplete lawsuit or wait around for weeks on end to find out where their clients are detained”
The judge ruled that ICE did not try to conceal her location and, if she had gotten on the flight, she would have clearly been in Texas, giving her counsel 48 hours to respond in court.
“Although the government’s hasty removal of Any undoubtedly frustrated counsel’s attempts to locate her, there is no evidence that the government was trying to conceal her location or immediate custodian from counsel,” Stearns ruled, according to the court docket.
In January, federal prosecutors acknowledged they had mistakenly deported Lopez Belloza after Pomerleau filed an order keeping her in the U.S. for at least 72 hours, which was granted.
“I want to sincerely apologize,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Sauter told the court at the time. “The government regrets that violation and acknowledges that violation.”
Flight back to U.S. was a ‘trap,’ lawyer says
Ahead of the court-ordered deadline to return her to the U.S. passed in February, the government attempted to transport her back to the United States, but she “failed to appear for her prearranged flight,” the Department of Homeland Security said previously.
Pomerleau told Boston.com that “it was a trap,” saying the government wanted to take her back to Texas instead of Massachusetts, likely to deport her again.
“She would have got on the flight, and we suspect that once it was in U.S. airspace, they were going to detain her on the plane,” Pomerleau said. “They were going to fly to Texas when the courts were closed, and they were going to try to deport her starting Sunday afternoon, when the courts were closed, when she still had a case in Boston.”
The court “does not credit the suggestion” that DHS would have immediately violated the previous court order and deport her again without advance notice, the docket said.
Since Lopez Belloza has been in Honduras, she has been studying at Babson remotely. Lopez Belloza’s legal team has filed an appeal to keep the case in Boston, which Pomerleau said is “the only court that the case law says you have to sue in.”
“They could have agreed to certain things to get her a student visa,” Pomerleau said. “They could have easily put a stamp in her passport and left her the hell alone and let her come back to the United States, and they refused to do that.”
Molly Farrar is a general assignment reporter for Boston.com, focusing on education, politics, crime, and more.
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