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A 19-year-old college student was about to board a flight to surprise her family for Thanksgiving when she was detained at Boston Logan International Airport and deported to Honduras two days later, her father and lawyer said on Sunday.
The student, Any Lucía López Belloza, was brought by her parents from Honduras to the United States when she was 7. Her father, Francis López, said in a telephone interview on Sunday that neither Ms. López nor her parents knew there was an order for her deportation.
“When they arrested Any, that’s when they told her,” said Mr. López, a tailor.
He said his employer had arranged and paid for his daughter’s travel to Austin, Texas, to surprise him at work.
Ms. López’s lawyer, Todd Pomerleau, described an opaque process for obtaining information about her case, including the grounds for her deportation.
He said she had been deported in violation of a court order that a federal judge signed on Friday that said Ms. López could not be removed from the United States while her case was pending.
Ms. López, a freshman studying business at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., was about to board a Southwest Airlines flight to Texas early on Nov. 20.
She was told there was a problem with her ticket, so she went to customer service and was surrounded by immigration agents, Mr. Pomerleau said.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency told The Boston Globe that an immigration judge had ordered Ms. López deported in 2015, when she was a child. The agency did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday.
Mr. Pomerleau said he checked her information in the Executive Office for Immigration Review database and could not find any record of her original deportation order.
“So I’m not convinced she has a removal order, and if she did have one, she should have been notified of it, because she’s completely unaware of this situation,” he said.
On Saturday, after she spent a night detained in Texas, she was put on a bus with shackles on her wrists, waist, and an
put on a flight to Honduras, Mr. Pomerleau said.
Ms. López, who is staying with her grandparents in Honduras, asked that her father speak on her behalf, her father said. He said she had found it upsetting to recount the details of her removal, in particular being detained and shackled.
He said his daughter told him she had not signed any paperwork authorizing her removal from the United States, as some people do to avoid lengthy detentions.
Ms. López lived in Texas with her parents and two younger siblings, who are 2 and 5, before going to college.
The family emigrated nearly 12 years ago because of the rampant crime and insecurity in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Mr. López and his wife feared for their daughter as the news was filled every week “with deaths and murders,” he said. “That’s the reason we left.” The family had applied for asylum, he said, but it was denied, and they were never told they had to appeal to avoid a deportation order.
Mr. López described his daughter as organized and studious.
“She had that responsibility — of being the first to graduate from college and being an example to others,” said Mr. López, who had sewn her business suits for interviews and internships.
Now, he said, his daughter was reeling being back in the country she left behind so long ago. “She’s trying to assimilate to her new reality,” he said.
Ms. López told The Globe she was worried about how she would continue her education.
“I have worked so hard to be able to be at Babson my first semester, that was my dream,” she said. “I’m losing everything.”
A spokeswoman for Babson College did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday.
At the time the López family left Honduras, migration from Central America was growing as people, particularly in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, fled violence, crime, and economic stagnation.
In recent years, migration from Honduras surged, with thousands joining migrant caravans and camping at the U.S.-Mexico border.
President Trump made stopping immigration and expelling migrants a central message of his campaigns, even more so in his push for a second term.
In recent days, he again turned his attention to Honduras, endorsing a right-wing candidate in this weekend’s election and seeking to pardon a former president whom many experts blame for spurring mass migration from his country to the United States.
The president in office, Xiomara Castro, has spent the end of her term trying to balance her obligation to undocumented migrants in the United States — of which there are estimated to be more than half a million — with a need to cooperate with the Trump administration, which has come down hard on leaders who do not back its agenda.
By Nov. 20, nearly 30,000 Hondurans had been deported this year, about 13,000 more than in the same period last year, according to Honduran government data.
Honduran officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the case of Ms. López.
Her father said he felt it was important to share his family’s ordeal at a time when so many are facing deportation amid Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“I’ve decided to speak because it’s a reality we are facing right now,” he said.
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Any Lucia Lopez Belloza celebrating her high school graduation in Texas. Credit…Todd Pomerleau
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