A planned family visit, an entire life destroyed: The case of Any Lucia Lopez Belloza - The deportation that should never have happened

She wanted to surprise her parents, spend a few free days at home, tell them what the first semester at a respected college feels like. Instead, Any Lucia Lopez Belloza’s trip ended in handcuffs, on a military base, in a Texas detention center, and finally in Honduras, a country she had not seen since childhood. And all of that despite a federal judge explicitly ordering that she was not allowed to leave Massachusetts or the United States. The sequence of events reads like a story that should not be possible, and yet it is bitter reality. On the morning of November 20, the 19-year-old stood at Boston airport with her ticket to Texas in hand, luggage checked, security cleared. A federal agent suddenly told her there was a problem with the boarding pass. Minutes later she found herself surrounded by armed ICE officers, without her phone, without a way out, completely surprised by what they told her: that there was a deportation order from 2015.

Only, there is no evidence for that. The only entry that exists states that the case was closed in 2017. The alleged order ICE now refers to appears nowhere. Nevertheless, the agency treated the student as if she had deliberately ignored requirements for years. Within 48 hours she was moved through several facilities: from the Boston Processing Center to a military base, from there to a Texas detention center, and finally onto a plane to Honduras, shackled at her hands and feet.

Meanwhile, a judge had already issued an emergency order: for 72 hours the young woman was not allowed to leave the state or the country. That order was clear. ICE ignored it anyway. The agency remains silent. For the family in Austin, the first call from their daughter after days was a moment of shock. The father first thought it was a scam attempt, until he heard his daughter’s sobbing and realized that something unimaginable had happened. The family knew nothing about an old order. If it had existed, the father says, they would never have sent their daughter on the trip alone. Now the girl is sitting with her grandparents in Honduras. Her studies at Babson College, fought for with enormous effort and started full of hope, are now at risk. “I am losing everything,” she said, and it does not sound like a phrase one says lightly, but like a sober conclusion.

The case would already be a scandal on its own, but it is part of a growing number of proceedings in which speed is placed above law, political toughness above care. In the meantime, she was able to rely on attorney Todd Pomerleau, who is also involved in the case of Bruna Ferreira, the mother of the nephew of press secretary Karoline Leavitt, whose alleged “battery” has not appeared in any public registry to this day. Because it simply does not exist. In that case it was Michael Leavitt, the press secretary’s brother and Ferreira’s former fiancé, who suddenly “remembered” that they had indeed lived together at the time, something that was impossible to overlook given the family photos. But the workload has long reached its limit, and it gets worse every day as the cases pile up. We currently have well over 600 cases on our desks, and for every one completed, two new ones come in.

Michael Leavitt, Michael Leavitt Junior and Bruna Ferreira - See also our article: “The mother of Karoline Leavitt’s nephew in ICE custody” - at the link: https://kaizen-blog.org/en/die-mutter-von-karoline-leavitts-neffen-in-ice-haft/

In the end, the picture looks very different, much more sober: authorities that do not respond to warnings, a court order that is ignored, and families pulled out of their everyday lives within hours. For those affected, this is not about headlines or public toughness, but about lost chances, ruined plans, and the realization that a single form or a single wrong decision is enough to push an entire life off track. Any Lucia Lopez Belloza wanted to fly home to make her family happy. Instead, her case shows how a system works that no longer exercises control, but causes harm without restraint. And that is the truly disturbing part of this story: that it can happen again at any time.