National News
Any Lucía López Belloza was traveling home to surprise her family for Thanksgiving when she was detained by immigration authorities at Logan International Airport in Boston on Nov. 20.
By Annie Correal, New York Times Service
2 minutes to read
On Sunday, immigration agents appeared at the family home of a recently deported college student in Austin, Texas, according to the family and their lawyer.
The agents arrived in three unmarked vehicles, and one agent in a green vest marked ERO — Enforcement and Removal Operations — rushed toward the student’s father, Francis López, as he washed his car, López said. He ran into his backyard and closed a latched gate. The agent forced open the gate and proceeded to enter the backyard.
López entered his house and locked the back door, he said. After about two hours, the agents left, without ever trying to communicate with the family or knocking on the door.
Any Lucía López Belloza, a 19-year-old freshman at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, was traveling home to surprise her family for Thanksgiving when she was detained by immigration authorities at Logan International Airport in Boston on Nov. 20. She was deported two days later to Honduras, the Central American country from which she and her parents fled more than a decade ago.
López’s case has drawn attention to the expanding scope of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants in the country illegally.
Immigration authorities cited a 2015 order of deportation in justifying the removal of López. Her lawyer, Todd Pomerleau, said he found no record of such an order and that she had been deported in violation of a court order that a federal judge signed on Nov. 21 that said López could not be removed from the United States while her case was pending.
It was not clear why agents from ERO, which is part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, appeared at López’s parents’ home Sunday, but López and her father have spoken broadly to the media about the case. Their home appeared to be the only one where the unmarked vehicles stopped, according to a lawyer for the family, Kristin Etter.
López’s parents’ legal status could have come to the attention of authorities because of media reports about her case, according to immigration groups. The López family’s petition for asylum was denied about a decade ago, but the family says that they were never notified of a deportation order.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not respond to a request for comment Sunday afternoon.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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