A US federal judge has issued a stark ultimatum to the Trump administration, granting it three weeks to find a way to return a deported Honduran college student to the United States. The order comes after government lawyers admitted a "mistake" led to the young woman's removal in violation of a judicial directive.
A Thanksgiving Trip That Ended in Deportation
The case centres on Any Lucia López Belloza, a 19-year-old freshman at Babson College in Massachusetts. On 20 November, she was arrested at Boston's Logan International Airport. López Belloza, a Honduran national brought to the US by her mother at age eight while seeking asylum, was attempting to travel to Texas to surprise her family for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Her legal team swiftly challenged her detention, and a judge in Massachusetts issued an order on 21 November. This order explicitly barred immigration authorities from deporting López Belloza or transferring her out of the state for a 72-hour period.
A Chain of Errors and a Breached Court Order
Despite the court's intervention, the system failed. By the time the order was issued, López Belloza had already been moved to Texas. She was deported to Honduras the very next day, where she remains with her grandparents.
At a hearing in Boston's US District Court, a lawyer for the government apologised for the breach. He explained that an officer with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) failed to properly flag the court order, mistakenly believing it no longer applied once López Belloza was outside Massachusetts.
The Judge's Directive and Potential Solutions
Presiding over the case, Judge Richard Stearns, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, acknowledged the "amalgam of errors that ended badly for Any." While noting he lacked jurisdiction over her broader immigration case as she was now outside Massachusetts, he ruled the government retained power to fix its "tragic (and preventable) mistake."
Judge Stearns proposed the "simplest solution" would be for the US State Department to issue López Belloza a visa, allowing her to return. He set a strict 21-day deadline for the administration to inform the court of how it will proceed. The alternative, he warned, would be a court order demanding her return, with the threat of holding the government in contempt if it refused.
The Justice Department has declined to comment on the ruling. The outcome of this three-week period will determine whether this admitted error can be undone for the young student caught in the crosshairs of US immigration policy.
