By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, Feb 6 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday called a judge’s proposal that the government issue a student visa to a college student it deported to Honduras in violation of a court order “unfeasible” and said immigration authorities will not facilitate her return.
Boston-based U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns had given the administration until Friday to decide how to “rectify the mistake” it made when it deported Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a Babson College student who was detained at an airport while traveling to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with her family in Texas.
The 20-year-old college freshman is a Honduran national who was brought to the United States by her mother when she was age 8 while seeking asylum. Babson is located in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
The U.S. Justice Department in a filing said that while it had conveyed the recommendation the judge made last month that the U.S. State Department issue Lopez Belloza a visa that would allow for her return, “she appears inadmissible to the United States.”
It said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement likewise declines to facilitate her return, even though her deportation was due to the agency’s “inadvertent” violation of a court order.
“Such declination is driven by the fact that petitioner was subject to a final order of removal and therefore her arrest, detention and removal were authorized by statute and the Constitution,” a Justice Department lawyer wrote.
It is unclear what Stearns, an appointee of Democratic former President Bill Clinton, may do next, though he has held out the possibility of ordering the administration to facilitate her return with a threat of holding it in civil contempt if it does not.
“We will continue to litigate this case till Any is brought back to the United States,” Todd Pomerleau, her lawyer, said in a statement.
Lopez Belloza has said she was unaware she was subject to a final order of removal, which formed the basis of her arrest.
She was flown to Honduras on November 22 despite the fact that her lawyer had secured a court order in Massachusetts on November 21 barring Lopez Belloza from being deported or transferred out of the state for 72 hours. She remains there with her grandparents.
A lawyer for the government at a hearing last month apologized for the violation of the court’s order, describing it as due to a “mistake” by an ICE officer who failed to properly flag it.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Will Dunham)
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