(WASHINGTON) — A 19-year old college student who was deported the week before Thanksgiving after a federal judge blocked her removal said she was handcuffed and later forced to sleep on the floor in a detention center.
“I burst into tears because I couldn’t believe it, and spending the night there, sleeping on the floor,” Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, speaking from Honduras, told ABC News in an exclusive interview.
Lopez Belloza, who entered the U.S. from Honduras with her family when she was 8 years old, was about to board her flight from Massachusetts to Texas last Friday to surprise her parents for the holiday when immigration authorities detained her.
“When they told me, ‘You’re going to come with us’ … I was like, ‘Oh, I have a plane that I literally have to be there right now.’ They’re like, ‘No, you’re not even going to go on the plane,'” Lopez Belloza said.
The college freshman told ABC News that immigration officers declined to answer her repeated questions about why she was arrested and where she was going.
Court documents obtained by ABC News show that within hours of her detainment, a federal judge ordered the government not to remove Lopez Belloza from the U.S. and not to transfer her outside of Massachusetts.
But she was transferred that evening to a detention center in Texas and deported to Honduras the next day despite the court order.
“How does it feel to know that you were deported despite a judge saying that you should not be?” ABC News asked.
“It feels unfair,” Lopez Belloza said. “If there was an order, then why did everything happen to me so fast, within three days?”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told ABC News that Lopez Belloza had been issued an order for removal in 2015, but Lopez Belloza said she was surprised when authorities informed her of that.
“On November 20, CBP arrested Any Lopez-Belloza, an illegal alien from Honduras, as she was attempting to board a flight at Boston Logan International Airport,” the DHS spokesperson said. “This illegal alien entered the country in 2014 and an immigration judge ordered her removed from the country in 2015, over 10 years ago. She has illegally stayed in the country since.”
“Illegal aliens should use the CBP Home app to fly home for free and receive $1,000 stipend, while preserving the option to return the legal, right way,” said the DHS spokesperson. “It’s an easy choice leave voluntarily and receive $1,000 check or stay and wait till you are fined $1,000 day, arrested, and deported without a possibility to return legally.”
Lopez Belloza told ABC News that her parents were not aware she was traveling to Texas for the holidays.
“They didn’t know that I was at the airport,” she said. “They didn’t know nothing … and I just thought … now the surprise is going to be that I got arrested. It shouldn’t have been this way.”
“I feel like I made a mistake by me going to the airport … I’ve never, lied to my parents in that kind of way,” she said.
Lopez Belloza said this is her first time back in Honduras since her family fled the country more than a decade ago. She said her family thinks her deportation isn’t fair because she has no criminal record and was “just focusing on her studies.”
She told ABC News that she was living her American Dream.
“My parents, who they work so hard to be able to send me to college,” she said. “And I got really good financial aid. I really got a good college that basically wanted me, and I wanted them.”
“My dream was for me to be in college, fulfill not only mine but also my family dream … for me to be in college, be one of the first ones in my family to be there,” she said. “It was like … wow … I’m doing this. It’s happening.”
The 19-year-old was removed as part of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown, under which half a million migrants have been deported and at least another 1.6 million have self-deported.
When asked by ABC News what her message would be to President Donald Trump, Lopez Belloza said, “Why is he getting people who are living in the United States working day and night, people, people like me, who are in college, doing their dreams, having an education?”
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