A 19-year-old freshman at Babson College in Massachusetts said she would remain in Honduras on Friday, the deadline that a judge had given the Trump administration for facilitating her return to the United States after it violated a court order by mistakenly deporting her.
The government had arranged for a plane on Friday that would have brought the student, Any Lucia López Belloza, back to the United States. But her lawyers said she chose not to board, believing that she would be immediately detained on arrival and deported again. They pointed to a Thursday court filing by the Justice Department noting “ICE’s intent to effectuate” her “final order of removal after she is returned.”
In a tearful video call on Friday with journalists, Ms. López said a representative from Immigration and Customs Enforcement had tried to persuade her to return to the United States by wrongly suggesting that she was likely to be set free upon her return.
“An officer told me again and again that I will be released once I landed in the United States,” she said.
“She asked if she would be freed upon arrival or if she would be detained again,” said Ivonne Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the immigration advocacy group FWD.us, who said she joined a call with Ms. López and the ICE employee. “He said very likely you will be freed, and that the only way to know for sure is to get on the plane.”
Her legal team said she had a green card application pending and would continue to fight in court for her permanent return to the United States.
In an emailed statement, the Department of Homeland Security said that Ms. López “failed to appear for her prearranged flight” on Friday and that “ICE made multiple attempts to reach out to her with no response.” The department added that she had received “full due process” after an immigration judge issued a final order of removal when she was a child.
Ms. López was detained on Nov. 20 at Boston Logan International Airport, as she was about to board a flight home to Texas to celebrate Thanksgiving with her family.
Her ordeal drew significant attention because, though not a legal resident, she had lived in the United States since she was a child and won a scholarship to attend Babson College in Wellesley, Mass. After the Board of Immigration Appeals rejected her mother’s asylum application in 2017, the government ordered her removal. She was 11 years old at the time.
She was shackled and “treated like a terrorist,” her lawyer, Todd Pomerleau, said by email on Friday. He said his client was unaware that her mother’s case had resulted in an order of removal.
In a court declaration on Friday afternoon, an ICE official wrote that the government “has taken all reasonable and practicable steps to comply with the court’s order to return” Ms. López to the United States, but was “impeded by her failure to appear and her lack of cooperation with the return process.”
During the video call, Representative Greg Casar, Democrat of Texas, said the case fit into a larger pattern of the Trump administration defying the courts, as judges hold officials in civil contempt and compile lists of court orders that have been violated in immigration cases.
“They are refusing to follow the law and are now refusing to follow the judge’s orders,” he said.
The details of Ms. López’s case suggest that, in this instance, while the government has brushed aside nudges from a federal judge to relent and allow Ms. López to return to her life as an American student, it is also seeking to avoid another contempt-of-court ruling.
On Nov. 21, after her initial detention, a federal judge ordered her not to be removed from the United States. ICE did so anyway the next morning, putting her on a plane flying to Honduras from Harlingen, Texas, near a detention center where she was flown from Boston after her arrest. An ICE officer later told the court that he had mistakenly failed to flag her file for further review in other jurisdictions because he was under the impression that since she was no longer in Massachusetts, “the court’s order did not apply to her.”
“That officer made a mistake there,” an administration lawyer said in a hearing. “He regrets making that mistake.”
The error prompted Judge Richard G. Stearns, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, to encourage the Trump administration to grant Ms. López a student visa. After officials declined to do so, he threatened to hold them in civil contempt unless they corrected their mistake by bringing her back to the United States.
“Wisdom counsels that redemption may be found by acknowledging and fixing our own errors,” he wrote on Feb. 13, citing the Book of Proverbs. But while he gave a two-week deadline for her return, Judge Stearns also acknowledged that his jurisdiction over Ms. López’s case was limited. That petition was filed by her lawyer “too late in the wrong district,” after she had already been flown to Texas.
In a preliminary ruling on its emergency docket last year, the Supreme Court held that challenges to immigration removals, known as habeas corpus petitions, must generally be filed in the district where the person is being detained. Mr. Pomerleau has said in filings that he did not file her petition in Texas because neither he nor her family was able to ascertain where she was.
On Friday, Judge Stearns denied a motion by Ms. López’s lawyers that he clarify his order and require that ICE return her to Massachusetts. He explained that he did not have jurisdiction and such a motion would need to be filed elsewhere.
“I want to keep contributing to the country I call home,” Ms. López said on the Friday video call. “Instead, I’m being treated as if I do not belong, as if my life does not matter.”
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