Any Lucía López Belloza, a 19-year-old college student who had hoped to fly to Texas to surprise her family for Thanksgiving, was recently detained at Boston Logan International Airport and then deported to Honduras.
According to Belloza’s attorney, the first-year student at Babson College in Massachusetts was about to board a flight on Nov. 20 when she was told there was a problem with her boarding pass. She was then detained by immigration officials and sent to Honduras two days later.
Her father, Francis López, told The New York Times that Belloza was brought to the United States by her parents when she was 7 years old. The family’s lawyer said Belloza was deported despite a federal judge’s order temporarily blocking her removal.
On Monday’s “Morning Joe,” Joe Scarborough slammed the Trump administration for Belloza’s deportation and questioned how it squared with the president’s pledge to focus his immigration crackdown on the “worst of the worst.”
“When Republicans said they were going to deport the worst of the worst, did they really mean Babson College students that were coming home to surprise their family?” Scarborough asked.
“Here you have this college student at Babson, who is met at Logan and ends up being shackled and sent back to Honduras — a country where her parents removed her from because of the violence when she was 7 years old,” he added.
The former Republican congressman then shared a recent interaction he and Mika Brzezinski, his wife and co-host, had with two viewers about the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies. “I don’t want to get into great details, but this weekend, we ran into a couple,” he recalled. “It was very sweet; they watch the show. The wife, though, said she was MAGA — big MAGA supporter.”
Scarborough said that after a few minutes of pleasant conversation, Brzezinski pressed the woman about Trump’s indiscriminate approach to immigration, asking: “Do you really support kindergarten teachers being ripped out of their classrooms? American citizens being grabbed, cuffed, detained? … And, in this case, a Babson student who went home to surprise her family for Thanksgiving?”
The MS NOW host said that the “justification” given by that woman was that America is “at war” and such situations are simply the price people have to pay to keep the country safe.
On his show, Scarborough questioned that logic. “Does she feel safer this morning, because a 19-year-old … young woman, who was visiting her parents on Thanksgiving, ended up handcuffed and shackled and deported to Honduras?” he asked. “Does that make America safer, or does that make us look really cold and callous and hateful to the rest of the world?”
You can watch Scarborough’s full analysis in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.