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Any Lucia López Belloza had been away from her mother and father and two younger sisters since starting her first semester at a business college near Boston in August. A family friend provided her with plane tickets so she could travel back to Austin and surprise them for the holiday gathering.

The teenage business student was standing at the boarding gate at Logan Airport when she was informed there was an “error” with her travel documents; when she went to the service desk, she was handcuffed and arrested by what she understood to be two federal immigration agents.

“I thought: ‘I was travelling to surprise my parents for Thanksgiving, and now the shock will be that I won’t be there,’” López explained.

She was permitted a phone call to her parents, who contacted a lawyer. The next day, a federal judge issued an emergency order barring her deportation from the US for at least three days until her court proceedings could be examined.

However the next morning, she was chained at her wrists, feet and waist and expelled to her native Honduras, a country which she departed at the tender age of seven and of which she has virtually no recollection.

A Dangerous Country López Was Deported Back To

Home to about 11 million people, Honduras is a key transit corridors for drugs moved from South America to Mexico, and has spent decades grappling with the expanding influence of violent cartels that control entire neighbourhoods, extort families and recruit youths. The country’s homicide rate is triple the global average.

Honduras is also in a state of political turmoil, with a knife-edge presidential election of which the ballot tally has been delayed for days, with local politicians and analysts criticising repeated attempts by the US president, Donald Trump, to sway Hondurans’ votes.

“It never occurred to me I would experience such an ordeal,” said the young woman, who, since being sent away on 22 November, has been residing at her relatives' house in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second-largest city.

An ‘Blatant Violation’ Says Her Lawyer

Her swift deportation – less than 48 hours after she was arrested at the airport – has drawn international scrutiny as one of the clearest examples of alleged abuses under Trump’s mass deportation policy.

“This situation is an unconstitutional horror show,” said her lawyer, the Boston-based legal representative, who has defended other high-profile ICE detention cases.

“She wasn’t told why she was detained,” said the attorney. “They restrained her like she was some type of dangerous felon, and then deported to Honduras with no opportunity to have a court hearing or even talk to an lawyer,” he added.

“Should this not be considered a breach of rights, it is hard to imagine what would be,” he said.

Official Statement and Legal Disputes

Trump administration officials have stated the primary target of arrests and deportations was individuals with serious records, but – like many others apprehended by ICE agents – the student had no criminal record. Being undocumented in the US is a civil matter but a civil infraction.

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson said López, “an illegal alien”, was taken into custody because she “entered the country in 2014 and an court ordered her removed from the country in 2015, a decade ago. She has remained unlawfully in the country since.”

Her lawyer said that no one was ever presented with the deportation order, and that even if it exists, a federal law specifies that apprehensions in such cases can only take place within a 90-day window after the order is issued – “not a decade after the fact,” said Pomerleau.

“Her mother brought her here because of how horrific the conditions were in Honduras, where criminal groups were killing and extorting people … They arrived just like the Pilgrims centuries ago, for a better life and to escape persecution,” explained the lawyer.

Conditions in the Honduran City

Honduras “has a significant emigration issue”, said a social science researcher, a academic who studies returned migrants in Central America. In the last ten years, about a fifth of Hondurans have left the country, the majority heading to the US.

In that year, when López’s family fled Honduras, their home town, this urban center, was considered the most violent city of the globe and their community, La Pradera, was one of the most dangerous.

“The children and families that I’ve interviewed from there reported a very strong presence of gangs who forced multiple families to flee,” noted the researcher.

Organized crime has a devastating impact on females, having been the primary cause of gender-based killings in Honduras recently. Teenage girls are particularly affected, making up the largest share of victims of assault.

“Now you have a teenager back in a country where it’s very dangerous to be a young woman, who was given no due process rights in the US,” she stated.

Pursuing for Justice and Hope

The student's lawyer said they are now awaiting an official explanation from the American authorities to the court as to why the judge's order barring her deportation was ignored.

“There is a chance the administration will say: ‘We apologize, we erred here, and we’re going to {bring her back|facilitate her return.’ That would be the sensible and just thing to do.

“But they might have a alternative stance, and that would necessitate me to make a strong legal case that the judicial ruling was disobeyed and seek a solution,” he said.

“We’re not stopping until we get her back”.

The student said she was trying to stay focused: “I am trying to be as positive and as strong as I can.

“I want to be able to progress and maybe continue my studies, whether here or by finishing my semester at the college. And eventually, to be able to reunite with my family and my loved ones again,” she expressed.

Her university, the school she was enrolled at in Wellesley, issued a statement regarding her situation and saying that “the priority remains on assisting the individual and their relatives”.

“My main goal in the US was always to study,” stated she. “This event to me isn’t fair, because we came to study and strive, to move forward in pursuit of that American dream so many of us had.”