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Any Lucia López Belloza had been separated from her mother and father and two younger sisters since starting her first semester at a business college near the city of Boston in August. A generous individual gave her airfare so she could fly home to Austin and give them a surprise for Thanksgiving.

The teenage university student was already at the boarding gate at Boston airport when she was told there was an “problem” with her travel documents; when she went to the service desk, she was restrained and taken into custody by what she understood to be two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

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

She was permitted a single call to her parents, who immediately reached out to a lawyer. The next day, a federal judge issued an emergency order prohibiting her removal from the US for at least three days until her court proceedings could be examined.

However the following day, she was shackled at her wrists, feet and waist and expelled to her native Honduras, a country which she departed at the age of seven and of which she has almost no recollection.

A Dangerous Country López Was Sent To

Home to about eleven million people, Honduras is one of the main trafficking routes for drugs moved from the southern continent to Mexico, and has spent decades grappling with the growing influence of armed gangs that control whole districts, extort families and enlist young people. The country’s murder rate is triple the world average.

Honduras is also in a state of political turmoil, with a extremely close presidential election of which the vote count has dragged on for days, with local politicians and experts criticising repeated attempts by the American leader, Donald Trump, to influence the electoral process.

“It never occurred to me I would go through such an ordeal,” said the young woman, who, since being sent away on 22 November, has been residing at her grandparents’ home in a major Honduran city, Honduras’s economic hub.

A ‘Blatant Violation’ Says Her Lawyer

Her rapid expulsion – less than 48 hours after she was detained at the airport – has attracted global attention as one of the clearest cases of reported abuses under Trump’s large-scale removal policy.

“This situation is an unconstitutional horror show,” said her attorney, the Boston-based legal representative, who has represented other notable ICE detention cases.

“She wasn’t told why she was arrested,” added the attorney. “She was shackled like she was some type of hardened criminal, and then deported to Honduras with no chance to have a legal hearing or even talk to an lawyer,” he continued.

“Should this not be considered a breach of rights, I don’t know what is,” Pomerleau said.

Official Statement and Legal Disputes

Trump administration officials repeatedly said the primary target of arrests and deportations was dangerous criminals, but – like many others apprehended by ICE agents – López had a clean record. Being undocumented in the US is not a crime but a civil infraction.

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson said López, “an undocumented individual”, was arrested because she “entered the country in 2014 and an immigration judge issued a removal order from the country in 2015, over 10 years ago. She has remained unlawfully in the country since.”

Her lawyer said that no one was ever presented with the removal order, and that even if it does exist, a federal law specifies that arrests in such cases can only take place within a 90-day window after the order is issued – “not 10 years later,” said Pomerleau.

“Her mum came to the US because of how horrific the circumstances were in Honduras, where gang members were killing and extorting people … They came here just like the early settlers centuries ago, for a better life and to escape persecution,” said the lawyer.

Life in the Honduran City

Honduras “has a significant emigration issue”, said a social science researcher, a academic who studies returned migrants in the region. In the past decade, about a fifth of Hondurans left the country, the majority traveling to the US.

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

“Young people and households that I’ve interviewed from there described a overwhelming presence of criminal organizations who compelled many residents to leave,” noted Kennedy.

Gang violence takes a particularly heavy toll on females, having been the primary cause of gender-based killings in Honduras recently. Young women are especially vulnerable, making up the largest share of female victims of sexual violence.

“Now you have a young woman back in a country where the risks are high to be a young woman, who was given no legal recourse in the US,” she stated.

Fighting for Return and Hope

The student's lawyer said they are now waiting for an formal response from the US government to the court as to why the judge's order barring her removal was not respected.

“It’s possible the government will say: ‘We apologize, we made a mistake here, and we’re going to {bring her back|facilitate her return.’ That would be the easy and reasonable thing to do.

“But they might have a different approach, and that’s going to require me to make a forceful argument that the judicial ruling was violated and demand a remedy,” he said.

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

The student said she was trying to keep her mind occupied: “I am trying to be as optimistic and as strong as I can.

“My desire is to be able to move forward and perhaps continue my studies, whether in Honduras or by finishing my semester at the university. And eventually, to be able to reunite with my family and my loved ones again,” she expressed.

Babson College, the school she was attending in Wellesley, issued a statement addressing her situation and saying that “our focus remains on supporting the individual and their family”.

“My primary objective in the US was always to study,” stated López. “What happened to me isn’t fair, because we went there to study and work hard, to move forward in pursuit of that American dream so many of us dream of.”