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The Lucía López Belloza had not seen her parents and two little sisters since beginning her freshman year at a business college near Boston in August. An acquaintance gave her airfare so she could travel back to her family in Texas and surprise them for the holiday gathering.

The teenage university student was standing at the departure gate at Logan Airport when she was informed there was an “issue” with her boarding pass; when she reached customer service, she was handcuffed and arrested by what she believed to be two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

“My thought was: ‘I am going to see my parents for Thanksgiving, and now the surprise will be that I am not coming,’” López stated.

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

But the following day, she was shackled at her hands, feet and torso and expelled to her native Central American nation, a nation which she departed at the age of seven and of which she has almost no memory.

The Dangerous Country She Was Deported To

Home to about 11 million people, Honduras is one of the main transit corridors for drugs transported from the southern continent to its northern neighbor, and has spent decades struggling against the expanding power of armed gangs that dominate entire neighbourhoods, extort families and enlist young people. The country’s homicide rate is three times the world average.

Honduras is also in a political maelstrom, with a knife-edge national vote of which the vote count has been delayed for days, with officials and experts criticising efforts by the US president, Donald Trump, to sway the electoral process.

“I never thought I would go through such an ordeal,” stated López, who, since being sent away on 22 November, has been residing at her relatives' house in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second-largest city.

A ‘Blatant Violation’ According to Her Lawyer

Her swift expulsion – less than two days after she was arrested at the airport – has drawn global attention as one of the starkest cases of alleged violations under Trump’s large-scale removal policy.

“Her case is an unconstitutional horror show,” said her attorney, the Boston-based Todd Pomerleau, who has defended other high-profile ICE detainees.

“She received no explanation why she was detained,” said the attorney. “She was shackled like she was some type of hardened criminal, and then sent to Honduras with no opportunity to have a legal hearing or even consult with an lawyer,” he added.

“Should this not be considered unconstitutional, I don’t know what is,” Pomerleau said.

Official Response and Juridical Disputes

Federal officials repeatedly said the chief focus of enforcement actions was dangerous criminals, but – like many others apprehended by ICE agents – the student had no criminal record. Lacking legal status in the US is a civil matter but a civil infraction.

A federal agency representative said the individual, “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, over 10 years ago. She has remained unlawfully in the country since.”

Her attorney said that neither she nor he was ever presented with the deportation order, and that even if it does exist, a federal law stipulates that arrests in such instances can only take place within a 90-day window after the order is issued – “not 10 years later,” said the lawyer.

“Her mother brought her here because of how terrible the conditions were in Honduras, where criminal groups were murdering and threatening people … They came here just like the Pilgrims centuries ago, for a brighter future and to escape persecution,” said the lawyer.

Life in San Pedro Sula

Honduras “faces a large emigration problem”, said Elizabeth G Kennedy, a academic who researches deportees in Central America. In the past decade, about a fifth of Hondurans left the country, most traveling to the US.

In 2014, when the student's family left Honduras, their home town, this urban center, was considered the murder capital of the globe and their neighbourhood, La Pradera, was one of the most violent.

“Young people and households that I have spoken with from there described a overwhelming presence of gangs who compelled many residents to flee,” said the researcher.

Organized crime has a devastating impact on females, having been the primary cause of femicides in Honduras recently. Young women are particularly affected, making up the largest share of female victims of sexual violence.

“And now you have a teenager back in a country where it’s very dangerous to be a female, who was given no due process rights in the US,” she added.

Pursuing for Return and Future

Pomerleau said they are now waiting for an official explanation from the American authorities to the court as to why the emergency order stopping her removal was ignored.

“It’s possible the government will say: ‘Sorry, 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.

“Yet they might have a different approach, and that’s going to require me to make a forceful argument that the court order was violated and demand a remedy,” he explained.

“We will not cease until we she is returned”.

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 perhaps continue my studies, whether in Honduras or by finishing my term at the university. And eventually, to be able to see my family and my loved ones again,” she expressed.

Her university, the institution she was enrolled at in Wellesley, issued a public comment regarding her case and saying that “the priority remains on supporting the student and their family”.

“My main goal in the US was always to study,” stated she. “This event to me isn’t fair, because we went there to study and work hard, to advance in search of that American dream so many of us had.”