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The Lucia López Belloza had not seen her mother and father and two younger sisters since starting her first semester at Babson College near the city of Boston in August. An acquaintance gave her airfare so she could fly home to Austin and surprise them for the holiday gathering.

The teenage business student was already at the boarding gate at Logan Airport when she was told there was an “problem” with her travel documents; when she reached customer service, she was handcuffed and taken into custody by what she understood to be two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

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

She was allowed a single call to her parents, who contacted a lawyer. The next day, a federal judge issued an emergency order prohibiting her deportation from the US for at least three days until her case could be reviewed.

But the next morning, she was shackled at her hands, ankles and torso and forcibly removed to her native Central American nation, a country which she left at the age of seven and of which she has virtually no recollection.

A Dangerous Country López Was Deported Back To

A nation home to about 11 million people, Honduras is a primary trafficking routes for narcotics transported from South America to Mexico, and has spent many years grappling with the growing power of armed gangs that control whole districts, extort families and enlist youths. The nation's murder rate is triple the global average.

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

“It never occurred to me I would experience such an ordeal,” stated López, who, since being sent away on 22 November, has been staying at her relatives' house in a major Honduran city, Honduras’s economic hub.

A ‘Blatant Violation’ Says Her Lawyer

Her lightning-fast expulsion – less than two days after she was detained at the airport – has attracted international scrutiny as one of the clearest examples of alleged abuses under Trump’s mass deportation policy.

“Her case is an legally dubious horror show,” said her attorney, the Massachusetts Todd Pomerleau, who has defended other high-profile ICE detention cases.

“She received no explanation why she was detained,” added Pomerleau. “They restrained her like she was a hardened criminal, and then deported to Honduras with no chance to have a legal hearing or even talk to an attorney,” he added.

“If that isn’t a breach of rights, it is hard to imagine what would be,” Pomerleau concluded.

Official Statement and Juridical Disputes

Federal officials repeatedly said the primary target of enforcement actions was dangerous criminals, but – like many others detained by ICE agents – the student had a clean record. Being undocumented in the US is not a crime but a civil infraction.

A federal agency representative said the individual, “an undocumented individual”, was arrested 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 neither she nor he was ever presented with the removal order, and that even if it exists, a U.S. statute stipulates that apprehensions in such instances can only take place within a three-month period after the order is finalized – “not a decade after the fact,” argued Pomerleau.

“Her mother brought her here because of how horrific the circumstances were in Honduras, where gang members were murdering and threatening people … They came here just like the early settlers centuries ago, for a brighter future and to find safety,” said the lawyer.

Life in San Pedro Sula

Honduras “has a significant emigration issue”, said a social science researcher, a Soros justice fellow who studies deportees in the region. In the last ten years, about a fifth of Hondurans left the country, the majority heading to the US.

In 2014, when López’s family left Honduras, their city, this urban center, was considered the murder capital 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 control of gangs who forced multiple families to flee,” said the researcher.

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

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

Fighting for Return and Hope

Pomerleau said they are now waiting for an official explanation from the US government to the judge as to why the emergency order stopping her removal was not respected.

“There is a chance the administration 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.

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

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

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

“My desire is to be able to move forward and perhaps resume my education, whether in Honduras or by finishing my semester at the college. And eventually, to be able to see my family and my loved ones again,” she said.

Babson College, the school she was enrolled at in Massachusetts, issued a public comment regarding her case and saying that “the priority remains on assisting the individual and their family”.

“My primary objective in the US was always to study,” said López. “What happened to me is unjust, because we went there to learn and work hard, to move forward in search of that promise of opportunity so many of us dream of.”