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The Lucia López Belloza had been separated from her parents and two younger sisters since starting her freshman year at a business college near Boston in August. A family friend gave her plane tickets so she could travel back to Austin and give them a surprise for the holiday gathering.

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

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

She was allowed a single call to her parents, who contacted a lawyer. The next day, a U.S. judge issued an injunction prohibiting her deportation from the US for at least three days until her court proceedings could be reviewed.

However the next morning, she was chained at her wrists, ankles and waist and expelled to her native Honduras, a country which she departed at the age of seven and of which she has scarcely any recollection.

A Volatile Land López Was Sent To

Home to about 11 million people, Honduras is a key trafficking routes for narcotics transported from the southern continent to Mexico, and has spent many years grappling with the growing power of armed gangs that dominate whole districts, extort families and enlist young people. The country’s homicide rate is three times the global average.

Honduras is also in a state of political turmoil, with a knife-edge national vote of which the ballot tally has been delayed for several days, with local politicians and experts condemning repeated attempts by the American leader, Donald Trump, to influence Hondurans’ votes.

“It never occurred to me I would go through this tragedy,” said López, who, since being deported on November 22nd, has been staying at her grandparents’ home in a major Honduran city, Honduras’s economic hub.

A ‘Unconstitutional Horror Show’ Says Her Lawyer

Her lightning-fast deportation – less than 48 hours after she was arrested at the airport – has drawn global attention as one of the clearest examples of alleged violations under Trump’s large-scale removal initiative.

“Her case is an legally dubious nightmare,” said her attorney, the Massachusetts Todd Pomerleau, who has defended other notable ICE detention cases.

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

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

Official Statement and Legal Contradictions

Federal officials have stated the primary target of enforcement actions was individuals with serious records, but – like many others detained by ICE agents – the student had a clean record. Lacking legal status in the US is not a crime but a civil infraction.

A federal agency spokesperson said the individual, “an illegal alien”, was taken into custody because she “arrived in the country in 2014 and an immigration judge issued a removal order 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 shown the deportation order, and that even if it exists, a federal law specifies that apprehensions in such instances can only take place within a 90-day window after the order is issued – “not a decade after the fact,” said the lawyer.

“Her mum brought her here because of how terrible the circumstances were in Honduras, where criminal groups were killing and extorting people … They came here just like the Pilgrims 400 years ago, for a better life and to escape persecution,” said the lawyer.

Conditions in San Pedro Sula

Honduras “faces a large emigration problem”, said a social science researcher, a Soros justice fellow who researches deportees in the region. In the past decade, 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 murder capital of the world and their community, a specific district, was one of the most dangerous.

“Young people and households that I’ve interviewed from there reported a very strong control of gangs who compelled many residents to leave,” noted Kennedy.

Gang violence takes a particularly heavy toll on women, having been the primary cause of femicides in Honduras last year. Teenage girls are especially vulnerable, making up the majority of female victims of assault.

“Now you have a teenager back in a country where the risks are high to be a female, who was given no due process rights in the US,” she added.

Fighting for Justice and Hope

Pomerleau said they are now awaiting an formal response from the US government to the court as to why the emergency order barring her removal was not respected.

“There is a chance the administration will say: ‘Sorry, we made a mistake 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 different approach, and that would necessitate me to make a strong legal case that the judicial ruling was violated and seek a solution,” he explained.

“We’re not stopping until we she is returned”.

López said she was trying to keep her mind occupied: “I am trying to be as positive and as resilient as I can.

“I want to be able to progress and maybe resume my education, whether in Honduras or by completing my term at the college. And eventually, to be able to reunite with my parents and my loved ones again,” she said.

Her university, the school she was attending in Wellesley, issued a statement regarding her case and saying that “our focus remains on supporting the individual and their family”.

“My primary objective in the US was always to pursue an education,” said she. “What happened to me isn’t fair, because we went there to study and work hard, to move forward in search of that promise of opportunity so many of us dream of.”