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Any Lucía López Belloza had been away from her mother and father and two younger sisters since beginning her first semester at a business college near Boston in August. A generous individual gave her airfare so she could travel back to her family in Texas and surprise them for Thanksgiving.

The 19-year-old university student was standing at the boarding gate at Boston airport when she was informed there was an “problem” with her boarding pass; when she reached the service desk, she was handcuffed and arrested 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 shock will be that I am not coming,’” López explained.

She was permitted a phone call to her parents, who immediately reached out to a lawyer. The next day, a U.S. judge issued an injunction barring her deportation from the US for at least 72 hours until her case could be reviewed.

However the next morning, she was shackled at her wrists, feet and waist and deported 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 Sent Back 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 many years struggling against the growing influence of armed gangs that dominate entire neighbourhoods, extort families and enlist youths. The country’s homicide rate is triple the global average.

Honduras is also in a state of political turmoil, with a knife-edge national vote of which the vote count has been delayed for days, with officials and experts condemning repeated attempts by the US president, Donald Trump, to influence the electoral process.

“It never occurred to me I would experience this tragedy,” said López, who, since being sent away on November 22nd, has been staying at her grandparents’ home in a major Honduran city, Honduras’s second-largest city.

An ‘Unconstitutional Horror Show’ Says Legal Counsel

Her lightning-fast expulsion – under 48 hours after she was detained at the airport – has attracted international scrutiny as one of the starkest examples of reported violations under Trump’s mass deportation policy.

“This situation is an legally dubious nightmare,” said her lawyer, the Massachusetts Todd Pomerleau, who has represented other notable ICE detention cases.

“She wasn’t told why she was detained,” 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 court hearing or even consult with an lawyer,” he added.

“If that isn’t unconstitutional, I don’t know what is,” Pomerleau concluded.

Official Statement and Juridical Contradictions

Trump administration officials repeatedly said the chief focus of enforcement actions was individuals with serious records, 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 administrative violation.

A federal agency representative said López, “an undocumented individual”, was taken into custody because she “entered the country in 2014 and an immigration judge ordered her removed from the country in 2015, over 10 years ago. She has remained unlawfully in the country since.”

Her lawyer said that neither she nor he was ever shown the removal order, and that even if it exists, a U.S. statute stipulates that arrests in such cases can only take place within a three-month period after the order is finalized – “not a decade after the fact,” argued the lawyer.

“Her mum came to the US because of how horrific the circumstances were in Honduras, where criminal groups were killing and extorting people … They arrived just like the early settlers centuries ago, for a brighter future and to escape persecution,” said the attorney.

Life in San Pedro Sula

Honduras “has a large out-migration problem”, said a social science researcher, a academic who researches returned migrants in Central America. In the past decade, about a fifth of Hondurans left the country, the majority heading to the US.

In 2014, when the student's family fled Honduras, their city, this urban center, was considered the most violent city of the globe and their neighbourhood, a specific district, was one of the most dangerous.

“The children and families that I’ve interviewed from there described a very strong presence of criminal organizations who compelled multiple families to flee,” noted the researcher.

Gang violence takes a particularly heavy toll on women, having been the primary cause of femicides in Honduras recently. Young women are particularly affected, making up the majority of female victims of assault.

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

Fighting for Return and Hope

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

“There is a chance the government will say: ‘We apologize, we erred 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 judicial ruling was violated and demand a remedy,” he explained.

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

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

“I want to be able to progress and maybe continue my studies, whether in Honduras or by finishing my semester at the university. And one day, to be able to reunite with my family and my family again,” she said.

Her university, the institution she was enrolled at in Wellesley, issued a public comment addressing 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 López. “This event to me is unjust, because we came to study and strive, to advance in search of that promise of opportunity so many of us dream of.”