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Any Lucia López Belloza had been away from her parents and two little sisters since beginning her freshman year at a business college near Boston in the late summer. A family friend provided her with airfare so she could fly home to her family in Texas and surprise them for Thanksgiving.

The 19-year-old university student was standing at the departure gate at Logan Airport when she was told there was an “error” with her boarding pass; when she reached customer service, she was restrained and arrested by what she understood to be two federal immigration agents.

“My thought was: ‘I am going to surprise my parents for Thanksgiving, and now the surprise will be that I won’t be there,’” the student explained.

She was allowed a phone call to her parents, who contacted a lawyer. The next day, a U.S. judge granted an injunction barring her removal from the US for at least 72 hours until her case could be examined.

But the next morning, she was shackled at her wrists, feet and torso and expelled to her native Honduras, a nation which she departed at the age of seven and of which she has virtually no memory.

A Dangerous Land López Was Sent To

Home to about 11 million people, Honduras is a primary trafficking routes for drugs moved from South America to its northern neighbor, and has spent many years grappling with the expanding power of violent cartels that dominate whole districts, extort families and enlist youths. The nation's murder rate is triple the global average.

Honduras is also in a political maelstrom, with a extremely close presidential election of which the vote count has dragged on for several days, with local politicians and analysts criticising efforts by the American leader, Donald Trump, to influence Hondurans’ votes.

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

An ‘Blatant Violation’ According to Her Lawyer

Her rapid expulsion – less than 48 hours after she was detained at the airport – has drawn international scrutiny as one of the clearest cases of reported violations under Trump’s large-scale removal initiative.

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

“She wasn’t told why she was detained,” said Pomerleau. “She was shackled 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 said.

Official Statement and Legal Disputes

Federal officials have stated the chief focus of arrests and deportations was dangerous criminals, but – like most immigrants detained by immigration officers – the student had a clean record. Lacking legal status in the US is not a crime but a civil infraction.

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) representative said the individual, “an illegal alien”, was arrested because she “arrived in the country in 2014 and an court 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 shown the removal order, and that even if it does exist, a federal law stipulates that arrests 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 came to the US because of how horrific the conditions were in Honduras, where gang members were murdering and threatening people … They came here just like the Pilgrims 400 years ago, for a brighter future and to escape persecution,” said the lawyer.

Conditions in San Pedro Sula

Honduras “faces a large emigration problem”, said a social science researcher, a academic who studies returned migrants in Central America. In the last ten years, 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 murder capital of the globe and their community, La Pradera, was one of the most violent.

“Young people and households that I’ve interviewed from there reported a very strong presence of criminal organizations who compelled multiple families to leave,” said Kennedy.

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

“Now you have a teenager back in a country where it’s very dangerous to be a female, who was given no legal recourse in the US,” she stated.

Fighting for Justice and Hope

The student's lawyer said they are now waiting for an official explanation from the American authorities to the judge as to why the judge's order stopping her deportation was ignored.

“It’s possible 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 sensible and just thing to do.

“But they might have a alternative stance, and that’s going to require me to make a forceful argument that the judicial ruling was disobeyed and demand a remedy,” he explained.

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

López said she was trying to keep her mind occupied: “I try to be as optimistic and as strong as I can.

“I want to be able to move forward and perhaps continue my studies, whether here or by completing my semester at the college. And eventually, to be able to reunite with my parents and my family again,” she expressed.

Babson College, the institution she was attending in Massachusetts, issued a public comment addressing her situation and saying that “our focus remains on supporting the student and their family”.

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