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The Lucia López Belloza had not seen her parents and two little sisters since starting her freshman year at a business college near the city of Boston in the late summer. An acquaintance provided her with plane tickets so she could fly home to Austin and give them a surprise for Thanksgiving.

The 19-year-old business student was already at the boarding gate at Boston airport when she was told there was an “problem” with her travel documents; when she went to customer service, she was restrained and arrested by what she understood to be two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

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

She was permitted a phone call to her parents, who immediately reached out to a legal representative. The next day, a federal judge granted an emergency order prohibiting her deportation from the US for at least three days until her court proceedings could be examined.

However the following day, she was chained at her hands, ankles and waist and forcibly removed to her native Central American nation, a country which she departed at the age of seven and of which she has almost no memory.

A Dangerous Land López Was Sent Back To

A nation home to about eleven million people, Honduras is one of the main 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 control whole districts, extort families and enlist young people. The nation's murder rate is triple the world average.

Honduras is also in a political maelstrom, with a extremely close national vote of which the ballot tally has been delayed for days, with local politicians and analysts condemning repeated attempts by the US president, Donald Trump, to sway Hondurans’ votes.

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

An ‘Unconstitutional Horror Show’ Says Her Lawyer

Her lightning-fast expulsion – less than two days after she was arrested at the airport – has drawn global attention as one of the clearest cases of alleged violations under Trump’s mass deportation initiative.

“Her case is an legally dubious horror show,” said her attorney, the Boston-based legal representative, who has defended other high-profile ICE detainees.

“She wasn’t told why she was arrested,” said Pomerleau. “She was shackled like she was some type of hardened criminal, and then deported to Honduras with no opportunity to have a legal hearing or even consult with an attorney,” he continued.

“Should this not be considered a breach of rights, I don’t know what is,” he concluded.

Official Response and Juridical Disputes

Trump administration officials have stated the chief focus of enforcement actions was individuals with serious records, but – like many others apprehended by immigration officers – the student had a clean record. Being undocumented in the US is a civil matter but a administrative violation.

A federal agency representative said López, “an illegal alien”, was taken into custody because she “arrived in the country in 2014 and an court ordered her removed from the country in 2015, over 10 years ago. She has illegally stayed in the country since.”

Her lawyer said that neither she nor he was ever shown the deportation order, and that even if it does exist, a federal law specifies 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,” said the lawyer.

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

Conditions in San Pedro Sula

Honduras “has a large out-migration issue”, said Elizabeth G Kennedy, a Soros justice fellow who studies deportees in Central America. In the past decade, about a fifth of Hondurans have left the country, the majority traveling to the US.

In 2014, when the student's family fled Honduras, their city, San Pedro Sula, 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 have spoken with from there reported a overwhelming presence of gangs who forced multiple families to leave,” said Kennedy.

Gang violence takes a particularly heavy toll on females, having been the main driver of femicides in Honduras recently. Young women are especially vulnerable, making up the majority of victims of sexual violence.

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

Fighting for Return and Future

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

“There is a chance the administration will say: ‘Sorry, 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 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 am trying to be as positive and as strong as I can.

“I want to be able to progress and maybe continue my studies, whether here or by finishing my semester at the university. And eventually, to be able to reunite with my parents and my family again,” she expressed.

Babson College, the institution she was enrolled at in Massachusetts, issued a statement regarding her case and saying that “our focus remains on supporting the individual and their relatives”.

“My main goal in the US was always to study,” said she. “What happened to me isn’t fair, because we came to study and work hard, to advance in search of that American dream so many of us dream of.”