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Any Lucía López Belloza had not seen her mother and father and two little sisters since beginning her freshman year at a business college near the city of Boston in the late summer. A family friend provided her with airfare so she could fly home to Austin and give them a surprise for the holiday gathering.

The 19-year-old university student was standing at the departure 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 arrested by what she believed to be two federal immigration agents.

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

She was permitted a phone call to her parents, who contacted a lawyer. A day later, a U.S. judge granted an injunction prohibiting her deportation from the US for at least three days until her case could be examined.

However the next morning, she was chained at her hands, feet and waist and deported to her birth Central American nation, a country which she departed at the age of seven and of which she has scarcely any recollection.

A Dangerous Land She Was Deported Back To

A nation home to about eleven million people, Honduras is one of the main transit corridors for drugs moved from South America to its northern neighbor, and has spent decades grappling with the expanding influence of violent cartels that control whole districts, terrorize families and enlist youths. The nation's homicide rate is three times the global average.

Honduras is also in a state of political turmoil, with a extremely close presidential election of which the vote count has been delayed for days, with local politicians and experts criticising repeated attempts by the American leader, Donald Trump, to sway Hondurans’ votes.

“It never occurred to me I would go through this tragedy,” said López, who, since being deported on 22 November, has been staying at her relatives' house in a major Honduran city, Honduras’s second-largest city.

An ‘Blatant Violation’ Says Her Lawyer

Her rapid expulsion – less than two days after she was detained at the airport – has attracted global attention as one of the starkest cases of reported abuses under Trump’s mass deportation policy.

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

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

“Should this not be considered unconstitutional, it is hard to imagine what would be,” he concluded.

Official Response and Legal Disputes

Federal officials repeatedly said the primary target of enforcement actions was dangerous criminals, but – like most immigrants 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 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 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, over 10 years ago. She has remained unlawfully in the country since.”

Her lawyer said that no one was ever presented with the deportation order, and that even if it exists, a U.S. statute specifies that apprehensions in such cases can only take place within a three-month period after the order is issued – “not 10 years later,” argued the lawyer.

“Her mum 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 early settlers centuries ago, for a brighter future and to find safety,” explained the lawyer.

Life in the Honduran City

Honduras “faces a large out-migration 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 have left the country, the majority traveling to the US.

In that year, when López’s family left Honduras, their home town, this urban center, was considered the most violent city of the globe 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 presence of gangs who forced many residents to flee,” noted the researcher.

Organized crime takes a particularly heavy toll on women, having been the primary cause of femicides in Honduras last year. Young women are especially vulnerable, making up the largest share of female victims of assault.

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

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 emergency order stopping 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’s going to require me to make a forceful argument that the judicial ruling was disobeyed and seek a solution,” he explained.

“We will not cease until we get her back”.

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

“I want to be able to progress and maybe resume my education, whether here or by completing my term at the college. And one day, to be able to reunite with my parents and my family again,” she expressed.

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

“My primary objective in the US was always to study,” said López. “What happened to me is unjust, because we came to learn and strive, to advance in search of that promise of opportunity so many of us dream of.”