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The Lucia López Belloza had been away from her mother and father and two little sisters since beginning her first semester at Babson College near the city of Boston in the late summer. A family friend gave her plane tickets so she could travel back to her family in Texas and surprise them for the holiday gathering.

The teenage university student was already at the boarding gate at Boston airport when she was informed there was an “issue” with her boarding pass; when she went to customer service, she was handcuffed and taken into custody by what she believed 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,’” the student explained.

She was allowed a single call to her parents, who contacted a legal representative. A day later, a U.S. judge issued an injunction barring her removal from the US for at least 72 hours until her case could be reviewed.

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

A Dangerous Country López Was Deported To

Home to about eleven million people, Honduras is a key trafficking routes for narcotics moved from the southern continent to Mexico, and has spent decades struggling against the expanding power of armed gangs that dominate whole districts, extort families and enlist youths. The country’s murder rate is triple the global average.

Honduras is also in a political maelstrom, with a knife-edge presidential election of which the vote count has been delayed for several days, with officials and analysts criticising repeated attempts by the US president, Donald Trump, to sway Hondurans’ votes.

“It never occurred to me I would experience this tragedy,” said López, who, since being sent away on 22 November, has been residing at her relatives' house in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s economic hub.

A ‘Unconstitutional Horror Show’ Says Her Lawyer

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

“This situation is an unconstitutional horror show,” said her attorney, the Massachusetts legal representative, who has represented other high-profile ICE detainees.

“She received no explanation why she was arrested,” said Pomerleau. “They restrained her like she was a dangerous felon, and then deported to Honduras with no opportunity to have a court hearing or even consult with an lawyer,” he added.

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

Official Response and Juridical Contradictions

Trump administration officials have stated the primary target of enforcement actions was individuals with serious records, but – like most immigrants detained by ICE agents – López had no criminal record. Lacking legal status in the US is a civil matter but a civil infraction.

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

Her attorney said that no one was ever shown the removal order, and that even if it exists, a federal law 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 mother brought her here because of how terrible the circumstances were in Honduras, where criminal groups were killing and extorting people … They arrived just like the early settlers centuries ago, for a better life and to escape persecution,” explained the lawyer.

Conditions in San Pedro Sula

Honduras “has a significant emigration problem”, said Elizabeth G Kennedy, a academic who researches deportees in Central America. In the last ten years, about a fifth of Hondurans have left the country, most traveling to the US.

In that year, when the student's family left Honduras, their city, San Pedro Sula, was considered the most violent city of the world and their neighbourhood, a specific district, was one of the most dangerous.

“Young people and households that I have spoken with from there reported a overwhelming control of criminal organizations who compelled multiple families to flee,” said Kennedy.

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 majority of victims of assault.

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

Fighting for Return and Future

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.

“It’s possible the government will say: ‘We apologize, we erred here, and we’re going to {bring her back|facilitate her return.’ That would be the sensible and just thing to do.

“Yet they might have a alternative stance, and that’s going to require me to make a strong legal case 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 trying to keep her mind occupied: “I try to be as positive and as strong as I can.

“I want to be able to move forward and perhaps resume my education, whether in Honduras or by completing my semester at the university. And one day, to be able to reunite with my parents and my loved ones again,” she expressed.

Her university, the school she was enrolled at in Massachusetts, issued a public comment addressing her situation and saying that “our focus remains on supporting the student and their relatives”.

“My main goal in the US was always to pursue an education,” stated López. “This event to me is unjust, because we went there to learn and strive, to advance in search of that promise of opportunity so many of us had.”