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Any Lucía López Belloza had been separated from her parents and two little sisters since starting her freshman year at a business college near Boston in the late summer. An acquaintance gave her plane tickets so she could fly home to Austin and surprise them for Thanksgiving.

The teenage university student was already at the departure gate at Boston airport when she was told there was an “issue” with her travel documents; when she reached customer service, she was handcuffed and arrested by what she believed to be two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

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

She was allowed a phone call to her parents, who immediately reached out to a lawyer. The next day, a federal judge issued an injunction barring her deportation from the US for at least three days until her court proceedings could be examined.

But the next morning, she was shackled at her hands, feet and waist and forcibly removed to her birth Central American nation, a nation which she left at the tender age of seven and of which she has almost no memory.

A Dangerous Country López Was Deported To

Home to about 11 million people, Honduras is a key trafficking routes for narcotics transported from South America to Mexico, and has spent decades grappling with the expanding power of armed gangs that dominate entire neighbourhoods, extort families and recruit young people. The nation's murder rate is three times the world average.

Honduras is also in a political maelstrom, with a knife-edge presidential election of which the ballot tally has dragged on for several days, with officials and experts criticising repeated attempts by the US president, Donald Trump, to sway the electoral process.

“I never thought I would experience this tragedy,” said López, who, since being sent away on 22 November, has been staying at her relatives' house in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second-largest city.

An ‘Blatant Violation’ Says Her Lawyer

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

“Her case is an legally dubious horror show,” said her lawyer, the Massachusetts legal representative, who has defended other notable ICE detainees.

“She received no explanation why she was detained,” added the attorney. “She was shackled like she was a dangerous felon, and then deported to Honduras with no chance to have a legal hearing or even talk to an lawyer,” he continued.

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

Official Response and Juridical Disputes

Trump administration officials repeatedly said the primary target of enforcement actions was dangerous criminals, but – like many others detained by immigration officers – the student had no criminal record. Being undocumented in the US is a civil matter but a administrative violation.

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson said the individual, “an undocumented individual”, 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, a decade ago. She has illegally stayed in the country since.”

Her lawyer said that no one was ever presented with the deportation order, and that even if it exists, a federal law stipulates that arrests in such cases can only take place within a 90-day window after the order is finalized – “not 10 years later,” argued Pomerleau.

“Her mother brought her here because of how terrible the circumstances were in Honduras, where gang members were murdering and threatening people … They arrived just like the Pilgrims 400 years ago, for a better life and to escape persecution,” said the attorney.

Life in the Honduran City

Honduras “faces a significant out-migration issue”, said Elizabeth G Kennedy, a academic who researches returned migrants in Central America. In the past decade, about a fifth of Hondurans have left the country, most heading to the US.

In 2014, when López’s family left Honduras, their home town, San Pedro Sula, was considered the most violent city of the world and their neighbourhood, La Pradera, was one of the most violent.

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

Gang violence takes a particularly heavy toll on women, having been the main driver of femicides in Honduras last year. Teenage girls are particularly affected, making up the majority of female victims of sexual violence.

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

Fighting for Justice and Future

Pomerleau said they are now waiting for an official explanation from the US government to the court as to why the judge's order barring her deportation was not respected.

“There is a chance the government will say: ‘Sorry, we made a mistake here, and we’re going to {bring her back|facilitate her return.’ That would be the easy and reasonable thing to do.

“But 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 said.

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

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

“My desire is to be able to move forward and perhaps resume my education, whether here or by completing my term at the college. And one day, to be able to reunite with my family and my family again,” she expressed.

Her university, the school she was attending in Massachusetts, issued a public comment regarding her situation and saying that “the priority remains on supporting the student and their family”.

“My main goal in the US was always to pursue an education,” said López. “What happened to me isn’t fair, because we came to study and strive, to advance in pursuit of that American dream so many of us dream of.”