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The Lucía López Belloza had been separated from her parents and two little sisters since starting her first semester at Babson College near Boston in the late summer. A family friend gave her plane tickets so she could fly home to her family in Texas and surprise them for the holiday gathering.

The 19-year-old business student was standing at the departure gate at Boston airport when she was told there was an “issue” with her boarding pass; when she reached customer service, she was handcuffed and arrested by what she understood to be two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

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

She was permitted a single call to her parents, who contacted a lawyer. A day later, a U.S. judge issued an emergency order barring her deportation from the US for at least 72 hours until her case could be examined.

But the next morning, she was shackled at her hands, ankles and torso and deported to her birth Central American nation, a nation which she left at the age of seven and of which she has almost no memory.

The Dangerous Country López Was Sent To

Home to about 11 million people, Honduras is a key trafficking routes for drugs transported from the southern continent to Mexico, and has spent many years grappling with the expanding influence of violent cartels that dominate whole districts, extort families and enlist young people. The country’s homicide rate is three times the global average.

Honduras is also in a political maelstrom, with a knife-edge national vote of which the ballot tally has been delayed for days, with officials and analysts condemning efforts by the US president, Donald Trump, to influence the electoral process.

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

An ‘Blatant Violation’ Says Her Lawyer

Her rapid deportation – under two days after she was arrested at the airport – has attracted global attention as one of the starkest cases of alleged violations under Trump’s large-scale removal policy.

“This situation is an unconstitutional nightmare,” said her lawyer, the Boston-based Todd Pomerleau, who has represented other notable ICE detainees.

“She received no explanation why she was arrested,” added 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 lawyer,” he continued.

“If that isn’t a breach of rights, I don’t know what is,” he said.

Government Response and Juridical Contradictions

Trump administration officials repeatedly said the chief focus of arrests and deportations was individuals with serious records, but – like many others detained by immigration officers – the student had a clean record. Lacking legal status in the US is a civil matter but a administrative violation.

A federal agency spokesperson said the individual, “an undocumented individual”, was taken into custody because she “arrived in the country in 2014 and an immigration judge ordered her removed from the country in 2015, over 10 years ago. She has remained unlawfully in the country since.”

Her lawyer said that neither she nor he was ever presented with 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 mum brought her here because of how horrific the conditions were in Honduras, where criminal groups were killing and extorting people … They arrived just like the Pilgrims centuries ago, for a better life and to escape persecution,” said the lawyer.

Life in San Pedro Sula

Honduras “faces a significant out-migration problem”, said Elizabeth G Kennedy, a Soros justice fellow who studies deportees in the region. In the last ten years, about a fifth of Hondurans left the country, the majority heading to the US.

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

“The children and families that I have spoken with from there described a very strong control of criminal organizations who forced many residents to flee,” noted Kennedy.

Organized crime has a devastating impact on females, having been the primary cause of femicides in Honduras recently. Young women are particularly affected, making up the majority of female victims of assault.

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

Pursuing for Return and Future

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

“It’s possible the administration will say: ‘We apologize, 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 alternative stance, and that would necessitate 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”.

The student 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 perhaps resume my education, whether in Honduras or by completing my term at the university. And one day, to be able to see my family and my loved ones again,” she expressed.

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

“My primary objective in the US was always to pursue an education,” stated she. “This event to me isn’t fair, because we went there to learn and strive, to advance in pursuit of that American dream so many of us dream of.”