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The Lucía López Belloza had not seen her mother and father and two younger sisters since beginning her first semester at a business college near Boston in August. An acquaintance provided her with plane tickets so she could fly home to Austin and surprise them for the holiday gathering.

The 19-year-old business student was already at the boarding gate at Logan Airport when she was told there was an “issue” with her travel documents; when she went to customer service, she was handcuffed and taken into custody by what she understood to be two federal immigration agents.

“I thought: ‘I am going to see my parents for Thanksgiving, and now the shock will be that I am not coming,’” the student said.

She was permitted a phone call to her parents, who immediately reached out to a legal representative. A day later, a U.S. judge issued an injunction barring her deportation from the US for at least three days until her court proceedings could be reviewed.

However the following day, she was shackled at her hands, feet and waist and deported to her birth Central American nation, a country which she departed at the tender age of seven and of which she has scarcely any memory.

A Dangerous Land She Was Sent Back To

A nation home to about eleven million people, Honduras is a primary transit corridors for narcotics transported from South America to its northern neighbor, and has spent decades grappling with the expanding influence of armed gangs that dominate entire neighbourhoods, terrorize families and enlist youths. The country’s murder rate is triple the world average.

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

“It never occurred to me I would experience such an ordeal,” said López, who, since being sent away on November 22nd, has been staying at her grandparents’ home in a major Honduran city, Honduras’s economic hub.

A ‘Blatant Violation’ According to Her Lawyer

Her rapid expulsion – less than two days after she was arrested at the airport – has attracted global attention as one of the clearest examples of reported abuses under Trump’s mass deportation initiative.

“Her case is an legally dubious nightmare,” said her attorney, the Massachusetts Todd Pomerleau, who has represented other high-profile ICE detainees.

“She wasn’t told why she was arrested,” said the attorney. “They restrained her like she was a hardened criminal, and then deported to Honduras with no chance to have a legal hearing or even consult with an attorney,” he added.

“If that isn’t unconstitutional, I don’t know what is,” he said.

Government Response and Legal Disputes

Federal officials repeatedly said the chief focus of arrests and deportations was individuals with serious records, but – like most immigrants apprehended by immigration officers – the student had a clean record. Lacking legal status in the US is not a crime but a administrative violation.

A federal agency representative said the individual, “an illegal alien”, was arrested because she “entered the country in 2014 and an immigration judge issued a removal order from the country in 2015, a decade ago. She has remained unlawfully in the country since.”

Her attorney said that neither she nor he 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 90-day window after the order is finalized – “not a decade after the fact,” argued Pomerleau.

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

Life in San Pedro Sula

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

In that year, when the student's family left Honduras, their home town, this urban center, was considered the murder capital of the world and their neighbourhood, a specific district, was one of the most dangerous.

“The children and families that I have spoken with from there described a overwhelming presence of gangs who forced multiple families to flee,” noted Kennedy.

Gang violence takes a particularly heavy toll on females, having been the main driver of gender-based killings in Honduras recently. Young women are especially vulnerable, making up the largest share of female victims of sexual violence.

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

Fighting for Return and Hope

The student's lawyer said they are now awaiting an official explanation from the American authorities to the judge as to why the judge's order stopping her deportation was ignored.

“It’s possible 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 court order was disobeyed and seek a solution,” he said.

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

The student said she was attempting to stay focused: “I try to be as positive and as resilient as I can.

“My desire is to be able to progress and maybe resume my education, whether here 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.

Babson College, the school she was attending in Massachusetts, issued a public comment regarding her case and saying that “our focus remains on assisting the student and their family”.

“My main goal in the US was always to study,” stated López. “This event to me is unjust, because we came to study and work hard, to move forward in search of that American dream so many of us had.”