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Any Lucía López Belloza had been separated from her mother and father and two younger sisters since starting her freshman year at Babson College near the city of Boston in the late summer. An acquaintance gave her airfare so she could travel back to Austin and give them a surprise for the holiday gathering.

The 19-year-old university student was standing at the departure gate at Boston airport when she was informed there was an “error” with her travel documents; when she went to the service desk, 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 surprise my parents for Thanksgiving, and now the surprise will be that I am not coming,’” the student explained.

She was allowed a phone call to her parents, who contacted a legal representative. A day later, a federal judge issued an injunction barring her deportation from the US for at least 72 hours until her court proceedings could be examined.

But the next morning, she was shackled at her wrists, ankles and waist and deported to her birth Honduras, a country which she left at the tender age of seven and of which she has almost no memory.

A Dangerous Country She Was Sent Back To

A nation home to about eleven million people, Honduras is a primary transit corridors for drugs transported from South America to its northern neighbor, and has spent decades grappling with the expanding influence of armed gangs that control whole districts, terrorize families and enlist young people. The nation's homicide rate is triple the world average.

Honduras is also in a state of political turmoil, with a extremely close national vote of which the vote count has dragged on for several days, with officials and experts condemning efforts by the American leader, Donald Trump, to influence Hondurans’ votes.

“I never thought I would experience such an ordeal,” stated the young woman, who, since being sent away on 22 November, has been residing at her grandparents’ home in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s economic hub.

A ‘Blatant Violation’ According to Her Lawyer

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

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

“She received no explanation why she was arrested,” said the attorney. “She was shackled like she was some type of dangerous felon, and then sent to Honduras with no opportunity to have a court hearing or even talk to an attorney,” he added.

“If that isn’t a breach of rights, it is hard to imagine what would be,” he concluded.

Government Statement and Legal Contradictions

Trump administration officials have stated the primary target of arrests and deportations was individuals with serious records, but – like most immigrants apprehended by ICE agents – López had no criminal record. Lacking legal status in the US is a civil matter but a administrative violation.

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) representative 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, over 10 years ago. She has remained unlawfully in the country since.”

Her attorney said that neither she nor he was ever presented with the removal order, and that even if it does exist, a federal law specifies that arrests in such cases can only take place within a three-month period after the order is finalized – “not 10 years later,” said Pomerleau.

“Her mum brought her here because of how horrific the circumstances were in Honduras, where criminal groups were murdering and threatening people … They came here just like the early settlers centuries ago, for a better life and to escape persecution,” said the lawyer.

Life in the Honduran City

Honduras “faces a significant emigration problem”, said a social science researcher, a academic who studies returned migrants in the region. In the last ten years, about a fifth of Hondurans left the country, the majority traveling to the US.

In 2014, when the student's family left Honduras, their home town, San Pedro Sula, was considered the most violent city of the world and their community, a specific district, was one of the most violent.

“The children and families that I’ve interviewed from there described a overwhelming control of gangs who compelled multiple families to flee,” said Kennedy.

Organized crime takes a particularly heavy toll on women, having been the main driver of gender-based killings in Honduras recently. Teenage girls are particularly affected, making up the largest share of female victims of sexual violence.

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

Fighting for Justice and Future

Pomerleau said they are now waiting for an official explanation from the American authorities to the judge as to why the judge's order barring 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 easy and reasonable thing to do.

“Yet they might have a different approach, and that would necessitate me to make a strong legal case that the court order was disobeyed and demand a remedy,” he explained.

“We’re not stopping until we she is returned”.

The student said she was attempting to keep her mind occupied: “I try to be as optimistic and as resilient as I can.

“I want to be able to progress and perhaps continue my studies, whether here or by finishing my semester at the university. And one day, to be able to reunite with my family and my family again,” she said.

Her university, the institution she was attending in Wellesley, issued a public comment addressing her case and saying that “the priority remains on assisting the individual and their relatives”.

“My main goal in the US was always to pursue an education,” stated she. “What happened to me isn’t fair, because we came to learn and strive, to advance in search of that promise of opportunity so many of us dream of.”