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Any Lucia López Belloza had not seen her mother and father and two little sisters since beginning her freshman year at a business college near the city of Boston in the late summer. An acquaintance provided her with plane tickets so she could fly home to her family in Texas and give them a surprise for Thanksgiving.

The teenage business student was already at the departure gate at Boston airport when she was told there was an “error” with her travel documents; when she reached the service desk, she was restrained 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 won’t be there,’” López explained.

She was permitted a phone call to her parents, who immediately reached out to a legal representative. A day later, a U.S. judge granted an emergency order barring her deportation from the US for at least 72 hours until her case could be examined.

However the next morning, she was chained at her hands, ankles and torso and forcibly removed to her native Honduras, a nation which she departed at the tender age of seven and of which she has virtually no recollection.

The Dangerous Country López Was Sent Back To

Home to about 11 million people, Honduras is one of the main transit corridors for narcotics transported from South America to Mexico, and has spent many years struggling against the growing power of armed gangs that dominate whole districts, extort families and recruit young people. The country’s murder rate is three times the global average.

Honduras is also in a political maelstrom, with a extremely close national vote of which the ballot tally has been delayed for days, with local politicians and analysts criticising efforts by the American leader, Donald Trump, to sway the electoral process.

“It never occurred to me I would go through this tragedy,” said López, who, since being sent away on November 22nd, has been staying at her grandparents’ home in a major Honduran city, Honduras’s second-largest city.

A ‘Blatant Violation’ Says Legal Counsel

Her lightning-fast expulsion – less than two days after she was arrested at the airport – has attracted global attention as one of the clearest examples of alleged violations under Trump’s large-scale removal initiative.

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

“She received no explanation why she was detained,” said Pomerleau. “She was shackled like she was some type of dangerous felon, and then deported to Honduras with no chance to have a court hearing or even consult with an lawyer,” he added.

“Should this not be considered a breach of rights, I don’t know what is,” Pomerleau concluded.

Official Statement and Juridical Disputes

Federal officials repeatedly said the chief focus of enforcement actions was dangerous criminals, but – like most immigrants detained by immigration officers – López had a clean record. Being undocumented in the US is not a crime but a civil infraction.

A federal agency spokesperson said López, “an undocumented individual”, was arrested because she “arrived in the country in 2014 and an court issued a removal order from the country in 2015, over 10 years ago. She has illegally stayed in the country since.”

Her attorney said that no one was ever presented with the removal order, and that even if it exists, 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,” argued the lawyer.

“Her mum came to the US because of how terrible 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 San Pedro Sula

Honduras “has a significant emigration issue”, said a social science researcher, a academic who researches deportees in Central America. In the last ten years, about a fifth of Hondurans left the country, the majority traveling to the US.

In that year, when the student's family fled Honduras, their home town, this urban center, 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 reported a very strong presence of gangs who compelled multiple families to flee,” said the researcher.

Organized crime takes a particularly heavy toll on females, having been the primary cause of gender-based killings in Honduras last year. Teenage girls are especially vulnerable, making up the majority of victims of sexual violence.

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

Pursuing for Justice and Future

Pomerleau said they are now awaiting an formal response from the American authorities to the judge as to why the emergency order barring 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 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 demand a remedy,” he said.

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

López said she was attempting to stay focused: “I try to be as positive and as strong as I can.

“I want to be able to move forward 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 family and my loved ones again,” she said.

Babson College, the school she was attending in Wellesley, issued a public comment addressing her situation and saying that “the priority remains on supporting the student and their family”.

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