🔗 Share this article

The Lucía López Belloza had been separated from her parents and two little sisters since starting her freshman year at Babson College near Boston in the late summer. A generous individual gave her plane tickets so she could travel back to Austin and surprise them for the holiday gathering.

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

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

She was allowed a single call to her parents, who immediately reached out to a legal representative. A day later, a U.S. judge granted an emergency order prohibiting her deportation from the US for at least three days until her court proceedings could be reviewed.

But the next morning, she was chained at her hands, feet and torso and forcibly removed to her native Honduras, a country which she left at the age of seven and of which she has scarcely any recollection.

A Volatile Country She Was Deported To

A nation home to about eleven million people, Honduras is one of the main trafficking routes for drugs transported from South America to Mexico, and has spent decades struggling against the growing influence of violent cartels that control entire neighbourhoods, terrorize 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 extremely close national vote of which the vote count has dragged on for several days, with officials and analysts criticising efforts by the US president, Donald Trump, to sway the electoral process.

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

A ‘Blatant Violation’ Says Her Lawyer

Her lightning-fast expulsion – under two days after she was arrested at the airport – has drawn global attention as one of the starkest cases of reported abuses under Trump’s large-scale removal policy.

“Her case is an unconstitutional nightmare,” said her lawyer, the Boston-based legal representative, who has represented other notable ICE detention cases.

“She received no explanation why she was detained,” added Pomerleau. “They restrained her like she was a hardened criminal, and then sent to Honduras with no chance to have a legal hearing or even talk to an attorney,” he continued.

“Should this not be considered a breach of rights, it is hard to imagine what would be,” he said.

Government Statement and Juridical Contradictions

Trump administration officials repeatedly said the chief focus of arrests and deportations was dangerous criminals, but – like most immigrants apprehended by immigration officers – the student had no criminal record. Lacking legal status in the US is not a crime but a administrative violation.

A federal agency representative said López, “an undocumented individual”, was arrested 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 attorney said that no one was ever presented with the deportation order, and that even if it does exist, a U.S. statute stipulates that arrests in such instances can only take place within a 90-day window after the order is issued – “not a decade after the fact,” said the lawyer.

“Her mum brought her here because of how terrible the circumstances were in Honduras, where criminal groups were murdering and threatening people … They arrived just like the early settlers centuries ago, for a better life and to find safety,” explained the attorney.

Life in the Honduran City

Honduras “faces a large out-migration issue”, said a social science researcher, a Soros justice fellow who studies returned migrants in Central America. In the last ten years, about a fifth of Hondurans left the country, the majority traveling to the US.

In 2014, when López’s family fled Honduras, their city, San Pedro Sula, was considered the most violent city of the globe and their community, La Pradera, was one of the most dangerous.

“The children and families that I have spoken with from there reported a overwhelming control of criminal organizations who compelled many residents to flee,” noted Kennedy.

Gang violence has a devastating impact on females, having been the primary cause of gender-based killings in Honduras recently. Teenage girls are especially vulnerable, making up the largest share of victims of assault.

“And now you have a young woman back in a country where the risks are high to be a young woman, who was given no legal recourse in the US,” she stated.

Pursuing for Return and Future

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

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

“Yet they might have a different approach, and that’s going to require me to make a strong legal case that the judicial ruling was violated and seek a solution,” he said.

“We’re not stopping until we get her back”.

The student said she was trying to stay focused: “I am trying to be as optimistic and as strong as I can.

“I want to be able to progress and perhaps resume my education, whether here or by completing my semester at the college. 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 situation and saying that “our focus remains on assisting the individual and their family”.

“My main goal in the US was always to study,” said López. “What happened to me is unjust, because we came to study and work hard, to advance in pursuit of that promise of opportunity so many of us dream of.”