🔗 Share this article

The Lucía López Belloza had not seen her mother and father and two younger sisters since beginning her freshman year at a business college near Boston in August. A generous individual provided her with plane tickets so she could travel back to Austin and surprise them for Thanksgiving.

The teenage business student was already at the departure gate at Boston airport when she was told there was an “issue” with her boarding pass; when she went to customer service, she was restrained and taken into custody by what she believed to be two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

“My thought was: ‘I was travelling to see my parents for Thanksgiving, and now the shock will be that I won’t be there,’” López said.

She was permitted a single call to her parents, who immediately reached out to a lawyer. A day later, a federal judge issued an injunction barring her deportation from the US for at least 72 hours until her case could be reviewed.

However the next morning, she was chained at her hands, feet and waist and deported to her native Honduras, a country which she departed at the tender age of seven and of which she has scarcely any recollection.

The Volatile Country López Was Sent Back To

Home to about 11 million people, Honduras is a primary trafficking routes for drugs moved from the southern continent to Mexico, and has spent decades grappling with the expanding power of armed gangs that dominate entire neighbourhoods, terrorize families and recruit youths. The country’s murder rate is three times the global average.

Honduras is also in a political maelstrom, with a knife-edge presidential election of which the ballot tally has dragged on for days, with officials and analysts condemning efforts by the American leader, Donald Trump, to influence Hondurans’ votes.

“I never thought I would go through such an ordeal,” said López, who, since being sent away on November 22nd, has been staying at her relatives' house in a major Honduran city, Honduras’s second-largest city.

A ‘Unconstitutional Horror Show’ According to Her Lawyer

Her swift deportation – under 48 hours after she was detained at the airport – has attracted global attention as one of the starkest examples of reported abuses under Trump’s large-scale removal initiative.

“This situation is an legally dubious horror show,” said her lawyer, the Massachusetts Todd Pomerleau, who has defended other notable ICE detention cases.

“She wasn’t told why she was detained,” said Pomerleau. “She was shackled like she was some type of hardened criminal, and then sent to Honduras with no chance to have a legal hearing or even consult with an lawyer,” he continued.

“If that isn’t unconstitutional, it is hard to imagine what would be,” he said.

Official Statement and Legal Disputes

Federal officials repeatedly said the primary target of arrests and deportations was individuals with serious records, but – like many others apprehended by ICE agents – López had no criminal record. Being undocumented in the US is not a crime but a administrative violation.

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson said López, “an undocumented individual”, was arrested because she “entered 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 no one was ever shown the removal order, and that even if it exists, a federal law stipulates that apprehensions in such cases can only take place within a three-month period after the order is finalized – “not 10 years later,” argued Pomerleau.

“Her mum came to the US because of how terrible the circumstances were in Honduras, where gang members were murdering and threatening people … They arrived just like the Pilgrims centuries ago, for a brighter future and to escape persecution,” said the attorney.

Life in San Pedro Sula

Honduras “faces a significant out-migration problem”, said a social science researcher, a Soros justice fellow who studies returned migrants in Central America. In the past decade, about a fifth of Hondurans have left the country, most heading to the US.

In 2014, when the student's family fled 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.

“Young people and households that I’ve interviewed from there reported a very strong presence of criminal organizations who compelled multiple families to flee,” said Kennedy.

Organized crime takes a particularly heavy toll on women, having been the primary cause of femicides in Honduras last year. Young women are particularly affected, making up the largest share of victims of assault.

“Now you have a teenager back in a place where the risks are high to be a young woman, who was given no due process rights in the US,” she added.

Fighting for Return and Hope

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

“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 sensible and just thing to do.

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

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

“I want to be able to move forward and perhaps continue my studies, whether here or by completing my semester at the college. And one day, to be able to reunite with my parents and my family 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 family”.

“My main goal in the US was always to study,” said she. “This event to me isn’t fair, because we came to learn and strive, to move forward in search of that promise of opportunity so many of us had.”