🔗 Share this article

The Lucía López Belloza had been away from her mother and father and two younger sisters since beginning her first semester at a business college near Boston in August. A generous individual gave her plane tickets so she could fly home to Austin and surprise them for Thanksgiving.

The 19-year-old university student was already at the departure gate at Boston airport when she was told there was an “problem” with her travel documents; when she reached customer service, she was handcuffed and arrested by what she understood to be two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

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

She was allowed a single call to her parents, who contacted a lawyer. A day later, a U.S. judge granted an emergency order prohibiting her removal from the US for at least three days until her case could be reviewed.

However the following day, she was shackled at her wrists, feet and waist and expelled to her birth Central American nation, a nation which she departed at the age of seven and of which she has virtually no recollection.

The Volatile Country López Was Deported To

Home to about 11 million people, Honduras is a key transit corridors for drugs moved from the southern continent to its northern neighbor, and has spent decades grappling with the expanding power of violent cartels that dominate whole districts, terrorize families and recruit youths. The nation's murder rate is triple the world average.

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

“I never thought I would go through such an ordeal,” stated the young woman, who, since being sent away on November 22nd, has been staying at her relatives' house in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second-largest city.

An ‘Unconstitutional Horror Show’ Says Her Lawyer

Her swift deportation – less than 48 hours after she was arrested at the airport – has drawn global attention as one of the starkest examples of alleged violations under Trump’s large-scale removal policy.

“Her case is an unconstitutional nightmare,” said her attorney, the Massachusetts Todd Pomerleau, who has defended other notable ICE detainees.

“She received no explanation why she was arrested,” added the attorney. “They restrained her like she was some type of hardened criminal, and then deported to Honduras with no chance to have a legal hearing or even talk to an attorney,” he continued.

“Should this not be considered unconstitutional, I don’t know what is,” Pomerleau concluded.

Official Statement and Legal Disputes

Trump administration officials repeatedly said the primary target of arrests and deportations was dangerous criminals, but – like many others apprehended by immigration officers – López had a clean record. Being undocumented in the US is not a crime but a administrative violation.

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson said the individual, “an undocumented individual”, was taken into custody because she “entered the country in 2014 and an immigration judge ordered her removed from the country in 2015, a decade ago. She has illegally stayed 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 U.S. statute stipulates that apprehensions in such cases can only take place within a three-month period after the order is issued – “not a decade after the fact,” argued Pomerleau.

“Her mum brought her here because of how terrible the circumstances were in Honduras, where criminal groups were killing and extorting people … They arrived just like the Pilgrims 400 years ago, for a brighter future and to escape persecution,” said the lawyer.

Life in the Honduran City

Honduras “has a large out-migration problem”, said Elizabeth G Kennedy, a Soros justice fellow who studies returned migrants in Central America. In the last ten years, about a fifth of Hondurans have left the country, most heading to the US.

In that year, when the student's family fled Honduras, their city, this urban center, was considered the murder capital of the world and their neighbourhood, La Pradera, was one of the most dangerous.

“The children and families that I have spoken with from there reported a very strong control of criminal organizations who forced many residents to leave,” noted Kennedy.

Gang violence has a devastating impact on women, having been the main driver of gender-based killings in Honduras recently. Young women are especially vulnerable, making up the majority of female victims of assault.

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

Fighting for Justice and Hope

Pomerleau said they are now waiting for an official explanation from the US government to the court as to why the judge's order barring her deportation was not respected.

“There is a chance the government will say: ‘We apologize, 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.

“Yet they might have a different approach, and that would necessitate me to make a forceful argument that the judicial ruling was violated and demand a remedy,” he explained.

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

López said she was attempting to keep her mind occupied: “I am trying to be as positive and as resilient as I can.

“I want to be able to progress and perhaps continue my studies, whether in Honduras or by finishing my term at the college. And eventually, to be able to see my parents and my family again,” she said.

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

“My primary objective in the US was always to study,” said López. “What happened to me is unjust, because we went there to learn and work hard, to move forward in search of that promise of opportunity so many of us had.”