Any Lucia L\u00f3pez Belloza had not seen her parents and two little sisters since starting her first semester at Babson College, near Boston in August. A family friend gave her plane tickets so she could fly home to Austin and surprise them for Thanksgiving.<\/p>\n
The 19-year-old business student was already at the boarding gate at Boston airport when she was told there was an \u201cerror\u201d with her boarding pass; when she reached customer service, she was handcuffed and arrested by what she believed were two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE<\/a>) agents.<\/p>\n \u201cI thought: \u2018I was travelling to surprise my parents for Thanksgiving, and now the surprise will be that I won\u2019t be there,\u2019\u201d L\u00f3pez told the Guardian.<\/p>\n She was allowed a phone call to her parents, who contacted a lawyer. The next day, a federal judge issued an emergency order barring her removal from the US for at least 72 hours until her case could be reviewed.<\/p>\n But the next morning, she was shackled at her wrists, ankles and waist and deported<\/a> to her native Honduras<\/a>, a country which she left at the age of seven and of which she has virtually no memory.<\/p>\n Home to about 11 million people, Honduras is one of the main trafficking routes for drugs moved from South America to Mexico, and has spent decades grappling with the growing power of armed gangs that control entire neighbourhoods, extort families and recruit young people. The country\u2019s homicide rate<\/a> is three times the global average.<\/p>\n Honduras is also in a political maelstrom, with a knife-edge presidential election of which the vote count has dragged on since Sunday, with local politicians and analysts criticising repeated attempts by the US president, Donald Trump, to influence Hondurans\u2019 votes<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI never thought I would go through this tragedy,\u201d said L\u00f3pez, who, since being deported on 22 November, has been staying at her grandparents\u2019 home in San Pedro Sula, Honduras\u2019s second-largest city.<\/p>\n Her lightning-fast deportation \u2013 less than 48 hours after she was arrested at the airport \u2013 has drawn global attention as one of the starkest examples of alleged abuses under Trump\u2019s mass deportation policy.<\/p>\n \u201cHer case is an unconstitutional horror show,\u201d said her lawyer, the Boston-based Todd Pomerleau, who has represented other high-profile ICE detention cases, including that of the mother of the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt\u2019s nephew<\/a>.<\/p>\n An armed member of the elite gang taskforce on patrol in San Pedro Sula, the city where L\u00f3pez left when she was seven. Photograph: Zuma Press, Inc.\/Alamy<\/p>\n \u201cShe wasn\u2019t told why she was detained,\u201d said Pomerleau. \u201cShe was shackled like she was some type of hardened criminal, and then deported to Honduras with no opportunity to have a court hearing or even talk to an attorney,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n \u201cIf that isn\u2019t unconstitutional, I don\u2019t know what is,\u201d Pomerleau said.<\/p>\n Trump administration officials have repeatedly claimed the chief focus of arrests and deportations was dangerous criminals<\/a>, but \u2013 like most immigrants<\/a> detained by Ice agents \u2013 L\u00f3pez had no criminal record. Being undocumented in the US is not a crime but a civil infraction.<\/p>\n A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson said L\u00f3pez, \u201can illegal alien\u201d, was arrested because she \u201centered the country in 2014 and an immigration judge ordered her removed from the country in 2015, over 10 years ago. She has illegally stayed in the country since.\u201d<\/p>\n Her lawyer said that neither she nor he was ever shown the removal order, and that even if it does exist, a federal law<\/a> stipulates that arrests in such cases can only take place within a 90-day window after the order is issued \u2013 \u201cnot 10 years later,\u201d said Pomerleau.<\/p>\n \u201cHer mum brought her here because of how horrific the circumstances were in Honduras, where gang members were killing and extorting people \u2026 They came here just like the Pilgrims 400 years ago, for a better life and to escape persecution,\u201d said the lawyer.<\/p>\n Honduras \u201chas a large out-migration problem\u201d, said Elizabeth G Kennedy, a social scientist and Soros justice fellow who researches deportees in Central America. In the past decade, about a fifth of Hondurans left the country, most heading to the US.<\/p>\n In 2014, when L\u00f3pez\u2019s family left Honduras, their home town, San Pedro Sula, was considered the murder capital of the world<\/a> and their neighbourhood, La Pradera, was one of the most violent.<\/p>\n \u201cThe children and families that I\u2019ve interviewed from there [La Pradera] reported a very strong presence of gangs who forced multiple families to leave,\u201d said Kennedy.<\/p>\n