College Student Recounts ‘Horror Show’ ICE Removal to Her Native Country at Thanksgiving

Any Lucía López Belloza had not seen her mother and father and two little sisters since starting her first semester at Babson College near Boston in the late summer. An acquaintance gave her plane tickets so she could fly home to Austin and surprise them for the holiday gathering.

The teenage university student was standing at the boarding gate at Logan Airport when she was informed there was an “issue” with her boarding pass; when she reached the service desk, she was handcuffed and arrested by what she understood to be two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

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

She was permitted a phone call to her parents, who contacted a legal representative. The next day, a U.S. judge issued an emergency order barring her deportation from the US for at least three days until her case could be reviewed.

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

A Dangerous Country López Was Sent Back To

Home to about eleven million people, Honduras is a primary trafficking routes for drugs transported from the southern continent to Mexico, and has spent decades struggling against the expanding power of armed gangs that dominate whole districts, terrorize families and recruit youths. The nation's homicide rate is triple the world average.

Honduras is also in a state of political turmoil, with a knife-edge presidential election of which the ballot tally has been delayed for days, with local politicians and analysts criticising repeated attempts by the US president, Donald Trump, to sway the electoral process.

“I never thought I would experience such an ordeal,” stated López, who, since being deported on November 22nd, has been residing at her relatives' house in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second-largest city.

A ‘Unconstitutional Horror Show’ According to Her Lawyer

Her lightning-fast deportation – under 48 hours after she was arrested at the airport – has drawn global attention as one of the starkest cases of alleged abuses under Trump’s large-scale removal policy.

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

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

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

Official Response and Legal Disputes

Federal officials repeatedly said the chief focus of enforcement actions 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 civil infraction.

A federal agency representative said López, “an illegal alien”, was arrested because she “entered the country in 2014 and an court 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 cases can only take place within a 90-day window after the order is issued – “not a decade after the fact,” argued Pomerleau.

“Her mother came to the US because of how horrific the conditions were in Honduras, where criminal groups were murdering and threatening people … They arrived just like the Pilgrims centuries ago, for a better life and to find safety,” explained the lawyer.

Conditions in San Pedro Sula

Honduras “has a significant out-migration issue”, said a social science researcher, a academic who researches deportees in the region. In the past decade, about a fifth of Hondurans left the country, most traveling to the US.

In that year, when López’s family fled Honduras, their city, this urban center, was considered the most violent city of the globe and their neighbourhood, a specific district, was one of the most dangerous.

“Young people and households that I have spoken with from there described a overwhelming control of criminal organizations who forced many residents to leave,” said the researcher.

Organized crime takes a particularly heavy toll on women, having been the primary cause of femicides in Honduras recently. Teenage girls are especially vulnerable, making up the largest share of victims of assault.

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

Pursuing for Return and Future

The student's lawyer said they are now waiting for an formal response from the American authorities to the judge as to why the emergency order stopping 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.

“But they might have a alternative stance, and that’s going to require me to make a strong legal case that the judicial ruling was disobeyed and demand a remedy,” he explained.

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

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

“My desire is to be able to move forward and perhaps resume my education, whether here or by completing my term at the university. And eventually, to be able to reunite with my parents and my family again,” she said.

Her university, the school she was attending in Massachusetts, issued a statement addressing her case and saying that “the priority remains on supporting the individual and their family”.

“My primary objective in the US was always to pursue an education,” said she. “This event to me isn’t fair, because we came to learn and work hard, to advance in pursuit of that American dream so many of us had.”