College Student Describes ‘Terrifying’ ICE Deportation to Honduras at the Holiday

Any Lucia López Belloza had been separated from her parents and two little sisters since starting her first semester at a business college near the city of Boston in August. A family friend gave her plane tickets so she could fly home to Austin and give them a surprise for the holiday gathering.

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

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

She was allowed a phone call to her parents, who contacted a lawyer. A day later, a federal judge issued an emergency order prohibiting her removal from the US for at least three days until her court proceedings could be examined.

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

The Dangerous Land She Was Deported Back To

Home to about 11 million people, Honduras is one of the main trafficking routes for drugs moved from South America to its northern neighbor, and has spent decades grappling with the expanding influence of armed gangs that dominate whole districts, terrorize families and recruit young people. The nation's murder rate is triple the world average.

Honduras is also in a political maelstrom, with a knife-edge national vote of which the vote count has been delayed for several days, with local politicians and experts criticising repeated attempts by the US president, Donald Trump, to sway Hondurans’ votes.

“It never occurred to me I would experience this tragedy,” said López, who, since being sent away on 22 November, has been staying at her grandparents’ home in a major Honduran city, Honduras’s economic hub.

An ‘Unconstitutional Horror Show’ According to Her Lawyer

Her lightning-fast expulsion – under 48 hours after she was detained at the airport – has attracted international scrutiny as one of the clearest cases of reported violations under Trump’s large-scale removal initiative.

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

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

“If that isn’t a breach of rights, it is hard to imagine what would be,” Pomerleau concluded.

Official Response and Juridical Disputes

Federal officials repeatedly said the chief focus of enforcement actions was dangerous criminals, but – like most immigrants detained by immigration officers – López had a clean record. Lacking legal status in the US is not a crime but a civil infraction.

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson 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, a decade ago. She has illegally stayed in the country since.”

Her attorney said that neither she nor he was ever presented with the deportation order, and that even if it does exist, a U.S. statute specifies 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 mum brought her here because of how horrific the circumstances were in Honduras, where gang members were killing and extorting people … They came here just like the Pilgrims centuries ago, for a better life and to find safety,” said the lawyer.

Conditions in San Pedro Sula

Honduras “faces a significant out-migration issue”, said Elizabeth G Kennedy, a academic who studies returned migrants in Central America. In the last ten years, about a fifth of Hondurans have left the country, the majority heading to the US.

In that year, when López’s family fled Honduras, their home town, San Pedro Sula, was considered the most violent city of the globe and their neighbourhood, a specific district, was one of the most violent.

“Young people and households that I have spoken with from there described a very strong presence of criminal organizations who compelled multiple families to leave,” said Kennedy.

Organized crime has a devastating impact on women, having been the primary cause of femicides in Honduras recently. Teenage girls are particularly affected, making up the majority of female victims of assault.

“Now you have a teenager 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 added.

Fighting for Return and Future

Pomerleau said they are now awaiting an formal response from the American authorities to the court as to why the emergency order barring her deportation was ignored.

“There is a chance the administration will say: ‘Sorry, we erred 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 different approach, and that’s going to require me to make a strong legal case that the judicial ruling was violated and demand a remedy,” he explained.

“We will not cease until we she is returned”.

The student said she was attempting to stay focused: “I try to be as positive and as resilient as I can.

“My desire is to be able to move forward and perhaps continue my studies, whether here or by completing my term at the college. And eventually, to be able to reunite with my parents and my family again,” she expressed.

Babson College, the institution she was attending in Massachusetts, issued a statement regarding her situation and saying that “our focus remains on assisting the individual and their family”.

“My main goal in the US was always to pursue an education,” said López. “What happened to me is unjust, because we went there to study and strive, to move forward in pursuit of that American dream so many of us dream of.”