Long Island brothers deported back to El Salvador after routine immigration check-in, had lived in the U.S. for 10 years

Two young men from Central Islip have been deported to El Salvador even though they have lived in the United States much of their lives and contend they had permission to remain here while their immigration cases wound through the system.

Now, they say, they feel like strangers in a land they left as boys and are afraid to go out on the streets in the capital city of San Salvador.

"We feel strange," Jose Alexander Trejo Lopez, 20, said in a Zoom call on Thursday from El Salvador. The United States "is basically what we call home" since he and his brother Josue, 19, came here at ages 11 and 10. In El Salvador "we have no family, we have no one."

The brothers said they had no criminal record, had attended school here and planned to make a life in the United States.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials did not respond to a request for comment.

The boys’ mother, Alma Lopez, is at her home in Georgia with the cap and gown Josue was supposed to wear at his upcoming high school graduation hanging on her wall. The boys spent years living in Georgia and had been living most recently in Central Islip with their stepfather.

"I can’t believe what is happening," Lopez said in Spanish.

Detained on March 14

The brothers were detained by ICE officials in Manhattan on March 14 when they went for a routine check-in for their pending immigration cases, they said. They were transferred to detention facilities in Buffalo, Texas and Louisiana before being put on a plane for El Salvador a week ago, they said.

When their mother left the immigration offices in Manhattan without her two oldest sons that day, "I felt like the world was falling apart," Lopez said. "I was leaving half my life inside there."

Lopez said she believed she was not deported because she was with her youngest son, who is handicapped.

The family crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in 2016 fleeing what they called threats to their mother from the MS-13 gang. They had applications pending with federal immigration agencies to legalize their status, they and their lawyer, Ala Amoachi, of East Islip, said. At one point, Jose Trejo Lopez had a legal work permit, he said.

"They were deeply, deeply assimilated in the country," Amoachi said. "It’s just extremely unjust. They’re basically thrown out of the country like garbage to a place that is foreign to them now."

President Donald Trump has pledged to carry out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history, asserting immigrants in the country illegally are a drain on social services and the economy.

Trejo Lopez said he had been afraid to attend his check-in appointment with ICE in March because he had been hearing stories about immigrants getting detained and deported after attending such meetings. But he and his relatives went anyway.

No valid identification

At the detention center in Buffalo, at one point the brothers were placed in a section with convicted criminals, he said.

"I didn't feel safe," Trejo Lopez said. "The treatment in there is just horrible."

When they were transferred to Louisiana, they spent 16 hours in shackles and went nearly a week wearing the same clothes, he said.

They were sent to El Salvador without their passports and have no official identification, he said. That is part of the reason they don't go out — soldiers on buses and in the streets could put them in the country's notorious jails if they have no ID.

"We are afraid because we have nobody" here, Trejo Lopez said. "The last time we were in this country, it was like nine years ago. ... Now everything is different."

His mother wants her sons to return to the United States "so they can fulfill the dreams they had. We are trusting in God and the lawyer" to bring them back, she said.

Trejo Lopez doesn't think the brothers did anything wrong, he said, since they were brought here as children and have tried to be good students with bright futures.

"At the end of the day, we are humans and we have ... rights," he said.