Photo: courtesy of the subject
Alma Lopez Diaz was sitting in a waiting room of 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan when an officer came out with one of her son’s wallets and another’s debit card.
She had walked into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office with her sons Josue, 19, an usher at the family’s church, and Jose, 20, a recent high-school graduate, to accompany them on a routine check-in with the authorities. She also brought her youngest son, Mateo, a nonverbal 8-year-old with Moebius syndrome, a neurological disorder, who has seizures and requires constant care.
Alma, 38, was alarmed. It had always been her custom to go as a family to the boys’ ICE appointments since they came from El Salvador in 2016 and after being denied asylum. She didn’t see why they should be targeted now, given neither had a criminal history — not even a school disciplinary record, says their lawyer. In their pastor’s “heartfelt plea” to immigration authorities, he described the brothers in writing as “free from vices.”
Yet at this check-in, the situation was different from in years past. An officer told Alma that Jose and Josue were now detained: “They are not going to be returning.”
Alma corralled Mateo and held the small black-and-orange wallet. She had not even said anything final to her two eldest. The room was full of moms and children. She tried to look behind a curtain through which the brothers had gone, but they were no longer there.
Such scenes have become more common all across America. Donald Trump has struggled to fulfill his campaign promise of deporting millions of people, with a Brookings Institute analysis finding total daily removals below Biden-administration levels. At the same time, the enforcement mechanisms of the new administration have been unleashed, as federal agents make high-profile arrests and triple down on partnerships with local law enforcement.
They are also ensnaring individuals with no criminal records and some who show up at ICE offices as required. Both of those were true for the Trejo Lopez brothers. The check-in can be an easy way for the agency to juice deportation numbers, says Camille Mackler, the CEO of Immigrant ARC, a collaborative of legal-service providers in New York. She also notes that lawyers are seeing more immigrants without criminal histories being detained. “When they can deport, they’re deporting,” she says.
In another merciless aspect of the new deportation regime, immigrants can be at risk even while they seek other forms of relief. The brothers were pursuing green cards under what’s known as Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, granted to those under 21 who have suffered abuse, abandonment, or neglect by a parent. Their father had seen them exactly once since they were toddlers in a brief encounter at a barbecue. In March, after they were detained, New York Family Court found that they had been abandoned and neglected by their father and that it was not in their “best interests” to be returned to El Salvador, according to court filings. Yet they remained in custody.
While there was no guarantee of success, a different administration typically “would have agreed to wait and see what happened with the decision in the case,” says Mackler.
“They’re becoming very aggressive with detaining individuals now,” says Ala Amoachi, the Trejo Lopez brothers’ attorney. Gone are the days when immigrants could mostly expect discretion from federal officials if they lived quiet lives. To make matters more chaotic, the detention decisions are being made “kind of arbitrarily,” she says, “like it really depends on when you check in, who’s the supervisor of the day. You may be picked up. You may not be. You may be given an ankle bracelet.”
Jose and Josue were unlucky. They were now faced with the prospect of returning to a country so foreign to them that their mother told me through a translator, “I don’t know who they would be staying with.”
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The boys were born into poverty in El Salvador: Their father sent hardly enough money to cover milk and diapers, forcing them to rely on nearby family for food, Alma would later write in an affidavit. When the children started school, she began scratching out a living selling chips and soda but was soon being extorted by gang members who threatened violence. Pregnant with Mateo, she and her 10- and 11-year-old boys undertook the long trip to the U.S. in search of asylum. They were apprehended at the border in 2016 and placed in removal proceedings but released into the country.
After arriving in Georgia, they found a close-knit mix of family and community. Jose became an active member of Monte Sinai Lawrenceville, a Christian church, helping with photography and videos for events. His younger brother taught in the flock’s children’s ministry in addition to volunteering as an usher, “always greeting everyone with warmth and a servant’s heart,” Pastor Juan Granados wrote in his letter of support for the brothers.
The asylum claim had been denied not long after arrival, but the family stayed out of custody as appeals continued. They attended regular immigration check-ins and appointments, sometimes seeming to come as often as every few months. Alma and her sons would pray before leaving the house because the family often had close calls. Once, officials asked Alma if a relative could pick up the kids — the understanding was that she was about to be deported. Other times, they were told they had 30 days to leave the country or that the youngest, Mateo, could actually be cared for just as well by doctors in El Salvador. They would talk to a lawyer, file a petition, and keep deportation at bay.
Around the same time, Alma began a long-distance relationship with a childhood friend who lived in New York. In 2024, her boys decided to move in with the man they considered a stepfather, and Alma visited them once a month. The brothers shared a room and worked on securing their immigration status, dutifully logging their new Long Island address with the federal government.
After Trump’s election, they heard rumors about ICE showing up unannounced, so Jose took to peering through the window at loud noises. There were stories about people being detained at their check-ins, and the brothers couldn’t avoid theirs in Manhattan in early March. They actually showed up for their original appointment and were told to go home until two days later because of how crowded it was. But even that preliminary encounter had been unsettling to the boys, if not to their mother: An officer processing their entry into the facility had told them “Good luck.”
Inside the ICE waiting room, Alma says she was told that the officers weren’t going to arrest her, “because I was with Mateo.”
Josue and Jose were soon en route to a federal detention center in Buffalo, where they were given blue uniforms as noncriminal detainees. In the weeks they were there, Josue became something of a tour guide for new arrivals, explaining things and giving ESL classes, says Amoachi. Officers even used the brothers as informal translators. Weeks later, they were transferred on a 16-hour journey to a facility in Louisiana. They were shackled for so long that their lawyer says they recounted phantom pains even after their limbs were released. (ICE did not respond to requests for information about the brothers’ cases or treatment in custody.)
Last Tuesday, they were denied a stay of removal and their deportation was scheduled for that coming Friday, just two weeks shy of when Josue was supposed to attend his high-school graduation ceremony. “Don’t worry about your graduation,” an official talking to him about his mental health said. “Don’t worry about that stuff. Just put your mind to El Salvador. You’re not from here anymore.” Early the next morning, Alma was told that her sons were going to be removed that same day — her birthday.
Still, the young men held out hope even upon being loaded into the plane. Officials had taken a couple people off at the last minute, and the brothers wondered if they could be next. Then the door closed. “Is this really happening?” Jose remembers thinking. “I wanted to cry, but I wasn’t able to.”
Not long after they arrived in San Salvador, people in uniforms called out names, many for detainees with tattoos, including one man the brothers had met in the Louisiana facility who told them there were many things he regretted and that he’d become a Christian a few years earlier. He expected to be sent to CECOT, the now-infamous prison.
When they were finally released, a friend of the family, an older man, was waiting outside the airport and took them to his home. When we spoke a day later, they were still there and were not sure how long they would stay or what else they would do. “We don’t have another place or another family member that we could go,” says Jose, “because all our family is in the U.S.”
They called their mother. At one point, Mateo picked up the phone, connected by video, and saw their faces. “He was literally happy for a minute and then he realized that something was not right,” says Josue. “He started crying.”
The child’s horrified reaction has spread to the rest of the family. In Georgia, Alma set up a GoFundMe for her sons, “Stranded and Seeking Hope.” She says she can’t leave Mateo, a U.S. citizen, behind. That suggests a severed link to the older brothers. “I don’t know what would be the next time that I would be able to see them again,” she says. “It would probably have to be many years.”
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