It’s been more than six months since brothers Diego and Lizandro Claros Saravia were deported by the Trump administration. Both entered the U.S. as minors in 2009 to reunite with family in Maryland, all having fled violence in El Salvador, one of the most dangerous nations in the world. They eventually settled in as American teens, with Lizando becoming a rising soccer star with a scholarship to North Carolina’s Louisburg College, and Diego graduating high school and going to work at a car shop. They continued to lack legal status but were allowed to stay, so long as they regularly checked in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But things changed when Donald Trump became president:
Under the Obama administration, Lizandro and Diego would have been a low priority for deportation. They had clean records, Diego was employed and Lizandro was getting an education. Donald Trump had been inaugurated seven months earlier, though, escorted by proclamations of securing the border and putting “America First.”
The young men were detained on a Friday and deported by Wednesday. During a press conference that afternoon, Lizandro and Diego’s mother, Lucia, wept in front of cameras. “They have separated my family,” she cried. “We were together, and we were very happy.” Today their rooms remain untouched. Lucia says she becomes too grief-stricken to enter. “I don’t even dare go in their rooms, because those bedrooms give me so much sadness,” she said. “The house is really empty, lonely.” The boys, now living in Nicaragua after a local college heard their stories and offered them a place, talked to Sports Illustrated about their new lives, and missing home:
It’s mid-November in San Marcos, and a ceiling fan circulates the stuffy air in Lizandro’s bedroom. His twin cot lies between his two roommates’ on the ground floor of a Spanish-style villa that houses nine Keiser students.
There’s a half-open suitcase at the foot of Lizandro’s bed, filled with clothes that he hates putting away. Lizandro has no posters on the wall, no pictures on a nightstand. He eschews avoidable reminders of home and of the stereotypical American college life he never got to lead.
“I feel like I’ll never be able to adapt normally if I keep bringing stuff from [home],” Lizandro says. “Like, it’s just going to be harder on me.”
Lizandro and Diego have been at Keiser for three months. They were originally deported back to El Salvador, where they stayed with aunts and an uncle in a small village outside Jucuapa.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Lizandro said. “I feel like in this country, I don’t have a future.”
The U.S. was supposed to be their future. Lizandro had just won a soccer scholarship and expected to go to school in North Carolina, “a pit stop on the road to a high-level Division I program.” Thinking that he was doing right thing by showing that he was being a productive American, Lizandro sent ICE a copy of the scholarship. It probably led to their arrest and eventual removal. “The ICE agents told me they were deporting the kids,” their attorney said at the time, “because Lizandro got into college, and that showed they intended to stay in the U.S.”
If he could do it all over again, Lizandro would not have shown up at the ICE agency back in July, in consideration of his brother more than himself.
“At first I used to blame it on myself ‘cause I was the one who sent that letter, I was the one who was going to college and my brother had nothing to do with it, and just because he was there in the process with me he was also a victim,” says Lizandro, his voice wavering.
“I used to be like, ‘I’m sorry man, I know it was all on me. I know I’m the one who f***ed up. We shouldn’t have went there.’ But later on he was just like, ‘No, we’re brothers and we’re in this together and we’re here together.’”
The two are stuck in a limbo. They were born in El Salvador and spent their teens in America, but Nicaragua is a stranger to them. And because of broken and outdated immigration law, the brothers will most likely be banned from re-entering the U.S. for the next 10 years. “It’s not going to happen in this administration, no matter what,” said Lizandro’s old coach in America, Matt Ney. “You look at a kid like Lizandro. And Diego. And despite the fact that they came here at 10 and 14, despite the fact that they have no criminal record, despite the fact that they have been vital contributors to our community, they were deported. And how is that just? I don’t know.”
It’s been happening all over America at an alarming rate since Trump’s inauguration: people just trying to do their best—with no line for them to get into for legal status—and then getting punished for following ICE’s rules. “I had my whole future planned out in the U.S.,” Lizandro said. “I was going to go to college. Get an education. Go to a lower division for two years and then try to go to a Division I school ... And then I come to a country where, O.K., I finish my education, now what do I do? Where do I go? Where do I get a job? So, yeah, I’m not yet in the process to think about the future, ‘cause I don’t know what’s going to happen.”