These Long Island brothers came to the U.S. as kids. ICE deported them to a country they hardly know.

EL SALVADOR — Brothers Josue and Jose Trejo Lopez spent more than nine years in Georgia and Central Islip living all-American lives: earning high school diplomas, teaching Sunday school, joining the Air Force Junior ROTC, eating New York pizza and staring awestruck at Manhattan skyscrapers. Their slightly accented English is peppered with American slang.

Now, a decade after their mother brought them to the United States as kids, Josue, 20, and Jose, 21, spend most of their time in a small cinderblock house in El Salvador, thousands of miles from their mother, brother, other relatives and friends, in a country where they were born but feel like foreigners.

The brothers returned to El Salvador in shackles last May, grasping only white plastic bags with the clothes and legal documents they had when immigration agents arrested them, along with two Bibles they got at an upstate detention center. Their years growing up in the United States didn’t prevent their deportation, nor did their lack of criminal records, nor a finding from a Suffolk County judge that they should not be sent away.

No one was there to greet them when they landed in El Salvador. After they called their mother for help, their grandmother in Georgia hastily arranged for a childhood friend — a man they had never met — to pick them up from a processing center.

"My brother and I are alone in this country," Jose said as he sat on a weathered burnt-orange sofa under a single light bulb that illuminates their small, tin-roofed living room.

The brothers pray every day, sometimes kneeling together on their living room floor, that God will return them to the American lives they desperately want to resume.

"We feel more American than Salvadoran," Jose said. "I grew up among true Americans, and that’s how I feel."

We feel more American than Salvadoran. I grew up among true Americans, and that's how I feel.

— Jose Trejo Lopez

The Trejo Lopez brothers were swept up as part of an aggressive campaign by the Trump administration to deport millions of people living in the country without legal authorization. The effort has gone well beyond the hardened criminals that administration officials highlight in news releases and television appearances to people like Josue and Jose, who arrived in the United States as children, learned English and integrated themselves into the fabric of their communities — in their schools, churches and neighborhoods.

Nearly three of every four people in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention as of Nov. 30 had no criminal conviction, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which analyzes immigration-related data. Most with a criminal conviction were found guilty of non-violent offenses, other analyses have found.

The Trejo Lopez brothers have never been arrested, court and district attorney records from Suffolk and Nassau counties and Georgia indicate.

Arrested at a routine check-in

They and their mother, Alma Lopez, 38, crossed the border on foot into Texas in 2016, when Josue was 10 and Jose was 11. At the time, El Salvador was gripped by gang violence and had the highest murder rate in the world. One gang member had tried to recruit Jose and another had attempted to extort Lopez, they said.

The day after a Border Patrol agent spotted and detained them, Lopez requested an interview with an asylum officer, and she formally applied for asylum less than five months later, the brothers' East Islip lawyer, Ala Amoachi, said. For years, the three reported for required check-ins with immigration authorities, she said. Jose and Josue — pronounced ho-SWAY — were arrested after they showed up for a routine immigration check-in in Manhattan.

"I did everything right, and I still got punished," Jose said. "It doesn’t make sense at all."

An ICE spokesperson said in a statement, "All aliens in violation of U.S. immigration law may be subject to arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removed from the U.S."

The Trejo Lopez brothers were twice ordered removed from the country, and in 2019, they lost an appeal, leaving them with a standing deportation order, ICE said.

"Once they have exhausted all due process and appeals, the aliens remain subject to a final order of removal from an immigration judge and ICE must carry out that order," the agency said.

Amoachi is pursuing multiple legal avenues to return the brothers to the United States. But their case is now more difficult because they are no longer in the country.

"It’s an uphill battle," Amoachi said.

She said Jose and Josue have had a hard time transitioning as adults to life in a nation they left when they were in elementary school.

"I think they cannot face the reality that they're there," she said. "And I think their entire existence right now hinges on the possibility that they could be returned to the U.S."

Their entire existence right now hinges on the possibility that they could be returned to the U.S.

— Ala Amoachi, lawyer for the Trejo Lopez brothers

The world's highest murder rate

Jose and Josue live on the outskirts of the sprawling San Salvador metropolitan area. Amoachi asked that their exact location not be named to protect them from extortion or robbery that some deportees — assumed to have money because they lived in the United States — face.

Yucca and almond trees dot sidewalks where vendors sell bags of plantain chips and cut papaya, pineapple and cucumber.

A pedestrian walkway leads to a rusting white-metal door that the brothers keep closed and locked, and beyond that is a small area where their clothes dry on metal cords. Before another metal door lies a cloth "Welcome" mat.

Inside, a multicolored hammock stretches the length of their living room, near a television on which the brothers play video games and watch TV. Josue prefers anime, Jose news from CNN, ABC and other U.S. outlets.

"I want to know what’s happening in my country," he said, referring to the United States.

At the back of the house is a single cement sink where they brush their teeth and wash dishes, and where they used to clean clothes by hand until they bought a washing machine using a GoFundMe account that Amoachi put together in the name of their mother shortly after their deportation.

The fundraising campaign — encouraged by clergy — has raised more than $46,000 for appliances, rent and other expenses, and for legal fees if their case goes to a federal appeals court in Georgia. Amoachi said she has been handling the brothers’ case for free since their deportation but is not licensed in Georgia, so they need to hire a lawyer there.

The washing machine stands in what had been an open-air patio but is now covered by a leaky tin roof. The house's owner, a teacher, covered the patio when she lived there and gang violence infested the neighborhood, with dead bodies sometimes discovered on nearby streets. In 2015 and 2016, when the brothers left the country, El Salvador had the world's highest murder rate outside a war zone, according to World Bank data.

Rarely leaving the house

Jose and Josue grew up in San Miguel, a city about 75 miles from where they live now. Their father abandoned them when they were 1 and 2 years old, court documents state. Jose said that when he was about 10, members of the notorious MS-13 gang — which in addition to wreaking havoc throughout El Salvador has been linked to dozens of murders on Long Island — started encouraging him to join.

Separately, the gang "began to extort me," Lopez said in Spanish from her home in Georgia. Lopez owned a small market, and in El Salvador at the time, it was common for gangs to demand "rent" from business owners, threatening violence if they didn't pay.

"They asked me for money I didn't have," Lopez said. She said a friend who sold food and other items at her sons' school was murdered, possibly because he didn't pay his "rent." She feared the same fate for her and her children, and she worried about the pressure on her kids to join a gang.

"Every day we lived in fear," she said. "I made the decision to immigrate to keep them safe."

Violent crime has plummeted since President Nayib Bukele took office in 2019, although human rights organizations say that has come at the cost of severe abuses, including arrests and imprisonment without sufficient evidence or due process.

The brothers are worried the gangs may one day seize control of the neighborhood again, or that, as young men, they may be mistaken for gang members and arrested.

"We have no family here," Jose said. "Anything happens to us, who’s going to do something for us? Nobody."

So they rarely leave the house. And since July, when they do, they do so in pairs, and usually only to one of the small bodegas nearby.

July is when a soldier stopped Josue while he was walking to a store to buy juice.

The soldier requested his national identification card, asked, "Where are you from?" and then let him go, Josue recalled.

Everybody knows everybody in the neighborhood, so, Josue said, he stood out. Residents still stare at the brothers when they go outside, they said.

"We’re still scared," Josue said.

One of the few people they know in the country is a 69-year-old childhood friend of their grandmother's whom they first met when he picked them up from a Salvadoran immigration office after their deportation. The man, José Alfredo Hernández Romero, whom they call Don José — Don is a Spanish title of respect for an older man — is the one who convinced the house’s owner to rent to them. A friend of Don José's occasionally drives them 10 minutes away to a large supermarket, where they stock up on food.

The fear of being stopped on the street is why they're hoping to find jobs working from home for one of the call centers based in San Salvador that looks for English speakers. 

But they also worry that a regular job would hurt their immigration case. Jose said federal officials may ask, "‘Do you have a job?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Oh well, you have roots in that country. You can stay."

When they were in an immigration detention center in Louisiana, a social worker advised Josue: “‘You need to stop thinking about the United States.’"

But Josue said the brothers constantly think about returning. Adapting too much to life in El Salvador is like "we’re turning our back to the United States," Josue said. "We don't want that. We want to go back."

The brothers remain optimistic despite what has so far been a losing legal battle.

Josue said as long as his brother continues to have hope, he can endure the agony of being away from his entire extended family — the last relative in El Salvador, a great-grandfather, died in February — and from the country that he grew to love.

"If he gives up, I’m done," Josue said.

Jose said his faith sustains him.

"Because I'm a Christian, my religion has taught me that I can do everything with Jesus on my side," Jose said. "So that's what keeps me strong."

Jose and Josue were active in their evangelical church in Georgia. Josue taught Sunday school and served as an usher. Jose attended worship services three days a week, projecting images of Bible verses and photos on the wall for the pastors. Their mother sold Salvadoran food in the hallway.

The pair spent more than seven years in Loganville, an ethnically diverse, middle-class suburb about 35 miles from Atlanta.

Josue joined the Junior ROTC at Loganville High School. His hopes of flying an Air Force plane after graduation were dashed when he was told he’d need a green card.

"I was trying to serve the country," Josue said.

A mother worries

Their mother struggled to make ends meet on her Georgia factory salary, with which she had to support Jose, Josue and her other son, Mateo, who was born in the United States and is now 9. He has Moebius syndrome, a condition that causes difficulty speaking and walking.

Not wanting to be a burden on their mother, the brothers traveled in February 2024 to Central Islip to move in with her longtime friend Juan Carlos Mendoza, who had regularly visited the family in Georgia and whom they viewed as the father figure they never had. They saw more opportunities in New York than Georgia and hoped to find jobs on Long Island if they were able to fix their immigration status. In March, Suffolk County Family Court Judge Stuart P. Besen named Mendoza their legal guardian.

If they can return to the United States, they hope to obtain legal work permits. Josue wants to work as a welder. Jose studied informally online to become a Wall Street day trader, and he hopes to pick that up again, or become a mechanic. More than anything, they want to help support their mother.

Mendoza said the brothers "had their minds focused on moving ahead in this country.

"The lives they had here were suddenly cut short," he said in Spanish.

Mendoza, 49, said he feels "total helplessness" — unable to do anything to bring Jose and Josue back to the Central Islip home they shared with him and his two sons.

He said Jose and Josue always treated people with respect, behaved impeccably and "radiated joy toward others." 

"They're excellent people, excellent kids," he said.

Jose wants to return to Long Island to live with Mendoza.

"New York is literally the American dream," he said. "You have a lot of opportunities there. You just need to be smart to take those opportunities."

Josue wants to live wherever Jose does: "I want to keep annoying him," he said with a smile.

Lopez constantly worries about what will happen to her sons as they navigate life in what to them is a foreign land.

"They've never been alone," she said. 

She talks to them each day via video calls, and messages them often, making sure they're OK and giving them advice. She prays to God to watch over them, and for their return.

"There's a great emptiness that I'm not able to endure," Lopez said through tears. "Every day I cry."

'Low-hanging fruit'

Jose and Josue were nervous when they showed up for their March 14 ICE check-in at 26 Federal Plaza, a hulking building in lower Manhattan that includes immigration courts and ICE and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services offices, a place where for decades, immigrants' dreams have been realized — and crushed. Their mother had driven from Georgia with their brother, Mateo, for their appointment.

The brothers had heard about other immigrants who had been arrested when showing up for their check-ins. But they wanted to follow the rules. And not showing up carried the risk of an expedited deportation.

Their fear that something bad could happen was quickly realized. Shortly after their arrival, ICE agents handcuffed them and told them they would be put in deportation proceedings. Their mother was left untouched. Lopez said an ICE agent told her that was because she was with her younger, disabled son.

The brothers were locked up in a detention center near Buffalo for more than a month and a half before their transfer to Louisiana and then Texas. They were shackled and put on a plane loaded with immigrants being deported to El Salvador.

Arresting someone when they show up for a routine ICE check-in was rare until the second Trump administration, said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired professor of immigration law practice at Cornell Law School and co-author of the 22-volume "Immigration Law and Procedure," which is widely cited in immigration court cases.

In past administrations, including during Trump's first term, resources were focused on locating criminals, he said. But immigrants like Jose and Josue are easier to catch, because they had given the government their names and addresses and attended their check-ins.

"Because of this increase in going after the low-hanging fruit, they're not going after as many criminal aliens as they would otherwise," he said. "So we may be missing some of the worst of the worst, as President Trump characterizes them."

Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and resident fellow in law and policy for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, which favors reduced immigration, said federal law has for decades said that people with final orders of removal — which Jose and Josue had — should be put in deportation proceedings, but the statute often wasn’t followed. A law signed by Trump shortly after his inauguration strengthened that requirement and is a key reason there has been a spike in arrests at immigration check-ins and hearings, he said.

Going after the low-hanging fruit, they're not going after as many criminal aliens as they would otherwise.

— Stephen Yale-Loehr, retired professor of immigration law practice

People without criminal records should not automatically be spared from deportation, Arthur said.

"Border security becomes impossible if once you cross over the border into the United States and don't commit any other crimes, you're going to be exempt from removal," he said.

That creates more incentive for migrants to try to cross the border illegally, he said.

Caught in a 'catch-22'

Amoachi said the government was aware when Jose and Josue were deported that they were still seeking to legalize their status through multiple appeals and requests.

Before the brothers' Manhattan ICE appointment, Amoachi had given them documents filed with Suffolk Family Court arguing they were eligible for special immigrant juvenile status — which is for immigrants under 21 abandoned, abused or neglected by parents — and had a case pending. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services requires a family court judge to review a case before it decides whether to approve the special status.

Jose said just before his apprehension, he handed an ICE agent the paperwork, but the agent barely glanced at it before handing it back, saying, “ ‘There’s nothing here.’ "

Twelve days after the brothers’ arrest, Besen, the family court judge, wrote in separate rulings for Jose and Josue "it is not in the child’s best interest to be returned to El Salvador ... because the child’s safety is at risk in El Salvador and there is no possible custodial placement for the child with a suitable caregiver in El Salvador."

On the day of Besen's ruling, Amoachi mailed an application to the federal government for special juvenile status.

The family court ruling is not binding on the citizenship and immigration agency, but in the past the government almost always granted the special status to clients who received such rulings, Amoachi said. The classification "is a humanitarian remedy that's supposed to protect children and prevent them from being removed to countries where they have been abandoned and where they're vulnerable," she said.

Amoachi said Jose and Josue qualify because their father abandoned them when they were toddlers, and they have no family in El Salvador.

The agency finally responded to the special status application in August, after the brothers had been deported. It declared they were not eligible because they must be in the United States when a decision is made and "a review of government records indicates you departed the U.S. on May 7, 2025."

The application for special status has been a catch-22, Amoachi said: ICE refused to take the brothers’ application into account before they were deported, but after deportation, the citizenship and immigration agency denied the application because they had left the country.

"It's creating an impossible situation," she said.

On another front, Amoachi is attempting to reopen the brothers' earlier immigration case, arguing they had been eligible for special juvenile status for years, but an application was never filed. On Jan. 16, the Board of Immigration Appeals denied the motion to reopen, but Amoachi said the brothers plan to appeal that decision in the federal appellate court based in Atlanta with Georgia-based attorneys.

Amoachi also has submitted petitions to allow Jose and Josue to live temporarily in the United States for humanitarian reasons while their legal cases wend through the system. She cited a social worker's evaluation in September that the boys had depression and post-traumatic stress disorder from their detention and deportation and had been "deeply assimilated" in the United States.

'Don't cry'

As Amoachi files documents and awaits decisions, the brothers wait. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger calls to the United States, and video games played remotely with friends, connect them with the United States and provide emotional support.

But mostly they just have each other. They do what they can to lift their spirits.

At midnight on Dec. 9, Jose blasted the traditional birthday song "Las Mañanitas" to celebrate Josue turning 20 and made his brother waffles and chorizo.

The pair said they’ve grown closer as they pray together and recount their lives in the United States — and the milestones they missed after their deportations.

Before his arrest, Josue completed his final credits at his Georgia high school and was set to receive his diploma in May — but he was deported before he could attend the ceremony.

Josue watched the graduation on a livestream from his Salvadoran living room. After he heard his name announced, he started weeping, cradling his head in his brother’s stomach.

"The good thing is that you graduated, bro," Jose says in a video he shot, as he rubbed his brother’s back. "You did it, man. Don’t cry."

Newsday's Bart Jones and Belisa Morillo and NewsdayTV's Ken Buffa contributed to this story.