One family's migration tales

NBC News is sharing a story of two student athlete brothers from El Salvador, who arrived in the US undocumented but went on to success in soccer and school.   Their story illustrates many aspects of the story of migration from El Salvador to the US.   Today these two brothers must live in El Salvador, deported by a Trump administration which did not care about their family ties in the US or the contributions the boys could make to their community. 

NBC's report begins:

In just five days, Diego and Lizandro Claros Saravia went from being promising soccer players with college aspirations to deportees sent to one of the most dangerous countries on earth. 

On Aug. 2, 2017 — despite a campaign by their family, coaches and teammates in suburban Maryland, where they'd attended high school — the brothers were put on a plane back to El Salvador, saying goodbye to the place they had called home for nearly a decade. 

“I felt very sad and devastated because I spent a long time fighting for something — something I deserved. And they took it away from me," Lizandro Claros, 19, said recently in Spanish, referring to the scholarship he'd won to Louisburg College in North Carolina shortly before being deported. 

Their lawyer called it the fastest deportation he’d ever witnessed.

The stories of the rest of Diego and Lizandro's family illustrates many other aspects of the migration process -- a father pushed to migrate by a natural disaster; a mother fleeing gang threats; one family member who will lose TPS next year; a young person with DACA status which Trump seeks to cancel; another family member living undocumented, while one struggles to gain permanent residency. 

What you see in this family is the effort to follow the rules -- of DACA, of TPS, of regular ICE check-ins -- but under Trump and Sessions all those rules are changing.   Just as Diego and Lizandro were suddenly deported despite their regular check-ins with ICE, the other family members face cancellations of DACA and of TPS and of pathways to gain legal status.  For this family, like many other Salvadoran immigrant families, their future is cloudy and uncertain.