The family's gang troubles began five years ago, when Jose Ever was 13, Santos was 8 and a third brother, Pablo Michael, was 12. Gang members targeted the eldest for recruitment, and soon they were roughing him up for daring to reject them.
For Santos, a green-eyed boy with a wide face, the attacks began in 2006, when he was 10. He was walking home from school when he encountered four MS-13 members lurking by an overpass. After encircling him, the boys threw him to the ground.
"Then one of them kicked me in the stomach and stepped on my back," he said in an affidavit. "He said me and my brothers were going to be killed unless we joined their gang."
The attacks continued and escalated. Before long the gang started harassing Pablo Michael. "It was really ugly," Santos said in an interview, "because they always hit me." All along, family members say, the gang for some reason had one key goal: to pull Jose Ever into its fold.
One day in May 2007, Jose Ever came home with a bloody lip and black eye. A gang member with a devil tattoo issued a warning: Either he join, or the gang would assail not only him but his brothers and mother.
Two months later Jose Ever was shot in the head. A friend who was present said he recognized the shooter as an MS-13 regular who had bullied Jose Ever. Santos remembers his mother's wails and tears.
The family's nightmare was hardly over. Gang members kept taunting the brothers and pushed their mother to the ground outside her home. It wasn't that the gang wanted them to join; the harassment was retribution for Jose Ever's defiance.
Ominous phone calls came at all hours. "They would threaten me," Maria said in an interview, "tell me they were going to kill us, like they killed my son." She felt powerless. The police did nothing after her son's murder. She had nowhere to go.
So a couple months later, she sent Santos to America, entrusting him to a cousin driving north to the border. (Pablo Michael, then 15, stayed behind because of medical issues related to a childhood head injury.)
As planned, Santos waded across the Rio Grande River and linked up with a woman waiting in Texas. She would spirit him to his aunt in Texas, and the aunt would get him to his father in Maryland. It was Nov. 1, 2007, his first day in America.
But within an hour Border Patrol agents pulled the car over and took Santos into custody. Immigration officers fed him pizza, but Santos says every bed was full at the detention facility, "so they locked me in a bathroom for the night." He was 11, stuck halfway between his mom and dad.
