Lorenzo Charles, born in Guyana and raised in Brooklyn, was deported in 2003 following what he described as a wrongful conviction for attempted burglary.

That should have been the end of Charles’ American story, as it is for so many legal immigrants convicted of crimes and then forcibly removed to the countries of their birth.

But for Charles, it was the start of a 20-year fight to return to Crown Heights — a place that he never stopped thinking of as home. Despite what legal experts told him were multiple insurmountable odds, Charles believed that he could somehow reverse his order of deportation — that through persistence, faith, and legal intervention, he could one day be un-deported.

“When we get deported, it's hard because we don't forget the world we came from, but the world we came from forgets us,” he said. “And then we're trapped in this world that don't wanna own us, or claim us….Every day you wake up in pain. You wake up yearning because it's somewhere you don't want to be, and you're confined there.”

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