Deported 20 years ago, Brooklyn man’s extraordinary fight to return reaches an end

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.”

Growing up in Crown Heights

Charles arrived legally in the U.S. with his mother and sister in 1983. He was 6 years old. His childhood was filled with relatives and friends who lived in a cluster of NYCHA apartment buildings. In the mornings before school, they’d hang out in the hallways, singing, he said. And on the weekends, they’d attend parties in the building’s scrappy backyards, and cruise up and down the main drag, St. John’s Place.

Then came the arrests: first for attempted robbery as a 16-year-old in 1993, then for attempted second-degree burglary when he was 20. After serving four years in prison for the second conviction, Charles was locked up by immigration authorities. The criminal conviction led the government to strip him of his green card. In 2003, Charles was deported to Guyana — a country he only remembered via blurry memories.

At this…