Transcript of 866: Watch Out for That Tree

Tom's an accountant. He once said this thing to his kids. It really stuck with him because it summed up so much about his personality and how he handles decisions at work and with his family. He said it's his job to assess risk. It was part of his thinking, even when he planned family vacations. Planning vacations would take him months. He'd get travel guides, check out national parks. He'd look for hidden gems near the parks that they could visit along the way. He'd check the local weather.

To make sure that we know what the average temperatures are during those times of years.

Now, I'm going to ask this question as an accountant's kid. When you had put together the family's plan for the trip, was that done in an Excel spreadsheet?

You know it. Pretty good, I like that.

If I saw that spreadsheet, what would I be seeing?

You'd be seeing from left to right, it has the dates that we're going to where we're going to be.

Also mileage between each spot, hours on the road, places to stay, that thing. Okay, so one year, the plan was to go to Great Basin National Park in Nevada and hike. Whenever the family would go to a national park, they always liked to do at least one really strenuous, difficult hike as part of the trip. On this trip, they decided to climb to the top of Wheeler peak. Tom researched this in advance, of course.

The trail starts 10,000 feet up and you climb 3,000 feet. The one thing that I remember reading was that they said Wheeler is susceptible to changes in weather. So I said, okay. They said, So get out early. So we got out early. We got out around seven o'clock in the morning.

Of course, you check the weather forecast for the day.

And I remember there was a 10% chance of thunderstorms, but later in the afternoon. So I thought, okay, we could get up there by ten o'clock. We could stay till 11: 00, then we could come back down.

And avoid the trouble.

Correct. And so the best laid plans, as we later found out. We headed out on time. It was a beautiful day, probably about in the '70s. Nice little breeze.

His two kids, Marco was 20, Angela, who was 18, sped ahead up the trail as usual. Tom and his wife, Marion, weren't that far behind. They're going up to switchbacks. Just a lovely, perfect day until The two kids get hit by lightning. I don't remember seeing a bolt.

I just remember seeing everything flash white.

This, of course, is Angela. I learned this family story from her when she worked here at our radio show. Basically, she and her brother got to the top of the mountain before their parents. Dark clouds rolled in really fast. Within minutes, it was hailing, the temperature dropped, and there was lightning. The strike which had Angela and Mark wasn't a direct hit. It probably hit some boulders next to them.

What I felt was as if somebody took a bottle and like, slammed it onto my head. I remember my arms flying up as though I was like a puppet and somebody draws the string. And we were like, knocked down.

I remember falling on my butt. And my brother, I mean, he describes it as getting tackled. Just this feeling of being physically overcome rather than an electric current running through your body.

And I mean, we were just freaking out. We were like, what the hell just happened? Screaming, screaming, cursing, cursing.

They run down the mountain towards their parents, just a little ways down the mountain, crouched like turtles, low in some shrubs so they don't get struck by lightning, getting pelted by hail. They have no idea this has happened to their kids.

And Mark and Angel, we were waiting for them to come down, and we're worried as we could see the lightning striking, and you could see it almost like sizzle as it hits the mountain. And we finally I see them coming down the mountain, and I could see the lightning hitting the mountainside really close to where they are. And I'm thinking, Oh, my God, my kids are going to get killed. And that's when I thought, What a mistake I made here. I never planned for this.

Finally, the kids them.

And Marengut says, Thank God you didn't get hit by lightning. And Angel said, Yeah, well, we did.

The kids are shaken up, sore, but no serious injuries. I don't think I was particularly traumatized. Wow. You got hit by lightning. I get traumatized by people who are mean to me.

Lightning's not personal. You know what I mean? It's like the lightning wasn't like, Angela, you're ugly. The lightning was just doing its thing.

Tommy, mom, felt two conflicting feelings. On the one hand, he'd taken precautions, he'd checked the weather, he had a spreadsheet, he knew he had planned as well as he could. But At the same time, he felt a lot of guilt for putting the kids in that situation.

Yeah, I felt very badly about that. For the next couple of weeks, I would wake up at night thinking about what I saw and what happened and the peril I put everybody in.

After this trip, he said, any day he took the family out for a hike.

I would make sure that weather-wise, we were pretty much in the clear. Although, like I said, we were pretty much in the clear for this day, too.

Yeah. How could you be more in the clear than you were that day? You were in the clear. It was 10% chance of rain in the afternoon. It doesn't barely get better than that. That's pretty good.

Yeah. I think the The other thing is when you're on a vacation and you know you're not coming back to this place anytime soon or ever again, I guess you might roll the dice a little bit more.

I know, but you weren't rolling the dice. You had 10% chance of precipitation. I mean, it's funny. I feel like listening to you talk about this, you do seem like you feel like you could have done something, but it really doesn't seem like there's anything you could have done.

That's my Catholic education. You got to be guilty about something. Italian Catholic education, you got to be guilty about something.

Okay, so with respect to everybody's religious education right now, ladies and gentlemen, sometimes you make a plan and random stuff happens that you really could not have anticipated. Today on our program, we have stories of people making very reasonable, very sound plans that emphatically do not work out for them. If somebody As I said, no one expects the Spanish acquisition. From WBEZ Chicago, it's this American Life. I'm Ira Glass.

Stay with us.

This American Life, Act One, Forces Outside Our Control. April was going to be their month. I mean, the April that just passed a couple of months ago. This couple had been waiting years for this. They'd been long distance for an insanely long time, six years. Then they both moved to New York, got married, but he was in school. Now, finally, he was out. They were at that moment as a young couple when you were excited for your life to really kick in. She was pregnant, working full-time as a dentist, just three weeks away from maternity leave. He had finished grad school in December. She was He was 30. Nour and Mahmoud. Our story begins in March.

It was a transitional phase for sure. Mahmoud had just got a job offer, so he was going to start his job. It was like a transition from… Because when Mahmoud was in school, I was the one who was working.

You're supporting the two of you.

Exactly.

And Noor would go to work. I would do all the house stuff. I would cook. Nour would come at 6: 00, 7: 00. We would eat dinner and just like, Riva. Riva.

You know, Riva.

A sitcom from the early 2000s with country music star Riva Mcentire. I know. Very random.

Riva was a show for watching.

No, it's just like an easy, light-hearted fun show.

Wait, and were you making him watch it?

Basically. I choose the Netflix shows that we are going to watch. Yeah, but you liked it.

I mean, it's a background show.

No, No, I mean- Okay, I'm slow playing an important fact about these two people, and maybe it's time to be less coy about that. Mahmoud is Mahmoud Khalil. The thing that interrupted the plan for April, something you might have heard of. In March, he became the test case, the pioneer The very first student protester that the Trump administration detained and tried to deport because of his participation in student protests. There was a video that Noor filmed of officers arresting him in the lobby of the student housing. Maybe you saw this. He's standing by the mailboxes when they put handcuffs on him. That's not...

Okay, he's not resisting. He's giving me his phone, okay? I understand. He's not resisting. You guys really don't need to be doing all the work.

In the video, Mahroud's back is to the camera, and he looks back towards Noor to comfort her, even though he's the one being arrested. It's fine.

It's fine.

He says, It's fine. It's fine. Habibi, it's fine. Noor gets on the phone with a lawyer.

Hi, Amy. Yeah, they just handcuffed him I took him. I don't know what to do. What should I do?

I don't know.

The video got a lot of attention, partly because it was the first video of a student arrested like this. Plane goes officers without a warrant, putting him into an unmarked vehicle, not answering basic questions.

Can we get a name, please? Can we get your name? I understand the lawyer is asking for your name. Over there. We don't give our names. He's saying they don't give their names.

Mahmoud later said it felt like a kidnapping. Part of what was so shocking about it at the time was the fact that Mahmoud Khalil was not here on a student visa or some temporary status. He's a permanent legal resident with a green card, married to a US citizen, the baby on the way. Not the person we thought of as a candidate for deportation at the time. Long, long ago, back in March. Since then, the government has attempted to revoke or terminate the visas of over 6000 students. And Mahmoud Khalil became a symbol. Exhibit A for the aggressive new tactics that the administration is using to crack down on descent. His case will help determine whether the President and Secretary of State have the power to kick somebody out of the country for protesting or anything else they think burns counter to the policy goals of the United States. Here at our show, we started working on a story about Mahmoud back in March, in the early days when he was still in detention. At the time, some of the most powerful people in the country, the President and the Speaker of the House, were calling him an aspiring young terrorist and a mastermind of student violence, a radical, foreign, pro-Hamas student.

It was also cartoonish. It made me wonder what the reality was. Who was this man, Mahmoud Khalil. To figure that out, I teemed up with a reporter, Suzanne Gabber, who covered the Columbia protests and travels in some of the same circles as Mahmoud Khalil and his wife. We interviewed people around Mahmoud Khalil who no one, who described him as a very particular person, somebody who asks a lot of questions, someone who chooses his words with a lot of care. But while he was in detention, the government stopped us and other reporters from interviewing him. He came out in June, and we talked to him finally. The Trump administration and right-wing media were still describing him as a menace to society. On the left, he was seen as a folk hero. But not a lot has been written about who he really is or what it's been like for him to live through this from day to day. His arrest, his detention, his new international notoriety. I'm going to bring Suzanne Gabber on now to present this story with me from this point forward. Hey there, Suz.

Hey. So yeah, like you said, before the arrest, Mahmoud and Nour were at this turning point in their lives, that they'd been planning for for years. And specifically, they were focused on two dates coming up in April, just weeks away. The due date for the new baby, and Mahmoud was about to start a new job. His first job after grad school. In that moment, before all this happened. One of their friends described it nicely to us. Her name's Jasmine Soraya. Mahmoud and Nour suggested we talk to her. She started as Mahmoud's friend. They're both Palestinian. They were at Columbia Grad School together. But then she got close to Nour, too. She was the witness at their wedding. Jasmine and Mahmoud were both involved in the Columbia student protests against the war in Gaza. And Jasmine pointed out that in the months before Mahmoud's arrest, he was winding down his student activism.

And I think me and Noor were like, Okay, now that Mahmoud's graduated, I was like, Oh, Mahmoud's finally going to step into the real world and see what it's the crushing blow of having to work 9: 00 to 5: 00 and not… Sometimes Sometimes she would say things like any wife would. I don't want to make her seem like she's not supportive because she is, but you need to be more present here. And he was. He really was at the end. We were talking about apartment hunting, and we were going to throw her a baby shower. And he was always talking baby stuff after he graduated.

When it comes to getting these big life-changing plans in motion, Nour and Mahmoud seem like they have a pretty equal partnership. They both say, She's the warrior. He's the calm one. She's the organized one. And he's nonchalant, as he puts it.

Do you want to tell them how you procrastinated your British embassy application? Let me tell you that story.

What she's talking about here is something that happened years ago. When he was living in Lebanon and he applied for a job, this is before he came to America. And this turns out to be one of those stories that all couples have, where one partner tells it to prove a perhaps unflattering point about the other partner. The way this came up is that in our interview, Mahmoud mentioned in passing that he procrastinates sometimes. That's when Noor busted out with.

Let me tell you that story. He saw this job and he was like, I need to apply. He kept procrastinating and procrastinating Procrastinating and procrastinating.

And then-Nur freaks out, and that also irritates me. He doesn't let me.

Then it came to the day where he was supposed to put in the application and he missed the deadline.

It was their fault, though.

Okay, please tell me how it was their fault.

What's usually the deadline? It's 11: 59. For that specific job, it was 11: 55. I go to Click Submit, 11: 57, and then they say, Oh, you missed the deadline. I was like…

Of course, I was like, I told you, apply earlier.

In the end, they extended the deadline for everybody. He got the job and worked at it for four years.

So it's March of this year. They're on the cusp of this new life, and Mahmoud gets detained on March eighth. Ice officers flew him from New York to Louisiana. He ended up 1400 miles away in a facility in a remote town called Gina. He lived in a big room 70 ICE detainees, bunk beds, three urinals, three toilets in that same room. No privacy. Lights always on. Norse sent Jasmine to visit him because she was too pregnant to go herself.

He probably wasn't being fully honest with her Which I think anyone wouldn't be, right? You'd want to say, Oh, I'm fine. When I went to see him in Louisiana, I was so worried because he was telling me he wasn't eating. And he was saying he was really cold and he He's not sleeping. Mahmoud's always put together. You can see lots of pictures of him in suits. His hair was a mess, and his skin was peeling. I knew that he has a special shampoo and eczema lotion that he uses on his face, and he just had looked different.

When Mahmoud describes this time, it's nowhere as dark. He was able to call Noor. He talked a lot to his helped other prisoners with their paperwork and cases. Everybody around him says that he was always optimistic about his case. He believed he hadn't done anything wrong, and he trusted that the US is a place with rules and laws. That was definitely not true where he grew up. His childhood was in a refugee camp in Syria. Whereas a teenager, he'd protested the regime of Bushar al-Assad. Two friends of his were disappeared.

At those protests- It's not that the police would come and arrest you. It's that the police would come and kill you. That was the stakes. You're literally walking to your death in these demonstrations.

Do you think that you were so calm when you saw that the White House was tweeting about you because it had been so much more dangerous for you doing activism in Syria when you were young?

I haven't thought about it, but my early years, like growing up in a refugee camp, literally living under bombardment for an extended period of time, that whole experience, I think, made me more We didn't call it resilient.

But it is resilient.

It's not a very healthy resilience, I know.

It's hard to imagine now, but when he was first detained, Mahmoud still thought maybe this wouldn't be a huge disruption. They'd get their lives back, and he'd be out in time for those two dates in April, the start of his new job and the baby's due date.

The job was with Oxfam, the humanitarian aid group, doing policy of the United Nations, focusing specifically on the Middle East and the Palestinian territories. It was exactly the job he'd been working towards for years. He'd worked in Lebanon for a group that ran schools for refugees, taught himself English, did similar work for refugees at the British Embassy, and then got himself into Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. Start date was coming up, April first. When he was arrested, it probably would have been good employee etiquette to contact his future bosses at Oxfam, but he figured that they had heard. He had no talk all the time on the phone when he was in detention. She had access to his email, and he would ask her, Did they email? Did they email? Remember, baby on the way, they were anxious to become a income household. They heard nothing. His start date came and went. Two days later, an email arrived rescending the job offer.

Noor read me the email. That was very, very disappointing.

Mahmoud Noor assumed that if he hadn't been arrested by the Trump administration, he would still have the job. That it would be hard for Oxfam or for any group doing development work to hire somebody that the White House named as a terrorist sympathizer. Oxfam declined our request for an interview about this. It was April third that Mahmoud heard he lost the job. The baby was due April 28th.

Noor told me that she had a deep fear about giving birth alone, and everyone kept telling her, Don't worry, don't worry. Your first baby is usually late. Mahmoud will be out by then. Then she went into labor a week early, April 20th. Immediately, she called Mahmoud's lawyers. It's happening. Try and get him out. They asked for an emergency furlough, which prisons sometimes give in urgent family situations like this. They hoped Mahmoud could fly to New York for just the birth with an ankle monitor and check-ins with the government. They were denied in less than an hour, and they ended up in this situation that they both feared. Nor in a hospital room without him.

He was on the phone, yes. Which also my doctor afterwards, she's like, Every time I saw you talking on the phone, I got so sad. Yeah, he was on the phone, giving moral support as much as he could. I put headphones in, and then, yeah, the headphones were in my ear.

It was 4: 00 AM. Mahmouds crouched on the floor in Louisiana. He's in a room with 70 detainees, and most of them are asleep. So he whispered over the phone.

To me, it was just trying to really picture the room. Noor, is she fine? Because it was a one-way call. No one is answering me. Even when I talk to Noor, I don't know if she can hear it because she's in labor. It felt like talking to the void. But I still would speak supporting words to Nour.

He was trying as best as he could just support like, Oh, you're doing good.

It's happening, Habibdi. Just a little bit more, a little bit more.

At one point, my headphones fell out, so I wasn't hearing him anymore. Obviously, you're pushing, you're in labor. I'm not thinking about like, Oh, let me put the headphones back in. But my mom ended up taking the phone, and he was like, Oh, put her on the phone. My mom's trying to give me the phone so I can listen. I was like, No, I'm dying at this point.

Her mom put the phone close enough to her ear so that she could hear him. Every 45 minutes, the phone line would cut out because the detention center limits the length of phone calls. So he'd call back, hoping they would answer.

A couple of times, they did not answer me because they forgot the phone. It was on the side until they saw that actually it was hung up, and now I'm calling again.

When the baby was finally born, a boy they named Dean, they took the phone and put it to his ear. In Muslim families, the father often recited the Adan, the call to prayer, right after the baby is born, welcoming them into the world. Mahmoud had thought about that moment a lot.

Just like I can't describe it, how important that to me more than religiously, it's culturally, to have the father to call that then. I mean, it's just my first time for him to hear my voice, but that was really difficult. My voice would crack while I'm reciting in Dean's ear.

Yeah, I can't imagine. Was that the most emotional you'd been in detention?

I believe so. I don't think there's words to describe it. The fact that we literally dreamt about this moment for so long. It just felt like very cruel that this happened to us, to have this moment stolen.

Two days later, Noor's mom and sister took her home from the hospital. They went to park the car. She took Dean upstairs.

So when I first came into the apartment, I was by myself. I'm very quiet. And I put him down in his car seat just on the kitchen floor. And we got home around sunset, and the sunset was beautiful. It was like this... I mean, you can see my apartment. There's a lot of sun that comes in, and it was just shining into our apartment. I had this beautiful baby, and then it was just quiet in the apartment. Mahmoud was not there. And it just... That's when it hit me. And then I just started crying. And I'm just looking at Dean and his car, seeing he was sleeping so peacefully. I mean, I was upset. I was so mad. It was not the way I had imagined, and it was not the way that we had talked about. It was a very frustrating day, I think.

So April third, Mahmoud didn't get the new job. April 21st, the baby came, and he wasn't there. He was still in detention, and it wasn't clear when or if he'd get out.

This is as good a spot as any to talk about the charges that were keeping Mahmoud in detention and upending his life. And to talk about the stakes of this case for the whole country. Traditionally, of course, the thing that Mahmoud did, he was part of student protests, would have been seen as being protected by the Constitution. It's part of our right to free speech. But the argument the administration is making in court is that Secretary of State has the power to decide if somebody's presence in the United States undermines US foreign policy and then kick them out of the country. This is based on an immigration law enacted at the height of McCarthyism in the 1950s. The things that the administration believes that Mahmoud Khalil has done that merit getting kicked out of the country that would override his right to free speech, those things actually are not spelled out in the government's filings in the case. But when White House Press Secretary, Caroline Levet, tried explain how Mahmoud undermines US policy at a press conference, she said Mahmoud first came here to study.

And he took advantage of that opportunity, of that privilege, by siding with terrorists, Hamas terrorists who have killed innocent men, women, and children.

This is an individual who organized group protests that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish-American students and made them feel unsafe, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda, flyers with the logo of Hamas.

That is what the behavior and activity that this individual engaged in.

That's what this individual distributed on the campus of Columbia University. The White House has talked about pro-Hamas flyers distributed at some Columbia protests. Did you know about flyers like that?

I did not. I mean, there's absolutely no truth to these allegations at all. Yeah, I would never. I mean, for so many reasons, I would never do that. For so, so many reasons. The protest is about ending the genocide and ending Colombia's complicity in war crimes. That was about it. Why would they bring such flyers? What would it do to the cause?

The administration found a new line of attack on this subject. This summer when Mahmoud did not condemn Hamas in an interview on CNN and another interview on Esra Klein's podcast, saying the question was a distraction and that he condemned the killing of all civilians. The Department of Homeland Security posted in response, Mahmoud Khalil refuses to condemn Hamas because he is a terrorist sympathizer, not because DHS painted him as one. As for the administration's bigger point, that the protests themselves were anti-Semitic, Mahmoud says exactly what so many people say, that it's possible to criticize Israel's actions in Gaza without being either anti-Semitic or aligned with Hamas. One thing that's generally confusing about the administration's argument in all these student deportation cases is this idea that a student protester can somehow undermine US foreign policy. What could that possibly mean? I mean, sure, students were asking the government to change its foreign policy and not keep funding Israel. But urging some policy change is just normal politics in the United States. President Trump did it when he ran for office. That is not undermining any policy. The only clue that the administration has given about what this might mean came in April, when the government submitted to the court a brief memo from the Secretary of State saying that Mahmoud's presence in the United States, quote, undermines US policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States.

But again, No explanation of how this one grad student who is no longer a grad student was achieving that lofty goal. In fact, in immigration court, the administration argued that it should not have to make any argument or explanation or present any evidence at all for how Mahmoud is undermining threatening US foreign policy. The government's lawyers argued that if the Secretary of State says that that's true, then that's that. No discussion needed. That's all that's required to deport him. If the government wins this case, presumably the Secretary of State would be able to declare without any explanation or any proof that lots of other people are deportable. I did reach out to both the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, asking how Mahmoud's actions undermine US foreign policy. The furthest I got was this not very illuminating answer to my from a senior State Department official, As you know, there's ongoing litigation with respect to this matter. However, our position is that the actions of the United States, with respect to Mahmoud Khalil, were correct and necessary and fully supported, both by fact and by law. In May, a federal judge ruled that the law that the government's using to go after Mahmoud is unconstitutionally vague.

And then in June, the judge said that Mahmoud was likely being targeted for deportation by the administration for exercising his First Amendment right to free speech. And he set him free.

Mahmoud flew home to New York June 21st, after 104 days in detention. When Nour and Dean greeted him at the airport, it was only the second time Mahmoud had seen his son in person. The first was in a cold courtroom in Louisiana. And from the moment he returned to New York, there was something new derailing the life he and Noura had planned. His own Fame.

Welcome home, Mahmoud Khalil.

Did you see Mahmoud Khalil.

Mahmoud Khalil. Mahmoud Khalil.

Mahmoud Khalil, back home in New York tonight.

His second day in New York, he was mobbed like the Beatles at a rally near Columbia. Security had to push people back. He gave a speech in front of a church, which his friend Jasmine decided to skip. She went inside the church and took care of Dean.

But I wasn't going to watch him give a speech in front of people. I I don't know. And he was like, Why? And I was like, I don't want to see people looking at you that way. And Mahmoud Challah or Mahmoud Madness or whatever it was.

Does he seem different?

Yeah. He's not focused. This is a weird distraction.

Yeah.

I mean, he's like a finger head. People know who he is. There's a coffee shop near my house, and they have a big picture of Mahmoud on the door. I go there every day. I'm like, Oh, there's Mahmoud on the door. Or I went to Times Square for some ungodly reason, a subway, and it says, Free Mahmoud on one of the subway signs. It's just like, I don't know if he really understands. I couldn't grapple with that idea that everybody knows who he is.

It's just a really strange thing for anybody to have to go through. Is it hard to get your mind around, though, just how well known you are?

I'm still comprehending that, like I said. Maybe I'm trying to push thinking about it. To be honest, I haven't contemplated that as of yet.

His Fame, it annoys me, to be honest.

What do you mean, annoys?

It's just a reminder of how absurd the situation is. He shouldn't be famous. Nobody should know who he is. It doesn't make any sense. And that this reason why Mahmoud's famous is because something absurd happened that never should have happened. It just, yeah. It annoys me. It makes me angry because if he wanted this and voluntarily chose it, great. But to have it forced upon him like that, I don't like it.

Mahmoud's Fame infected everything about their lives. A few weeks after he was released, they were still living in Columbia Student Housing, an apartment they'd have to move out of soon. Mahmoud was supposed to be finding an apartment for them, and he'd been putting it off.

Yeah, I procrastinate a lot. Nour hates that. We need to move in less than two weeks.

Here we are. We don't have an apartment. Are you serious?

Less than two weeks?

Yeah, less than. We need to move at the end of this month.

Can you shop for apartments like normal people right now?

I I have my cap.

And he wears a cap all the time.

Oh, you have a cap like you're in disguise.

Yes, like in disguise.

It was funny. One of the agents was like, I've seen you don't worry. I was like, maybe. I'm not sure.

He played it off really well.

He needs the disguise because there have been so many threats against them, and he's recognized so often when he goes out without it.

When Norwalk's on the street with Baby Dean, people come up to her. One time, a stranger asked, Is that Mahmoud Khalil's son? She didn't know if it was going to be good or bad. It's scary. And mostly, they've avoided leaving the apartment. And when Mahmoud does decide to go outside, It's to go to Washington to spend the day talking to members of Congress or to stand on stage in front of 3,000 people with comedian Rami Yusuf and New York City mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani.

Mr. Mahmoud. This positive side of his fan, the fact that people pay attention to him, seems for now to be deeply outweighed by the negative side. Mahmoud told us that given the choice, he would no question prefer the life that he was lining up for this year, the job at Oxfam, being there for Dean's birth, and not being famous over the life that he's ended up in. Case in point, it is really not clear what job he's going to be able to get. How do you picture what work you're going to be able to get now?

I'm trying to, as much as possible, to postpone having that conversation with myself. Just thinking, Oh, now I can't work for Oxfam or for an organization at the UN. It's scary. We did not have much money before my arrest. Until now, we don't have any money, to be honest.

There are two different cases that are going to determine whether Mahmoud will be deported. One is in federal court and may be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court. The other is an immigration court. That one could be decided in a few months and could result in his expulsion. If it does, the government says it will either send him to Syria, where he was born, but doesn't have citizenship, or to Alger, where he's a citizen but has never lived.

I was at a hearing in immigration court where they talked about where to send him. Four expert witnesses said if he were sent to either place, Mahmoud would be at great risk to be harmed or killed. Probably the most heart-wrenching moment of that hearing happened near the end of the day. Mahmoud said if he were deported, he wanted to go alone. He didn't want to expose Nour and Dean to any extra danger because of him. When he said this in his testimony, I looked over and I could see Nour crying. Later, she told me, This is how he always is, protective of her and his family, now Dean. It's sweet, she said, but sometimes she doesn't agree.

And that's where this interruption in their plans has left them. They don't know if they're going to end up here or abroad, together or apart. They're waiting to see what the new plan for their life is going to be. Coming up, a 16-year-old plans a prank, and a complete stranger from Honduras ends up in a million-dollar deal. What could possibly go wrong with that? That's in a minute. Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. This is American Life, Amara Glass. Today's program, Watch Out For That Tree. Stories of people who carefully, meticulously plan for one future, and then the plans are derailed by forces much bigger than they are. We've arrived at two of our program, Act Two, The Engineer. The plan that goes a kilter in this act is actually a prank, a prank done years ago by a child who has now grown up into an adult. His name is Kieran. As a kid growing up in England, he was obsessed with soccer. His first baby pranks happened on the day that soccer teams in England finished adding new players to their rosters. This always got live TV coverage. Kieran and his friend would head down to where the cameras were set up doing live news spots.

We'd walk over and we'd just stare really blankly into the camera like yokels that hadn't seen technology before. Then we'd rush back and we'd see if anyone had seen it on TV and be like, Oh, my God, who are those freaks in the back? That was us.

But then when they got to middle school age, they got more ambitious with their pranking. They wanted to start a rumor and get it onto their favorite TV channel, Sky Sports News. Kieran says they designed the rumor to be confusing but also plausible. The rumor they made up was that this soccer player, William Gallas, was going to sign with a not very good team, Birmingham.

Like, lower mid table, dowdy old Birmingham. He's on the out, he's old. It could happen. Let's try and just put some calls in.

So these kids, they caught up a hotel in Birmingham and booked a room in the player's name. This player, William Gallas, is French. So Kieran pretended to be a French sports agent with a terrible French It's talking like this.

Can I have a room? He's coming in. My client, William. You cannot tell what it is for. It is for Birmingham.

That task finished. Room is reserved. He caught up the press.

It was as easy as saying to a few papers, I've just heard from my friend who works at the Malmaison, the hotel. Don't take it from me, but apparently William Gallas has booked a room. He's coming in tonight. Then telling Sky Sports, all of this, Oh, my God, my phone has been blowing up. Apparently, William Gallas is going to Birmingham. I've heard it from this guy at this paper. I've heard it from the guy at the hotel. Then the next morning, we're watching Sky Sports news again. There's a flash interview with Alex McLeish, who was the manager at the time, and it's just 10 seconds of, Oh, you've been linked with William Gallas. Do you have anything to say about that?

No, no, nothing in that. I've got two young seven and a half, and it's not the right move for me. I need to spend my money on other positions or spend the club's money on other positions that we really need to improve things.

That was one of the funniest moments of our entire lives. It's just like being just hit by a tsunami. It was just, oh, my God. It was here sat on this floor by this TV yesterday. Today, it is coming out of the TV. That is ridiculously powerful. It's like, if we can do that, what else can we do?

That what else can we do is the plan that they launched into next. A plan that succeeded at a level that stunned these two kids. Okay, so I first heard this story on a podcast I've been listening to, Pablo Tori Finds Out, which I don't know exactly how to describe this. It's an investigative reporting sports show. It's also pretty funny. Anyway, Kieran told the story to Pablo, and then Pablo agreed to adapt it for our show. Here now to tell you this story is Pablo Torre.

At age 16, Kieran Morris was experiencing what can only be described as a puberty of the ego. He was still lightheaded, a little high, off the intoxicating success of his French accent, and now he wanted more. He wanted to go big game hunting, find another soccer player, and engineer an even bigger prank on the global soccer media. The only question was which player they should use. And then, one day in the summer of 2012, the London Olympics happened to be on TV. Honduras versus Morocco.

It's, oh, is there anyone here? Let's look through the squad list. We looked at a few. A few of them had already gone to Europe. A few of them already had a bit of hype around them. But there was a 19-year-old, number 10, making his first waves into the national team. It was fairly dynamic on the day. His name was Alexander López. He hadn't left Honduras. He had a pretty modest but good goal record, a little bit of detail on him. I don't know what it was, but we just fixed our eyes on him. Before we know it, we're at the big boxy computer in the study, going through Wikipedia, juicing it up a little bit with a bit more bio here.

What are you editing on Wikipedia?

Basically, at this point, it's a blank page. A season had just gone by, the '11, '12 season. It had no detail on it. Let's give him some references for a great series of goals in the Honduran League.

So they went in a few times over months, and kept juicing the numbers. Statistically, what are you giving him? What What an upgrade are you giving him?

Eighteen goals, 34 assists, crazy, crazy, crazy figures. If you watch a player do that to your lead, they're an object of fascination. Other people are rising with his tide. He's that talented. The assists I always thought were the flourish.

But from the beginning, the boldest thing they did is something you can still see right now. Forever etched in the Wikipedia history of the page for Olympia midfielder Alexander López, because Kieran Morris went back to add one more line, a nickname, which he placed at the very top.

He is known to Olympia fans as the Honduran Maradona.

Diego Maradona is one of the two or three greatest players in the history of soccer. That sound was him achieving immortality in the 1986 World Cup for Argentina against England. He is also one of its most colorfully reckless characters, to say the least. All of this is to say that Kieran comparing an effectively anonymous soccer player named Alexander Lopes to Diego Maradona was absurd. A real heat check. But for the people who'd never paid attention to soccer in Honduras, meaning pretty much everyone, this nickname was also plausible. And so the next step of Kieran's plan was to call up a newspaper, Rupert Murdoch's London Times. And the persona Kieran invented this time was an eager freelance journalist named Neil Barker. And as soon as Neil Barker heard a human voice on the other line, he pitched that human an item he had just heard about an Olympic-level prospect named Alexander Lopes. Because the Honduran Maradona, Neil Barker said, was signing with Wiggan, a team in the English Premier League based in Greater Manchester. And Neil Barker sounded legit.

Oh, I think he talked a bit like this. It was a bit more Mancunian and a bit more... Yes. So I've heard a little bit about Wiggan signing another Honduran lad. He's playing at the Olympics now. He's called Alexander Lopes. Apparently, it's really good. Two and a half million is what I've heard from the physio.

Oh, you're the physio's friend.

Oh, the physio's friend. You just piece it together like that where it's, oh, a physio's friend could have let that slip. A medical could be happening. Then the times, I remember, I I was on the phone with a guy for 20 minutes, and he was taking down every detail. I think, for the very least, the times when they put it in the paper, they believed it. Then the year afterwards, we saw the news that the Houston Dynamo had paid a million dollars for Alexander López. We just thought, oh, my God. There were the stats on the press release, 18 goals, 34 assists. They had a YouTube clip of him up. The comments of that had, Welcome the Honduran Maradona. We looked at the SB Nation posts and we looked at the Reddit boards, and there it was. We looked away for a second, and this wildfire seemingly had spread through Major League soccer.

I'm now looking at the press release off of houstonDynamoFC. Com, and it says, His record of 18 goals and 34 assists in 51 League Games for Olympia testifies to his creative and goal scoring potential, which feels like you wrote that. But no, this just got aggregated everywhere. You look it up now and it's like, foxnews. Com has a story about this, quoting those numbers. There's this one fan site. They're not just quoting the statistics, Kieran. They're quoting the legend, the nickname that you invented out of nothing. Yeah.

As soon as I saw that press release, I was sat down in my study in the other side of the city where I lived. It's the one where he's holding the shirt and it says Alex10. Got the number 10, Maradona's number, holding it proudly in orange in the sun in Houston. The first thing I did was I made it my laptop background. I put it on the wall like a hunting trophy. I was just like, there we go. There we have it. You're a terror. I know. What a terror you were, are, were, I hope. I think I'm reformed.

The Houston Dynamo signing the Honduran Maradona immediately became Kieran's defining story, because, of course, it did. Kieran Morris told the story of how he pranked this dumb soccer team, these credulous Americans in Texas who were so unfamiliar with his favorite sport that he condamined him into dropping a million dollars on an edited Wikipedia page. And he told this yarn in those terms to anyone and everyone who would listen.

Oh, yeah. I mean, directly led me to jobs, directly led me into what I do today. The magazine job I have today, I pitched doing the Honduran Maradona, the whole run through in my job interview. It's, hire me, I'm precocious. I can take a kid from Central America and make him into a millionaire. What could I do for you?

I like the idea of you bragging about this on dates.

Well, my now fiance, I started going out with Sarah, who will be listening. Hello. At the end of 2014, so nine years, so it was just after school, and so it worked on her years and years ago, nine years ago. She hates every beat, every turn, every single mention of Alexander Lopes because she has heard me pull that routine hundreds of times with hundreds of different people. She rolls her eyes like default. All of this hype around this story that was all tied into this hype I did around myself, never once did I think what has happened to him, what really has happened to him, to his family. And that bit by bit, as I got older, that became a bigger thing in my mind.

Lopes only lasted a few seasons in Houston. Didn't play a lot. And Kieran began to wonder if his prank had been part of the reason things worked out so badly for Alexander Lopes. If he had callously tampered with the life of a promising young soccer player, setting him up for a fall in Houston, giving fans unrealistic expectations, disappointing coaches and teammates. Kieran felt guilty. And so about a decade later, Kieran pitched yet another British newspaper, The Guardian, this time, on the untold backstory of the Honduran Maradona. The true story of what he'd done. This reporting trip, this guilt trip, is what brought Kieran Morris, at long last, to Houston, home of the hapless Dynamo, where he could finally discover what really happened once his million-dollar invention showed up for work. Dynamo management remembered Lopez clearly.

He was a really nice kid when he arrived, and he was fresh-faced and eager. There was a big Spanish-speaking contingent in the club, as there is in the city, and they just helped him settle in and get his fitness up. But what I've heard from speaking with Dom Kenia, who was the manager at the time, was that fitness was, I think, the big obstacle for adapting to the MLS?

I think at first, I think the speed of play and the physicalness of the players, no less, but a little bit different.

He was what he was used to in Honduras. We were expecting a bit more of an attacking presence from him, and I think it took him a little while to get adjusted.

What did they scout, actually? What did they tell you about what they saw themselves in terms of them evaluating him? What did they do?

They flew out and watched games in Ponduras. They put their due diligence in to monitor him and watch videos and all of these things to make sure that this guy was something good.

They took a trip down to Honduras to watch him play for his club, and he passed all the tests for us. It was after that, we set up a meeting with our owners to let them know there's an interest in a Honduran player south of the border as a bright future.

But as the MLS was professionalizing and intensifying, you need to run a lot more. You need to run a lot more. You need to contribute to all sides of the game. You need to be that modern total footballer to an extent.

You need to be a bit more like the Honduran Maradona that was promised, who was, again, like Maradona, one of the fastest and most physical athletes, as well as one of the most infamous. But he's known for his athleticism, his physicality, his speed, also obviously, rampant cocaine use, but as a side note. But the point is that the guy who arrived, he was less than, unsurprisingly, what that fake nickname you made up had suggested.

Exactly. And early doors, I watched, I think it was his first game against New York Red Bulls. And there's a moment he pulls out this amazing pass to, I think, Jason Johnson, and he to make it, I think, one-one with the Dynamo. And there's Lopez. That's what he can do. Lopez Johnson is turning it up. Spectacular goal. Alexander Lopez with a passing gem and a Most ever goal for Jason Johnson. And then the Dynamo get turned over. They lose 4-1. The season generally falls off the rails fairly quickly.

And as Kieran was canvassing the training ground, talking to all these people who work for the Dynamo, he started realizing something important. He discovered that the people he thought were these credulous Americans had actually done the research. They'd taken some international trips to Honduras themselves. It was one thing to write that press release and copy those fake statistics off Wikipedia, which the Dynamo clearly did, but they hadn't outsourced their entire scouting department to some British teenager.

Well, I remember the one that really set me back was speaking to Dom Knaer and I asked him, Have you ever heard the nickname the Honduran Maradona? And he rocks back in his chair and he smiles and he laughs and he goes, I've heard some nicknames in my day, but the first I heard that was from you today. Kieran, I haven't heard that until you said it just now. Like, literally never. Like, okay, check one on that. Chris Canetti, who was the President at the time of Houston Dynamo, he very like, breesily, like breesily, almost offhandedly said, yeah, we heard of that. Yeah, we knew about that at the time of the signing, but didn't make too much of that. I don't think he, not meant it, but I think what he meant by that was we knew there was some hype around him because it was so breesily toughed off. It didn't give me anything like, Oh, yeah, he's heard it. And then nick Calba, the Assistant GM, was just as clear as anything. Nope. Yeah, you get the Honduran Messi, you get the Whatever. So I don't really take stock in somebody's nickname, to be honest.

Even if we did hear it, we wouldn't care because those nicknames don't matter to us in the professional soccer industry.

What you're thinking as your life, the story you tell yourself about yourself, is just being dismissed as just obviously unserious. Of course, we don't give a shit about that. That's just a thing someone says. When they tell you that the legend doesn't even matter to them who made the decision, what's going through your head?

I think the first thought was that I'm a long way from home, that I have got this far, what 12 hours flight over FaceTime with sports executives who've taken time out of their day to speak to me and just thinking, Oh, God, why did I even lift under the rock with this one. I could have just kept on not bothering the story, leaving the ghosts to rest and all of that. And I didn't. And I picked at the scab too much. And now it's all coming out. Now I'm seeing it. Now I'm in the room with the adults, the adults who made the decisions, the proper people who weren't just spinning yarns and telling stories and smoking areas and all of that with the actual people doing their job. To think that I've been entertaining the idea that one day they opened up their laptops while they were watching the Olympics just as I was and thought, oh, look at all these goals and assists. Chris, go get your checkbook. When you see it all now.

Just, Kieran, what a literal child's version of how sports works. But there was one more thing that Kieran had to do now that he was telling the true story of the Honduran Maradona. And it was simple. Kieran Morris needed to come clean to Alexander Lopes himself. No, Kieran hadn't ruined Lopes' life, it turned out. But he tried to mess with it, did his best, gave him that absurd nickname without ever really thinking through the consequences. So this was a weird confession. Lopes was now playing for a team in Costa Rica. Kieran found his agent He calmed his own nerves, and without explaining to the agent why he kept on insisting on interviewing Alexander Lopez in person, Kieran got on a plane. One day, at a Costa Rican Hilton, the Honduran Maradona walked in.

We shook hands. It was journalist and subject, sit down, interpreter in the middle. Kieran Morris speaking.

Iliana Castillo, the translator.

Alec Lopes.

Alec Lopes.

El jugador.

They talk through his career Lopes had no bad memories of Houston. He had a rough time on a Saudi Arabian team for a while, but quit that contract, went to Honduras.

And that run back in Honduras, he was banging in the goals. He was winning trophies. He was all free-flowing goal scoring number 10 in Honduras. He finally had the record that we he had made up for him when he was 19. He was at 24 or whatever he was then. He was ripping up the Honduran League.

After stalling for as long as he could with details about Lopes' career, Kieran started edging up to the reason he was even there. Had Lopes ever heard of this nickname, the Honduran Maradona?

He had. He absolutely had. He had heard it, but he thought it was just a fun, silly nickname made up by the fans.

The surname came along simply because a lot of newspapers and journalists were talking about it, and they would say that I was like a young Maradona. I had the same skills that Maradona had when he was that age, too. I know that, but of course, we all know that Maradona, what he was, really. It's just that.

That was about as far as it went. There was a split second where I thought, shake hands and let him go. Tiniest split second. But I don't know what dragged me out of that. I can hear it on the interview tape. Those first stutters like, Excuse me, before you go- One thing, one more thing while I'm here and while I have Then I've already rehearsed the spiel with the interpreter. She's not cool.

I feel so awkward imagining this.

Beat for beat, I'll do one-tenth of the story, and then I'll pause, and then she'll do it in Spanish. When you were linked with Wiggan, I had changed Wikipedia around. I had called the papers. Then I will do the next bit and the next bit. Then it's all of those moments where I know I'm talking and he's not reacting. But then I just sit back and watch his reaction. I'm studying him while I'm waiting to say something again. I just keep talking and talking and talking. Ten years ago, I invented the name the Honduran Maradona.

. It's me. And he starts laughing.

Then I'm like, That could mean a multitude of things. But he thought it was funny and benign and inconsequential and saw it for what it was, which was nothing.

.

When my agent told me a journalist wanted to do an interview, I was like, Why?

But now I get it. How does he feel about using that nickname, the Hunder and Maradona? Does he embrace it? What's his feeling on that?

He was very old school about it. He was like, Oh, no, no, no. There's only one Maradona. But he's got a better nickname now. He's the engineer, El Ingeniero, as they call him, and his mom loves it. I think his brother actually is an engineer, so it's cool for them. The fans gave it him, which is how nick names should work. It sums him up. He dictates play from the middle of the field. He's crafty, he's intelligent. It's who he is, and it wasn't randomly made up by a child.

That nickname, the Engineer, is so perfect. It's so perfect because Kieran thought he was the engineer rerouting Alexander Lopez's life. But he wasn't. This entire time, Alexander Lopez had been engineering Alexander Lopes' trajectory. Because of course he was through all the ups and downs, which meant that the legend that Kieran had most invented was his own.

Dead right. Dead right. And This is what it's a story of. It's a story of a kid who just took something way, way, way, way, way Kieran Morris, thank you for coming clean about who you actually are. It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. I'm closer to knowing.

That story was adapted from the podcast Pablo Tori Finds Out, which Pablo likes to say, is a show about sports, the way Moneyball is a book about baseball. I've been enjoying it. He just had a big story this week about salary caps in Kauai Leonard that made national headlines. Thanks also to his producer Chris Tuminello.

Even though death may plan, Our program is produced today by Lily Sullivan, with help from Suzanne Gabber.

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I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American life.