Adopted in U.S. as Toddler, Salvadoran Is Exiled to a Home He Never Knew

During the good times, Steve Roob flew off to Miami or San Francisco or Chicago any time the mood struck him.

The one destination never on his itinerary back then was this tiny, poor country he left behind when he was adopted as a toddler. Still, all of those trips eventually got him back to El Salvador--but not as an award for frequent-flier miles.

Roob returned to Central America as a criminal deportee. He had been traveling on stolen credit cards that he admits he obtained through computer fraud.

After his arrest earlier this year, Roob expected to be sentenced to a year in a minimum-security prison. Instead, he got a lifetime in exile.

Police discovered that he had never been naturalized as a U.S. citizen and notified immigration officials. They issued a deportation order.

“When I left Houston, I couldn’t believe I was on a plane to El Salvador,” said Roob, 28. “They closed the door, and then it was nothing but Spanish.”

As the plane took off that May morning, Roob became one of more than 7,000 Salvadorans who have been kicked out of the United States during the last five years for committing crimes ranging from murder to drunk driving. They lose their right to stay because of a 1996 law requiring the deportation of noncitizens who are repeat offenders.

Under that law, fraud also is a deportable offense when the amount involved is more than $10,000, Immigration and Naturalization Service spokeswoman Karen Kraushaar said. Before 1996, the amount was $200,000, she said. She refused to comment on Roob’s case specifically.

The law is “tearing up families,” said Robert Foss, a Los Angeles immigration attorney who has counseled scores of clients about deportation. When told of Roob’s situation, he responded, “This is the worst case I have ever heard about.”

Speaks No Spanish, Has No Memories

Roob is unusual both because of the nature of his crime and the fact that he speaks no Spanish and has no known family or memories of life here. As a 2-year-old, he was whisked from a nation headed toward civil war to the suburbs of Cleveland.

He grew up to be a bank clerk with a talent for computers, a taste for Gucci loafers and no interest in the place he was born. A combination of oversights, bad judgment and perhaps more than a touch of arrogance landed the Middlepark High School graduate back in the poverty that fate had allowed him to escape 26 years ago.

“I fear for him since he does not know the culture or language,” his adoptive mother, Sharon Weiss, said in a telephone interview from Ohio. “I feel hopeless, hopeless.”

Roob is living here at a shelter run by a Roman Catholic Church charity and paying his rent by helping out at the local shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe. He cleans the church, assists the gardener and is reconfiguring the parish computer.

He has learned to wash his own clothes by hand and has become accustomed to cold showers. He has even gotten used to seeing police carrying automatic weapons and civilians with handguns tucked into their waistbands.

“There are times that are so depressing,” he said. “There are days when I feel like screaming and crying, but what’s the point?”

Instead, he goes for long walks, exploring the city, and tries to find humor in his situation. “When I first came here,” he said, brushing a lock of dark, wavy hair from his black eyes, “I thought, ‘I’ve never seen so many people who look like me.’ ”

He has not tried to find his biological family. Besides having no idea where to start, he reasons that if they didn’t want him as a baby, why would they want him now that he is a young man in trouble?

His adoptive family has not taken any steps to have the deportation reversed.

“It’s a sad thing that has happened to Steve,” said his mother. “I think the law is very unfair, the way it blankets everyone. But you have got to understand that he has torn a lot of lives apart.”

Weiss would not say why she and her former husband chose to adopt a child from El Salvador. “When we decided to bring Steven into our family, it became a difficult time as soon as he entered,” she recalled.

Those difficulties eventually led to a divorce. His mother remarried, Roob said, “to a man who wouldn’t put me out if I was on fire.”

In all the upheaval, Roob was never naturalized, a relatively simple procedure for adopted children of U.S. citizens.

He lasted only a semester in college. “School has always been boring for me,” he explained.

He next got a job at BankOne Corp., where he learned how credit cards work. “I just wish I didn’t know what I know,” he said. “I know so much about credit cards.”

Five years ago, he bought a computer program that contained names, addresses and telephone numbers. He matched that information with a credit-reporting company’s program that a friend illegally sold him and he became a jet-setter--on other people’s credit.

He took chances, charging clothes at Nieman Marcus on government travel cards that he knew were to be used only for hotels, restaurants, airplane tickets and rental cars. He estimates that he was running up charges of at least $3,000 a month.

He always got away with it but knew there was a paper trail that could lead to him. That was why he did not try to become a citizen when he found out that his naturalization had not been finalized, he said. He did not want to draw attention to himself.

“I knew I wasn’t a U.S. citizen, but I didn’t know I could be deported for what I did,” he said. So he kept living dangerously--and well. “People always knew I had money, but never asked too many questions,” he said.

He kept on the move, living mainly in northern Ohio. He was arrested in Chicago while trying to charge lunch on a credit card that he had reported stolen to get a new card on the same account, he said.

He gave a false name and said he eventually beat the charges, but his fingerprints led police to other outstanding warrants for fraud. Roob said he decided not to fight those charges or the deportation, convinced that he could not win.

“People do bad things,” acknowledged Foss, the lawyer. “But they have to have options to get their lives in order.”

Trying to Find Order in a New Life

Roob is trying to find order in his new life, trading English lessons for Spanish with the other men in his shelter and trying to appreciate the advantages of El Salvador.

“There are some days that are halfway decent,” he said. His biggest accomplishment has been getting an identification card, a process that took a week of visits to government offices.

“I’ve thought about going back to the States illegally, but the truth is I’m too scared,” he said. “I don’t know anything about going through Guatemala and Mexico.”

So, he swings between hope and despair.

“Sometimes, I fool myself into thinking that I’m going back, but I’m not going back,” Roob said. “I’m as miserable as a cat in a bathtub.”