This American Life - 866: Watch Out for That Tree

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

Small human plans that run into much larger obstacles. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.Prologue: Angela's dad, an accountant, made a spreadsheet to prepare for their family trip to a national park. But there are things you never think to put in a spreadsheet. (7 minutes)Act One: A young couple, excited to start a new chapter in their lives, is suddenly put on a very different trajectory. (30 minutes)Act Two: A sixteen-year-old plans out a prank, and a complete stranger from Honduras ends up in a million-dollar deal. What could go wrong? (25 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.

Tom's an accountant, and he once said this thing to his kids that 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. Planned 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 would put together the family's plan for the trip, was that done in an Excel spreadsheet? You know it. Pretty good on it. I like that. And so 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, you know, where we're going to be. And also mileage between each spot, hours on the road, places to stay, that kind of thing. Okay, so one year the plan was to go to Great Basin National Park in Nevada, and hike. And whenever the family would go to a national park, they always like to do at least one really strenuous, difficult hike as part of the trip. And on this trip, they decided to climb to the top of Wheeler Peak. Tom researched this in advance, of course. And 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 7 o'clock in the morning. Of course, you checked 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 10 o'clock, we could stay to 11, and we could come back down. And avoid the trouble. Correct. And so, you know, 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 new 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. And they're going up with the sweet. Which backs, 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. And 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 hit Angelo 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 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 like falling on my butt. And my brother, I mean, he describes it as getting tackled. just this feeling of being like physically overcome rather than like 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

who are 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 that it happened to their kids and Mark and Angel we were waiting for them to come down And, you know, we're worried as we could see the lightning striking and you could see it almost like sizzles it hits the mountain.

And we finally 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, you know, I never planned for this. Finally, the kids reached them. And Marion gets, 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 went, like, you got hit by lightning. I get traumatized by people who, like, are mean to me. Like, 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, very badly about that. And for the next couple 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 is 10% chance of rain in the afternoon like it doesn't barely get better than that that's pretty good yeah and I think 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 like you have 10 percent chance of precipitation.

I mean, it's funny. I feel like you do, like, listening to you talk about this, like, 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've got to be guilty about something, right? Italian Catholic education, yeah, you've got to be guilty about something. Okay, so with respect to everything.

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. As somebody once said, no one expects the Spanish acquisition. From WBC Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. This message comes from Wise, the app for using money around the globe. When you manage your money with Wise, you'll always get the mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Join millions of customers and visit Wise.com.

It's rare to find a podcast that can actually change your life. But when the show is called Life Kit, that's... Kind of the whole point. I'm Mariel Segarra. Three times a week on the Life Kit podcast, we guide you through a topic we could all use help with, from personal development to healthy living to managing your dinero, with takeaways so you can start living what you learn right away.

Escouche a Life Kit podcast from NPR. This American Life, Act 1, forces outside our control. April was going to be their month. I mean, the April that just passed a couple months ago. though. This couple have been waiting years for this. They've 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. And they were at that moment as a young couple when you're 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 to finish grad school in December. She was 28. He was 30. Noor and Mahmoud Australia 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 And it was kind of 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 So I would do like all the house stuff I would cook Noor would come like at 6, 7

Who would eat dinner and just like Riva. You know, Riba, sitcom from the early 2000s with country music star Riba McIntyre. I know, very random. Yeah, Riebo was a show for watching. No, it's just like an easy, lighthearted, fun show.

Wait, and when you're making him watch it? Basically. I choose the Netflix shows that we are going to watch. So, yeah, but you liked it. I mean, it's a background, like, show. Okay, I'm kind of slow playing an important fact about these two people, and maybe it's time to be less coy about that. Mahmood is Mahmood Khalil.

And 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 Norfilm of officers arresting him in the lobby of the student housing.

Maybe you saw this. He's standing right. by the mailboxes when they put handcuffs on him. Let's not. Okay, he's not resisting. He's giving me his phone, okay? He's not, I understand. He's not resisting.

You guys really don't need to be doing all the back. Like... In the video, Maherud's back as to the camera, and he looks back towards Norr, 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. Nor gets on the phone with a lawyer.

Hi, Amy. Um, yeah, they just like, Yeah, they just like handcuffed them and 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. Plank goes officers without a warrant, putting them 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.

He's saying they don't give their names. Mahmoo later said it felt like a kidnapping. Part of what was so shocking about it at the time was the fact that Mahmu Khalil was not here on a student visa or some kind of temporary status. He's a permanent legal resident with a green cart, married to a U.S. citizen, the baby on the way. Not the kind of 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 try and

to revoke or terminate the visas of over 6,000 students. And Mahmoud Khalil became a symbol, Exhibit A for the aggressive new tactics that the administration is using to crack down on dissent. His case will help determine whether the president and secretary of state or the power to kick somebody out of the country for protesting. Over 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-Khamas student. There's also cartoonish. It made me wonder what the reality was. Who was this man, Mahmou Khalil? And to figure that out, I teamed up with a reporter, Suzanne Gabber, who covered the Columbia protests and travels in some of the same circles as Mahmou Khalil and his wife.

And we interviewed people around Mahmuh Khalil, who know him, who described him as a very particular kind of 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 kind of a folk hero. But not a lot has been written about who he ruled, really is. What it's been like for him to live through this from day to day. His arrest, his detention, his new international notoriety. And I'm going to bring Suzanne Gabber on now to present this story with me from this point forward. Hey there, Suez. Hey, so yeah, like you said, before the arrest, Mahmoud and Noor 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 Mahmood, 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 Noor 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 Noor, 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 sort of like, okay, now that Mahmoud's graduated, and I was like, oh, Mahmoud's finally going to step into the real world and, like, see what it's the crushing blow of having to work 9 to 5 and not, you know. So sometimes she would say things like, you know, like any wife would. And I don't want to make her seem like she's not supportive because she is. But like, you know, you know, you know, you know, need to be more present here. And he was. He really was at the end. Like, we were talking about apartment hunting and we were going to throw her a baby shower and he was always like talking baby stuff after he graduated. When it comes to getting these big life-changing plans in motion,

Noor and Mahmood 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. And the way this came up is that in our interview, Mahmoud mentioned in passing that he procrastinates sometimes.

And that's when Norr busted out with. Let me tell you that story. He saw this job and he was like, I need to apply. And he kept procrastinating and procrastinating and procrastinating. And Nur freaks out, and that also irritates me. And 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 that time.

It's like 1159. For that specific job, it was 1155. So I go to click submit. like 1157, and then they say, oh, like, you missed the deadline. And I was like... And 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 Mahmul gets detained on March 8th. Ice officers. flew him from New York to Louisiana. He ended up 1,400 miles away in a facility in a remote town called Gina. He lived in a big room with 70 ICE detainees, bunk beds, three urinals,

three toilets, three toilets in that same room. No privacy. Lights always on. Norr 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, like, oh, I'm fine, I'm fine. Like when I went to see him in Louisiana, I was like so worried because he was telling me he wasn't eating and he was saying he was really cold and he wasn't sleeping.

You know, Mahmoud's always put together. Like you can see lots of pictures of him in suits and his hair was like a mess and his skin was kind of peeling and I knew that he has like a special shampoo and sort of eczema lotion that he uses on his face. and he just had, like, looked different. When Mahmoud describes his time, it's nowhere is dark. He was able to call Nor. He talked a lot to his lawyers, helped other prisoners with their paperwork and cases. And 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 U.S. 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 Bashar 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, like, 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, like, living under bombardment for an extended period of time, that whole experience, I think, made me more, I wouldn't call it. resilient. It's just... But it is resilient. That is...

Yeah, I mean, yeah. It's not 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.

To start of his new job, and the babies 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 kind of 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. The start date was coming up, April 1st, and 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 talked all the time on the phone

when he was in detention, and she had access to his email, and he would ask her, did they email? Did the email? Remember, baby on the way, they were anxious to become a two-income household. They heard nothing. His start date, came, and went.

And two days later, an email arrived, rescinding the job offer. Noor read me the email. That was very, very disappointing. Mahmoud Nour 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 3rd 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 them 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 like moral support as much as he could. I put headphones in, and then, yeah, the headphones were in my ear. It was 4 a.m. Mahm. 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. And to me, it's just like, to me was just trying to really picture the room. Noor, is she fine?

Because it was like a one-way call. Like, no one is answering me, like, even when I talk to Noor. I don't know if she can't hear it because, like, you know, she's in labor. So it felt like talking, like, to the void. But, like, I still would. speak, supporting words to Noor. He was trying, you know, the best as best as he could. Just like support, like, oh, you're doing good.

You know, it's happening, Habibti. Like, just a little bit more, a little bit more. At one point, like, my headphones fell out, so I wasn't hearing him anymore. And obviously, you're, like, pushing her in labor. I'm not thinking about, like, oh, let me put the headphone back in. But my mom ended up taking the phone, and he was like, oh, like, put her on the phone. And I'm like, my mom's, like, trying to give me the phone. phone so I can like listen and I was like no like I'm like 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 like because they forgot the phone like it was on the side until they saw that like actually you know 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 recite 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.

Like, just like I can't describe it, how important that to me. More than religiously, it's culturally, like, to have the father to call that then. I mean, it's just, like, my first time for him to hear my voice. But that was, like, really difficult. Like, my voice would crack, like, while I'm reciting in Dean's year. 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, like to have this moment stolen. Two days later, Nor'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, like, you know, like, I, like, put him down in his car seat just on the kitchen floor. And it was, we got home around, like, sunset, and the sunset was, like beautiful. It was like this, I mean, you can see my apartment. There's a lot of like sun that comes in and it was just like shining like into our apartment. I had this beautiful baby. And then it was just quiet in the apartment. Mahmoud was not there. And it just kind of like, that's when it hit me. And then I just started crying. And I'm just looking at Dean and his car. See he was sleeping like so peacefully. I mean, I was, 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.

So it was a very frustrating day, I think. So April 3rd, 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 Mahmood in detention, end upending his life. And I'll talk about the stakes of this case for the whole country. Traditionally, of course, the kind of 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 the Secretary of State has the power to decide that somebody's presence in the United States undermines U.S. 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. And 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,

Carolyn Levitt, tried to explain how Mahmood undermines U.S. policy at a press conference, she said, Mahmood 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 The White House has talked about pro-Kalmas 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, like at all. Yeah, I would never, I mean, for so many reasons, I would never do that, like, 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 Khamas in an interview on CNN and another interview on Ezra 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, quote, Mahmoud Khalil refuses to condemn Khamas 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. Mahmurz is 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 U.S. foreign policy. Like, 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 is 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 U.S. 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 kind of argument or explanation or present any evidence at all for how Mahmoud is undermining U.S. 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, the lots of other people are deportable. I did reach out to both the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department asking how Mahmood's actions undermine U.S. foreign policy. The furthest I got was this not very illuminating answer to my question from a senior State Department official, quote, But 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 like. 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 Noor 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 Noor had planned, his own fame. Welcome home, Macmoot Khalil. Mahmoud Khalil. Mahmoud Khalil. Mahmoud Khalil back home in New York tonight. His second day in New York, he was mob like the Beatles at a rally near Colombia.

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 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 Chala or Mahmoud Madness or whatever it was.

Does he seem different? Yeah. He's not focused. This is a weird distraction. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, he's like a finger. People know who he is. Like, I, there's a coffee shop near my house and they have, like, a big picture of Mahmoud on the

door. It's like, go there every day. I'm like, oh, there's Mahmoud on the door. Or, like, I went to Times Square for some ungodly reason in the subway, and it's for you Mahmoud on one of the subway signs. It's just, like, I don't know if he really understood. Like, 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 like how well-known you are? I'm still, I'm still comprehending that. So, maybe I'm trying to push thinking about it. And, yeah, to be honest, I haven't, like, yeah, contemplated that as of yet.

His fame, it kind of annoys me, to be honest. Yeah. What do you mean, it's just a reminder of, like, how absurd the whole situation is. Like, 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, like, something absurd happened that never should have happened.

And it just, yeah. It annoys me. It makes me angry. Because, you know, if he wanted this and voluntarily chose it, great. But, like, to have it forced upon him like that, I don't like it. Mahmood's fame infected everything about their lives. A few weeks after he was released,

they were still living in Columbia's 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, like, in less than two weeks. And here we are.

We don't have an apartment. Are you serious? Less than two weeks? Yeah, less than, like, we need to move at the end of this month. Can you shop for apartments, like normal people right now? I mean, 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. And one of, it was funny, one of the, like the agents was like, I've seen you somewhere. I was like, maybe, I'm not sure. He played it off really well. So. 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 Norwalks 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. This positive side of his fame, the fact that people pay attention to him, seems from 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 kind of job he's going to be able to get. How do you picture what kind of work you're going to be able to get? I'm trying to as much as possible, like to postpone having that, like, conversation with myself, like, just like thinking, oh, now, like, I can't work for Oxfam or for an organization at the UN. And it's scary and, like, we did not have much money before my arrest. I mean, 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 Algeria, 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 Noor and Dean

to any extra danger because of him. When he said this in his testimony, I looked over and I could see Noor 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 and their plans has left them. They don't know if they'll 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. It's this American life. I'm our 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 2, 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. And 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. And we'd walk over and we'd just like stare really blankly into the camera like, you know, yokels that hadn't seen technology before. And then we'd rush back and we'd see if anyone had seen it on TV and be like, oh my God, who were those freaks in the back? And 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. Karen says they designed the rumor to be kind of amusing, but also plausible. The rumor they made up was that the soccer player, William Gallis, was going to sign with a not very good team, Birmingham. Like, you know, lower mid-table, dowdy old Birmingham. You know, 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 Gallis, is French. So Karen pretended to be a French sports agent with a kind of terrible French accent. Oh, it's talking like this, you know. So can I have room? It's coming in.

My client, William. Oh, 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 is booked a room he's coming in tonight and then telling sky sports all of this oh my god my phone's been blowing up apparently william gallis is going to birmingham i've heard it from this guy at this paper i've heard it from the guy at the hotel and then the next morning we're watching sky sports news again there's a flash interview with alexe who was the manager at the time and it's just 10 seconds of oh you've been linked with william gillis do you ever need to say about that no no nothing in

I've got two young cent of halfs, 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's 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 sort of an investigative reporting sports show that's also pretty funny. Anyway, Kieran told the story to Pablo and then Pablo agreed to adapt it for our show.

And so 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. And we looked at a few. You know, a few of them had already gone to Europe. A few of them already had a sort of bit of hype around them. But there was a 19-year-old, number 10, making his sort of first waves into the national team. It was fairly dynamic on the day. His name was Alexander Lopez. He hadn't left Honduras. He had a pretty modest, but good goal record, a little bit of detail on him. And I don't know what it was, but we just fixed our eyes on him. And 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? Oh, it's basically at this point, it's a blank page. So a season had just gone by, the 11-12 season. It had no detail on it.

give him some references for, you know, 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 kind of an upgrade are you giving him? 18 goals, 34 assists, you know, crazy, crazy, crazy figures. If you watch a player, do that to your league, 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 Lopez, 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 Hondia and 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. And all of this is to say that Kieran comparing an effectively anonymous soccer player named Alexander Lopez 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 the 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 Lopez because the Honduran Maradonna, Neil Barker said,

was signing with Wiggin, 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 so it's a bit more Mancunian and a bit more, yeah,

so I've heard a little bit about Wiggin signing another Honduran lad He's playing at the Olympics now. He's called Alexander Lopez. Apparently, he's really, 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.

Like, 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. And then the times, I remember I was on the phone with the 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. And then the year afterwards, we saw the news that the Houston Dynamo had paid a million dollars for Alexander Lopez. We just thought, oh my God. Like, 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, you know, welcome the Honduran Maradona. We looked at the SB Nation posts and we looked at the Reddit boards and there it was. Like, we looked away for like a second and this wildfire seemingly had spread through major league soccer. I'm now looking at the press release off of Houston DynamoFc.com and it says, quote, his record of 18 goals and 34 assists in 51 league games for a lot. Olympia testifies, testifies to his creative and goal scoring potential, which feels like you wrote that, but no, like, this just got aggregated everywhere. Like, you look it up now, and it's like foxnews.com has a story about this, quoting those

numbers, and 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. And it's the one where he's holding the shirt and it says, Alex 10, got the number 10, Maradonna's number, holding it proudly in orange, in the sun, in Houston. And 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. a terror. I know. What a terror you were. Or. Well, 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 we pranked this dumb soccer team, these credulous Americans in Texas, who were so unfamiliar, with his favorite sport that he counted 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, directly led me to jobs, directly led me into what I do today. The magazine job that I have today, I pitched doing the Honduranar, the whole run through in my job interview. It's, you know, 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, like on dates. Well, my now-fiance, I started going out with Sarah, who will be listening. Hello. At the end of 2014, so it's nine years. So it's 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 Lopez because she has heard me pull that routine hundreds of times with hundreds of different people. Like 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's 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. Lopez 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 Lopez. 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 Maradana, 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 Kenea, 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,

the unless we were a different thing. 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? Oh, they flew out and watched games in Honduras.

They put their due diligence in to monitor him and watch videos and all of these things to make sure that, you know, this guy was something good. We did take a trip down to Honduras to watch him play for his club and he passed all the tests for us. It was after that. And we kind of set up a meeting with our owners to let them. 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, lot more. You need to contribute to all sides of the game. You need to be that modern total footballer to an extent. You kind of need to be a bit more like the Honduran Maradana that was promised, who was, again, like Maradona, one of the fastest and most physical athletes, as well as the most, you know, one of the most infamous, right? 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 first game against New York Red Bulls. And there's a moment he pulls out this, like, amazing path to, I think, Jason Johnson. And he scores to make it, I think, one. on with the dynamo. And there's Lopez. That's what he can do.

Lopez. Johnson is talented it up. Spectacular goal. Alexander Lopez with a passing gem and a first 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 Kinnear.

And I asked him, you know, have you ever heard the nickname, the Hondura Maradona? And he sort of rocks back in his chair and he smiles and he laughs and he goes, I've heard some nicknames in my day, but 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 Kinetti, who was the president at the time of Houston Dynamo, he very like breezily, like almost offhandedly said,

yeah, 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 breezily toft off. It wasn't, it didn't give me anything like, oh yeah, he's heard it. And then Nick Calbaugh and the assistant,

was just as clear as anything. Nope. You know, you get the Honduran messy, you'll get the, you know, whatever. So I don't really take stock in the, 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 you are, as your life, the story you tell yourself about yourself is just being dismissed as just like obviously unseveral. Like, of course, we don't give a shit about that.

That's, like, 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, you know, 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 like 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 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.

You know, 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 Lopez himself.

No, Kieran hadn't ruined Lopez's 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 kind of weird confession. Lopez was now playing for a team in Costa Rica. Kieran found his agent, 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. And one day, at a Costa Rican Hilton, the Honduran Maradana walked in. We shook hands. It was, you know, journalist and subject, sit down, interpreter in the middle. Kieran Morris speaking. Indiana Castillo, the translator. And Alec Lopez.

They talked through his career. Lopez 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, you know,

free-flowing, goal-scoring number 10 in Honduras. He finally had the record that we 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. And after stalling, for as long as he could with details about Lopez's career, Kieran started edging up to the reason he was even there. Had Lopez ever heard of this nickname, the Honduran Maradana.

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, you know, 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, you know, what he was, really. So it's just that. And that was about as far as it went. And 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. And I can hear it on the internet.

interview tape, those first, like, stutters, like, excuse me, um, before you go, um, one thing, one more thing while I'm here and while I have you. And then I've already rehearsed the spiel with the interpreter. Oh, I feel so awkward imagining this. So beat for beat, I'll do, like, one tenth of the story, and then I'll pause, and then she'll do it in Spanish. When you were linked with Wiggin, I heard James Wikipedia around. I had called the papers

And then I will do the next bit, and the next bit. And 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. And I just keep talking and talking and talking. Ten years ago, I invented the name the Honduran Marodagh. and he invented the name the Maradona Hondurino. It's me.

That was I. And he starts laughing. And 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 to say to want an interview, I was sort of like, huh? Why? But now I get it. How does he feel about using that nickname, the Honduran Maradana?

Does he embrace it? what's what's his feeling on that? Oh no, he was very old school about it. He was like, oh, no, no, no, there's only one Maradonna. 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 like it's cool for them.

The fans gave it to him, which is how nickname should work. And, you know, it sums him up. He dictates play from the middle of the field. You know, he's crafty. 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 Lopez's 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 too far in his own mind and has been telling people about it for 10 years since. 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. And he just had a big story this week about salary caps and Kauai Leonard that made national headlines thanks also to his producer Chris Tumanello. The program was produced today by Lily Sullivan, with help from Suzanne Gabber. People who put together today's show include Fia Bennon, Michael Comeday, Audrey Fompson, Cassie Halle, Hanah Jaffe-Walt, Seth Lynn, Tobin Lowe, Catherine Raimondo, Stone Nelson, Anthony Roman, Ryan Rummery, Alyssa, Larissa Chircheschi, Chris Doris Sotala, and Marisa Robertson, Texter.

our managing editor Sarah Abdur Rahman, our senior editors David Kestimbaum, our executive editor's Emmanuel Barry. This week we say goodbye to our office coordinator, Jindali Bonds. She is off to teach music to kids, which frankly is a much more interesting job than the job she had with us, and she gets to use her talents

way more in this new job. We will miss her, though. Special thanks today to Valerie Caesar, Mariam Alwan, Grant Minor, Carly Schaefer, Rumsie Kassam, Joseph Halli, Jew Taha, Dialla Shesha, Abushi Delao, Rosie Fitzgerald, Amber von Scha My Kangyo, Nurh Benavitas, Sarayasin, Rameyusuf, Lily Salzberg, Gaya Karamazza, and the filmmakers of the encampments.

It has been an entire week since I have mentioned that if you become a This American Life partner, you get ad-free listening, you get a greatest hits archive right in your podcast feed, and you get access to bonus episodes. There are now dozens of them. Some of them are honestly really kind of wonderful to check them out. Subscribe at thisamericanlife.org slash life partners. American Life is equipped to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tori Malatia. You know, he got into his first bar fight this week. What did it feel like?

What I felt was as if somebody took a bottle and, like, slammed it onto my head. I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. Thank you.