Ange is a tiny place. It had a population of less than 3,000 in 2010, just before the Danielyans were forced from their home, and many in the town were left reeling. The family was well-liked and very much a part of the community. After the initial shock, the response from Ange residents was swift. A ‘Get the Danileyans back’ Facebook page was started and people began collecting donations for the family. Large groups made the drive to protest outside of the Migration Agency in Sundsvall. Pettersson and a few friends were interviewed for an article in a local newspaper, while a TV news station sent a reporter to his school a week or so after the deportation. Pettersson doesn’t recall his exact words in what was his first on-camera interview, but instead offers the gist: “‘Why are you doing this? This family was living here for [nearly 10 years],’” he says. “But I didn’t understand much then. I just wanted my best friends back.”

The brothers say they never received a reason for their deportation. It has been reported in Aftonbladet, a Stockholm daily translated for Sportsnet by Tino Sanandaji, that the family’s application for asylum was denied after multiple appeals and that they lacked legal permission to live in the country. “The cause is that there [was] no war in Armenia by then, so the migration authority did not judge the family had cause for protection as asylum seekers and denied their applications,” says Sanandaji, a researcher at the Institute for Economic and Business History Research in Stockholm who has written on immigration issues and himself immigrated to Sweden from Iran when he was nine. “This is common, and regardless of the legal cause, the experience of being uprooted is traumatizing for children, in particular if they had lived there for several years.”

The ordeal was indeed harrowing for the Danielyans, who slept at the Yerevan airport on their first night in Armenia, before finding a place to stay. They didn’t have any family left in the country and were essentially dropped there, as if they were residents. “We didn’t know the language,” says Hayk, speaking for himself and his brothers. “So, it was like, ‘What are you going to do now?’ We can’t understand it or write it. We never went to school there, so it was very terrifying.” They were also genuinely afraid, he adds, that they would never return to Sweden.