New Beginning in U.S. Comes at Agonizing Cost

KAKUMA REFUGEE CAMP, Kenya —  Hussein Isak Ahmed is too young to remember his family’s escape from war-torn Somalia in 1992. But he can’t stop thinking about the day more than a year ago when he, his brothers and parents boarded a plane for what they thought would be a new life in the United States, far from the disease and desperation of this crowded refugee camp in northern Kenya.

“That was the last time I saw them,” the teenager recalled. With immigration papers in hand, the family had packed its belongings, expecting never to return to Kakuma. Hussein’s father sold their mud hut.

But the family was unexpectedly stopped at a transit center in Nairobi, the capital, where it was split up by U.S. immigration officials and asked a series of questions.

When the interviews were over, Hussein, then 14, found himself sitting alone in a room, shaking and teary-eyed. A few hours later, a stranger approached the boy.

“The others have gone,” the stranger said. “Their plane has left. You are going back to Kakuma.”

Hussein is one of scores of Somali Bantu refugees who say their dreams of relocating to the United States were shattered when immigration officials broke up their families, sending some to America and others back to Kakuma. Husbands have been separated from wives, children from parents, brothers from sisters.

The United States established the refugee program six years ago to rescue about 12,000 Somali Bantus from persecution in their homeland and resettle them.

But members of broken families, some here and some in the U.S., say they have been punished unfairly by overzealous immigration officers. In interviews in St. Louis, where 106 Somali Bantu families comprising about 500 people have been resettled, more than a dozen refugees said they were given little or no opportunity to vouch for relatives separated from them and sent back to the camp.

A spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a Department of Homeland Security agency, said those sent back had failed to “reconcile discrepancies to the [immigration] officer’s satisfaction.”

So-called infiltration-detection interviews were instituted in Nairobi in August 2004 in response to widespread fraud and intimidation at Kakuma, said Bill Strassberger, an immigration service spokesman. Though resettlement was offered only to Bantus, a minority group in Somalia, hundreds of non-Bantu Somalis with criminal gangs in the camp were assuming identities through bribery or intimidation, he said.

From August 2004 to last October, 5,407 applicants were interviewed in Nairobi, Strassberger said. Of those, 305 were sent back to Kakuma. In 103 cases, other family members chose to continue on to the United States. In 96 cases, those approved for resettlement decided to return to Kakuma with relatives who had been denied resettlement.

There is no guaranteed appeal process, but the immigration agency says it considers any written appeal filed in Nairobi within 90 days. For a rejection order to be overturned, the agency must receive either “a detailed account explaining how a significant error was made by the adjudicating officer” or “new information that would merit a change in the determination.”

Nearly everyone involved with the Somali Bantu resettlement program agrees that it is rife with impostors who have stolen or bought the identity cards of dead or missing refugees.

Non-Bantu Somalis are bitter about being excluded from the U.S. program. Bantus have long been despised and oppressed in their homeland, where historically they were used as slaves.

Now some Bantu families say that the resettlement program intended to rescue them has instead added to their pain. They say legitimate Bantu refugees, such as Hussein Ahmed, have been sent back without an opportunity to plead their case.

“They separated my son from me and never told me why,” Hussein’s mother, Saman Qasay Mohammed, 37, said during a tearful interview in St. Louis, where she lives with her husband and two other sons. “They said the situation would be solved when we got to America, but I never saw him again.”

Part of the Bantus’ problem appears to be self-inflicted. The resettlement program has been disrupted by a power struggle between two Bantu factions.

The factions accuse each other of demanding bribes and selling slots in the resettlement program. And each side has attempted to torpedo the other’s chances for relocation.

“About a year ago, we started getting all these letters saying this person is not related to that person, this child is not the son of that man,” said Gilbert Peters Ngetich, assistant manager of the International Organization for Migration, or IOM, office in Kakuma. “It’s been hard for us to figure out. We didn’t want to get into community politics.”

“The whole resettlement program has been turned into a battlefield, a power struggle by those with ill feelings toward one another,” said Abdullahi Ali Ahmed, 29, secretary-general of one of the Bantu factions.

Several Bantu refugees have accused Abdullahi Ahmed of using his position to extort money in exchange for his help. He denied the charge and in turn accused the rival faction of peddling ration cards to non-Bantus for $3,000 each.

Kakuma resident Abdul Haji, 37, said families like his were caught in the middle. “When two elephants fight, it’s the grass that is destroyed,” he said. “We are the grass.”

To weed out potential fraud, U.S. officials added the final interview in Nairobi. The questions are seemingly simple: How many windows does your house have? How many shirts does your father own? What did the family eat for breakfast three days ago?

But the interviews have raised concern among some immigration officials. Groups such as the IOM, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the Joint Voluntary Agency, which assisted in an earlier screening process, say they know little about the Nairobi interviews or the reasons behind many of the rejections. Officials from these agencies say the final decision should be made before families leave the camp.

“We have expressed some concerns to [the Department of Homeland Security] about the manner in which it is being done,” said Rosella Pagliuchi-Lor, assistant representative for the U.N. refugee agency in Nairobi.

Strassberger said the interviews were conducted in Nairobi because refugees, immigration officials and staff interpreters were intimidated by gang members in Kakuma. He said refugees sent to Nairobi were given documents stating that their eligibility for resettlement was conditional pending a medical examination, security clearance and the final interview.

The refugees in St. Louis, home to one of the largest Somali Bantu communities in the U.S., insisted that those left behind were legitimate family members.

Ali Abdullah Durow said his 59-year-old mother-in-law was sent back to Kakuma without explanation. Awes Haji Fairus produced a list of the names and camp identity card numbers for 19 members of his extended family who were sent back in December 2004.

Osman Liban said two of his seven children, Ali and Daud, were sent back to Kakuma in October 2004. The remainder of the family boarded the U.S.-bound plane to avoid the same fate.

Ali, now 20, said that before the family left Kakuma, he had refused to pay a $500 bribe to camp leader Ahmed. He didn’t tell his father about the threat. But as soon as his exit interview in Nairobi began, he knew that something was wrong. “I was being questioned like a criminal,” Ali said. “I felt like a suspect.”

Ali now cares for 16-year-old Daud at the squalid camp. They dropped out of school and support themselves with bicycle taxis. He hasn’t heard from his father since they were separated more than a year ago. “I tell myself that we shouldn’t disturb him or disturb the family,” Ali said, nervously biting the skin off an already bloody thumb.

He said he no longer dreamed of joining his family in the United States. “That was our last chance.”

Refugees who have been returned say there appears to be zero tolerance for discrepancies and no chance to explain.

“Once the interviewer had made his decision, that was it,” Hussein Ahmed recalled. He has replayed his September 2004 exit interview a thousand times in his head, and believes he knows why he was pulled from his family. At first, the questioning seemed routine. But then the immigration official asked something that made Hussein freeze.

“Who is Daud?” the agent asked. Hussein’s mind flashed back to three years earlier, when a Somali man visited his family’s hut late one night. Brandishing a gun, the stranger threatened to attack the family if it didn’t allow him to impersonate Daud, a brother of Hussein who had died.

The family complied at first, but immigration officials eventually uncovered the fraud.

Now Hussein’s mind was racing. Was this a trick question? Would revealing the truth hurt the family’s chances to relocate?

“I got nervous and didn’t know what to say,” he said. “So I just said, ‘Daud is my brother.’ It was true. He was my brother.”

Hussein said he sensed immediately that there was a problem. Afterward, he briefly saw his father, Isak Ahmed Barow, 40, and described what had happened.

“Oh no!” his father cried. Other family members had relayed the story about the impostor. Hussein said his father tried to explain, but the immigration officials insisted that Hussein be returned to Kakuma.

When Suban Waladi, a family neighbor in Kakuma, saw the boy wandering back alone, she broke into tears. “I held him tight and told him to be patient,” Waladi, 54, said. She told him: “I’m your mama now. You’ll stay with me until your mother and father come for you.”

Now Hussein sleeps in her mud-walled hut on a mattress next to Waladi’s 14-year-old son. She and her husband make sure the boy gets enough to eat and attends school.

Even as Waladi tries to convince Hussein that he’s not been abandoned, she struggles to understand how her former neighbors could have left him.

“Never,” she said, shaking her head. “I would never leave my child. I would keep the family together.”

Immigration officials at the camp have a file on Hussein and a few other teenage boys sent back to the camp alone. But there have been no formal efforts to review rejected cases or investigate complaints, they said.

In St. Louis, Hussein’s mother says she has lost sleep worrying about her son and wishes she had returned to the camp with him. She was told in Nairobi that she could begin trying to overturn her son’s rejection order once she arrived in the U.S. But she is illiterate and speaks little English; she said she was unaware of the 90-day deadline for filing an appeal.

“I think about him every day, and my blood pressure goes up,” she said. “Who will care for him in the camp?”