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.