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.
