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?"
