Asylum Denied or Ideas and Opinions

Asylum Denied: A Refugee's Struggle for Safety in America

Author: David Ngaruri Kenney

Asylum Denied is the gripping story of political refugee David Ngaruri Kenney's harrowing odyssey through the world of immigration processing in the United States. Kenney, while living in his native Kenya, led a boycott to protest his government's treatment of his fellow farmers. He was subsequently arrested and taken into the forest to be executed. This book, told by Kenney and his lawyer Philip G. Schrag from Kenney's own perspective, tells of his near-murder, imprisonment, and torture in Kenya; his remarkable escape to the United States; and the obstacle course of ordeals and proceedings he faced as U.S. government agencies sought to deport him to Kenya. A story of courage, love, perseverance, and legal strategy, Asylum Denied brings to life the human costs associated with our immigration laws and suggests reforms that are desperately needed to help other victims of human rights violations.

Publishers Weekly

Astonishing in its power to move and inform, this fluent first-person narrative, a collaboration between a young Kenyan political refugee, Kenney, and his stalwart American attorney, Schrag, depicts the flaws and corruption at the heart of the U.S. asylum process. Kenney fled Kenya in 1995 after being arrested and nearly executed for leading a peaceful protest against the government's treatment of his fellow tea farmers; he survived torture and escaped to America where he was plunged into an incomprehensible and hostile immigration system. Kenney and Schrag's dealings with the Department of Homeland Security and federal immigration courts reveal a system that is "disquietingly random." Applicants are victims of "refugee roulette," their fates largely dependent on the sympathies of the government officials who hear their cases. Schrag's recommendations to make the system more consistent and compassionate give the book-and Kenney's heartbreaking story-an added sense of purpose and real practical potential. Kenya's recent political implosion lends this book added topical relevance, but its core concerns for justice and reform remain directed at American society, especially (though not only) its byzantine asylum system. (May)

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Kirkus Reviews

A dismaying account of bureaucracy at its red-tape-bound worst. Kenney, who was imprisoned and tortured for leading a tea farmer's protest in Kenya, was fortunate to be befriended by generous Peace Corps workers, who helped get him out of Kenya and to the United States on a basketball scholarship in 1995. He was also fortunate to meet Schrag, who heads Georgetown University's Center for Applied Legal Studies, an organization that helps asylum seekers. Schrag provides an introduction that explains how the co-authors worked together to present the story from Kenney's point of view. Kenney accumulated mountains of paperwork and endured countless frustrations as he worked his way through a labyrinth of federal courts and other government agencies, struggling to comply with complex rules and regulations while pleading his case before seemingly arbitrary, sometimes openly hostile officials. Facing deportation in 2004, he left for Africa, where he was captured and nearly killed by rebel forces in Tanzania. Bribery was a standard part of nearly every transaction, but after extraordinary difficulties with an epithet-spouting official at the U.S. consulate, he succeeded in getting an immigrant visa and returned to his pregnant wife in America. The authors make clear that the odds are against asylum seekers, especially since 9/11. Each has his own epilogue: Kenney's is deeply personal, Schrag's is a lawyerly analysis of what's wrong with the way the United States treats immigrants and how the system could be improved. Wrenching human drama, bogged down in a plethora of details that often make for tedious reading.

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Ideas and Opinions (Modern Library Series)

Author: Albert Einstein

A new edition of the most definitive collection of Albert Einstein's popular writings, gathered under the supervision of Einstein himself. The selections range from his earliest days as a theoretical physicist to his death in 1955; from such subjects as relativity, nuclear war or peace, and religion and science, to human rights, economics, and government.