For one Kenyan family, typo creates visa nightmare

ELKTON, Md.: One digit a 1 that should have been a 2 has apparently prevented Eunice Nyakundi from seeing her children since she fled Kenya seven years ago.

Perhaps, as Nyakundi believes, it was nothing more than a typographical error committed by a clerk at an immigration office in Vermont on a certificate of permanent residency. Instead of listing her birthday as 12/25, the clerk entered 12/15.

Officials at the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, consider it reason enough or, rather, they have specified no other reason to keep the Elkton resident's two sons from entering the United States from Nairobi and her daughter from crossing the border from Canada, even for short visits with their mother.

Nyakundi, an American citizen since 2007 and the sponsor of her grown children's efforts to win visas, said embassy personnel have made it clear they don't trust her and that none of the documentation she provided at their request not her birth certificate, not her passport, not DNA tests showing a 99.9 percent probability that all three of the visa applicants are her offspring has changed their minds.

A spokesman at the Department of State in Washington declined comment, saying immigration law bars consular officials from discussing specific cases.

Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, says that if documentation submitted by Nyakundi is legitimate, it should be an easy thing to get the birth date on the certificate corrected.

Vaughn said, though, that Kenyans generally are notorious for trying to get into the United States illegally, noting that a refugee program had to be shut down after it was determined that half of visa petitions were fraudulent. As a result, legitimate applicants come under closer scrutiny.

``I haven't done anything wrong,'' said Nyakundi, 49, a Nairobi native who says the failed effort to reunite her family has left her broke, in poor health and questioning her decision to pick the United States as sanctuary when she fled her abusive husband.

``I'm here legally, and I think it's my legal right to have my children over here. These are nice, hardworking kids. What am I supposed to do?''

Nyakundi arrived at the Newark, N.J., airport in September 1998 with just a small suitcase, $50 and an associate degree in social work. She says she was running from an abusive husband and needed to get away quickly. There was no time to process travel plans for her children, and she regrets that she had to leave them with their father. She says, though, that even Denis, a preteen at the time, pressed her to flee to safety.

``I had to go quickly because of the abusive situation,'' she said, rubbing a quarter-sized knot on her forehead, one of the lasting effects of the abuse. ``They said, 'If you don't go, he's going to kill you.'''

Her husband didn't harm the children at first, she said, but her daughter Damaris eventually became a target and she soon fled to Toronto, where she now works as a mortgage analyst.

Nyakundi says that, before she got her bearings in the United States, she slept on the basement floor of a friend's house in Wilmington. She eventually got training that qualified her for a job as a surgical technician, but she left that relatively lucrative position in December 2007 because of the stress of her family situation.

``You have to be 100 percent alert in that job, and I couldn't deal with it, I couldn't concentrate,'' she said.

She now works as a nurse's assistant at a nursing home in her neighborhood on Elkton's east side, where she's owned a town house since 2005.