Amina & Mohamed
Amina, a Somali refugee, was about to reunite with her son, Mohamed, after nearly two years apart. Then came Trump’s ban.

By Nick Miriello and Julia Steers
Photographs by Maddie McGarvey and Adriane Ohanesian
Feb 3, 2017

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The room is dark save for the blue-green wash of light coming off the big-screen TV. In the other room, morning prayers still play on a radio, muted and distant. Mumtaz, the 3-year-old girl whose explosive energy usually consumes the two-bedroom apartment, is lying on her back watching a cartoon cadre of British elves and fairies imagine a pink unicorn into existence. She mouths the dialogue; she’s seen this episode before.

Her mother, Amina Ibrahim, points to the giant bowl of Rice Krispies that Mumtaz has deserted on the kitchen table. “Mumtaz, eat,” she says in Somali. The cereal is Mumtaz’s breakfast, but also a distraction. Amina is preparing for her regular phone call with Mohamed, her second of four children and Mumtaz’s only brother. The family, all refugees of Somalia’s ongoing civil war, had to leave him behind with a friend in Uganda when they resettled to Ohio in 2015.

“Why do you hate me, Mommy?” Mohamed asks almost every time they speak. “Why haven’t you come for me?”

These phone calls, just a few minutes each, are the only time Amina sees him. Mohamed is now living in Nairobi, Kenya, with a friend of the first friend — a stranger, really, who was kind enough to take him in. He turned 4 in October. The family hoped he would soon join Amina, her husband, and her daughters in the U.S. They are on top of the paperwork and Mohamed is just a few steps short of the necessary approvals in his nearly two-year-long reunification process.

In recent months, frustrated by the waiting, Amina had devised a plan: She’d fly to Kenya and bring Mohamed back with her. She knew his application was close and she didn’t want to take any chances on the last legs of his process. Against her caseworker’s advice, she paid the $325 fee and applied for a refugee traveler’s visa for herself and Mumtaz. Mohamed had spent too much time without his mother, and she was worried she was losing him, that her phone calls were failing to convince him he was loved.

Her plan is off the rails now. On Monday, she received a letter from the State Department telling her she was one step closer to earning her travel visa, one step closer to reuniting with Mohamed in Kenya. But two days before that, President Trump had signed an executive order freezing all refugee resettlement efforts and barring travelers from seven countries, including Somalia, from entering the U.S. It’s a double blow: Mohamed’s reunification application is likely to suffer serious delays along with everyone else’s, and Amina can’t even go to see him as long as the visa restrictions remain in place. Their temporary separation is starting to feel permanent.

Amina and Mohamed’s relationship could be characterized as cursed. His father took him from her in a bitter dispute when Mohamed was just four months old, and Amina wouldn’t see him again for more than two years. When they were finally reunited in late 2014, Amina had been granted asylum and was already approved to move to the United States. She and her two daughters, teenage Faisa and toddler Mumtaz, could go to Columbus and start a new life. But because Mohamed had been living with his father’s family, he wasn’t part of their appeal.

Amina had fled her home in Kismayo, Somalia, when she was just 12 years old, after the civil war left her orphaned. For 23 years she’d lived in and out of Uganda’s Nakivale refugee camp, hoping to one day go to America, or wherever the resettlement program would place her. When her application came through, she found herself in an unenviable but not uncommon position among refugees. She could try to add Mohamed to the already finished application, but her advisers told her doing so would all but guarantee derailing her efforts and send the family’s status into uncertain territory. They told her, Go set up your home and apply for reunification. Since Mohamed was young, they didn’t expect any delays. Six months, maybe a year, and he’d be with her in America.

Much of that promise has come true. Amina joined Columbus’ population of nearly 40,000 Somalis, the second-largest community in the United States. She has a part-time job and a home for her family. Faisa is advancing through high school; Mumtaz is learning English faster than Somali. And Amina gave birth to a third baby girl, Mushtaq, last fall.

But now all she can think about is what Mohamed said to her when she left. “If you leave me, I won’t be able to call you Mom again.” On Tuesday morning, four days after Trump signed his order, she sits in the dark, deciding whether and how to tell Mohamed what the news in America means for their future together. She checks how much money is left on her international call account: $7.45. She doesn’t know if she can handle telling him, if she can handle hearing herself tell him.

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The same morning, Mohamed wakes up and nudges his playmate Bilal, sleeping head to foot with him in the same bed. He pulls a candy from his pocket, ripping it open with his teeth. On a typical day, the boys should go to madrassa from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., with two breaks. But many days Mohamed doesn’t want to go, and his caretaker, Kaltumo Rukow Gulie, does not force him. Bilal Hassan is the youngest of her five boys, the hyperactive menace of the apartment complex, and he often insists on staying home with Mohamed.

Mohamed sits in front of the TV as Bilal bounces around him, occasionally managing to get Mohamed to wrestle and chase him. After a breakfast of sweet black tea and white bread, Mohamed goes back to the TV. He sits six inches from the screen, transfixed. Today, he’s watching a British kids program in English, volume blaring twice as loud as it should be.

Kaltumo lets him self-soothe with TV, sweets, and juice when he “misses his mama” or looks sad. He’s also been sick with a sore throat and high fever lately, three times since November. She says the sweets help.

Kaltumo, a 29-year-old single mother, has her hands full. She owns a clothing shop in Nairobi’s Eastleigh neighborhood, often called Little Mogadishu because of its predominantly Somali population. She rents a three-bedroom, eighth-floor apartment on one of the quieter streets, next to a large mosque and above a bookshop. Her ex-husband pays rent and school fees, but otherwise she supports her sons with her earnings from the business.

In October, her old friend Layla came to her with another boy, 4 years old, the same age as Bilal. “He didn’t have anyone else. Layla didn’t know anyone else,” Kaltumo says. “She told me, ‘You’re the only one.’ I have kids. How can I just let Mohamed go? I couldn’t leave him.”

Kaltumo dotes on Mohamed and Bilal — her “babies,” she calls them — and treats Mohamed as she does her own children. She tells the neighbors and madrassa teachers he is her nephew, to avoid questions. The four older boys treat him as a brother, coming home from school and passing by the TV to say hi and give him some tea.

Kaltumo has never met Mohamed’s mother, Amina, but they speak weekly by phone, mostly about Mohamed and the progress of his paperwork. Amina sends Kaltumo money for transport to Mohamed’s appointments — with the Refugee Support Center, at United Nations agencies, at Kenya’s Department of Refugee Affairs — and on holidays, but little else.

Mohamed fits in well with her boys and Kaltumo brushes off questions about mothering a sixth son as if it’s nothing. “I’m not angry with Amina,” she says. “As a mom, I understand. When we speak, she says, ‘May God bless you.’ I know it’s not a small thing [to take Mohamed in]. I always tell her, ‘It’s OK. Today it’s you, tomorrow it’s me. You would do the same.’”

She admits that guiding him through the refugee registration process wears on her, but, she says, “This child is still young and he needs me. I have volunteered to help, so we go back and forth, up and down, until he gets help.”

And so on Tuesday, like many days before, Kaltumo wakes up early to open her shop for a few hours before she’ll spend most of the day navigating an endless bureaucracy of Kenyan immigration services, UNHCR procedures, and facilities packed with hundreds of others seeking refugee status, resettlement, and asylum. Amina and Kaltumo had agreed to move the process forward in hopes Trump’s visa ban on Somalis is lifted. Mohamed needs to get his name into Kenya’s refugee registry so that when his application is eventually processed he can leave the country.

Kaltumo’s brother arrives to drive them to Mohamed’s appointment at the Department of Refugee Affairs in Nairobi’s Shauri Moyo neighborhood. In anticipation of a long wait, they take some bread and tea before they go. Kaltumo washes Mohamed’s face and wipes his nose.

When asked where his mother is, Mohamed insists she is “at school.” Where? “Up there,” he says, pointing to the sky. Your sisters? “Up there,” he repeats. When asked whether his mom is in America, he scoots closer to the TV and turns it up.

But he is clearly more aware than he lets on. In the car on the way to his appointment, he protectively clutches the folder with his documents to his chest. He takes out the papers, inspecting them as if he can read the words.

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Somalis have known displacement longer than many of the world’s refugees. In 1991, a civil war brought on the complete collapse of the Somali state. Now in its third decade, the refugee crisis persists, caused by cycles of clan-based instability, war, terrorism, and famine. Somalis are the world’s third-largest refugee population, at 1.1 million, topped only by Syrians and Afghans.

Like Mohamed, thousands were born and educated in refugee camps and cities outside their home country. The closest they have come to al-Shabaab, Somalia’s al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group, is through TV and radio reports from abroad. But as Somali passport holders, they fall under the list of countries whose nationals are banned from traveling to the U.S. under the order Trump issued in the name of “protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry.”

In Nairobi this week, more than a hundred Somali refugees already approved for resettlement in the U.S. — some after 10 years of waiting and vetting — were stuck in transit centers after Trump’s order suspended their visas. Many of their clearances will expire over the next 120 days and they will have to begin the process again. Officials said they are preparing for the possibility they will have to send these refugees back to camps as new arrivals.

Kenya is the regional hub for the United Nations’ resettlement and refugee services. Its headquarters in Nairobi process the majority of refugees from Sudan and Somalia. Kenya is also home to the world’s largest refugee camp, Dadaab, where an estimated 350,000 people, mostly Somalis, live.

“The refugees that UNHCR Kenya puts forward for resettlement are the most vulnerable in the region — in the world, probably,” said Yvonne Ndege, a spokeswoman for the agency. “People who need medical assistance, survivors of torture, women at risk, children at risk.”

Mohamed first registered as a refugee in Uganda, where he was born. But when he came to Nairobi last fall, he lost his status and had to reapply as a refugee in Kenya. The government there, overwhelmed with Somali refugees, stalled granting new registrations, delaying Mohamed’s case significantly.

Angie Plummer, the director of Community Refugee & Immigration Services in Columbus, is overseeing Mohamed’s reunification application in the U.S., along with at least four other families in similar situations. His saga feels harsh because of how young Mohamed is, she said in her office this week, but it’s not unique. UNHCR estimates that a little over half the world’s 21 million refugees are minors, many of them separated from one or both parents and reliant on an extended family member or friend to care for them. Plummer looked over the multicolored files that littered her desk and pointed to one. “Just thumbing through, this is a mother and an 8-year-old separated,” she said.

If Mohamed hadn’t moved from Uganda to Kenya, he’d probably be in the U.S. already, Plummer said. But she was clear that Amina didn’t have much choice in the matter: You follow the help. Like so many other refugee families, “This is a product of war and flight, and so if you have three kids, maybe Grandma takes one, and you take two.”

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Mohamed risks having his story become an echo of his mother’s. Like hundreds if not thousands of Somali children in the early 1990s, Amina lost her family to warring clans and militias — she found her father and brother dead in the streets of Kismayo and was separated from her mother and other siblings.

Without a family member nearby, neighbors took Amina with them as they fled to Uganda. She is hazy about the details of her escape and the length of the journey. “I was a child,” she says. But she remembers reaching the Nakivale refugee camp and thinking it would do. “It was survivable,” about the only criterion she had.

Survival would remain her guiding principle for the next 23 years of her life. It informed her decision to apply for resettlement in the U.S. as a teenager and her decision to abandon that notion when a suitor came along. It informed her reasoning when she married at 16 and traded camp living for Hoima, a small town in Western Uganda. That decision resulted in the birth of her first child, the strong and hard-working Faisa, and in joining the welcoming embrace of her husband’s family.

But survival also meant returning to the camp as a divorced woman after a dispute with her husband. It meant not seeing Faisa for two years because the father insisted it was his right to raise his child, a position she had no choice but to respect. It meant restarting her life in the camp even though her friends there had left, some to be resettled in America. And then it meant meeting Mohamed’s father, only to go through the same thing again.

Mohamed was born on Oct. 5, 2012, and from the start he wouldn’t know much stability. After her first failed marriage, Amina had committed herself to following through on her resettlement application for herself and Faisa — and now Mohamed. Mohamed’s father didn’t want them to leave. He took Mohamed to stay with his family outside Kampala, telling Amina they were going on a short visit to the boy’s aunt. But he never returned, and he never responded to her inquiries and pleas to see her son.

Amina was already two months pregnant with their second child. (Mumtaz would be born in July 2013.) She searched for him, imploring her husband’s family and friends to help her. She contacted the police and local representatives of the U.N. “I looked and searched for him everywhere,” she says. She even put a notice in the newspaper asking people to contact her if they saw him.

In 2014, nearly two years after he’d taken Mohamed and left, Amina received news of her husband’s whereabouts: He was dead, one of 3,270 refugees and migrants to die attempting the deadly trip across the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy that year.

Mohamed wasn’t with him, but for a long stretch of time Amina feared the worst. Again, she asked his father’s family if they knew where her son was. They did not, they said. This carried on for months, before someone finally told her the truth: Mohamed had been living in Kampala, not far from Amina. The family had been lying to her at the request of his father, but they could no longer afford to care for the boy.

When Mohamed was finally returned to her, Amina told him who she was and he bristled. He insisted his mother was dead, that she couldn’t be his mother. Over the next four months, Amina worked to establish their relationship. “I was so happy because I had all my kids; everything was perfect,” she says.

In the years spent searching for her son and his father, Amina’s life hadn’t stalled; she continued living in between the refugee camp and Kampala, where she would stay with friends and work as a maid and shopkeeper. Her resettlement application had advanced, so much so that she had a hard date for moving to America: May 3, 2015. But she only had visas for herself and the two girls. Because he wasn’t in her custody, she hadn’t been able to include Mohamed on the family’s application. “If I found him sooner, I would have added him to the case,” she says.

But Amina knew she could no longer delay the opportunity for resettlement now that it had arrived. She had waited more than two decades for this door to open, and she had to think about a future not only for herself and Mohamed but also for her daughters. She enlisted the help of a friend she trusted, Layla, to care for Mohamed, and promised him it wouldn’t be long before he, too, joined his mother and sisters in the U.S.

If you ask any resettlement expert, they’ll tell you Amina made the only choice she could. Three weeks after she and the girls arrived in Columbus, she filed for Mohamed’s reunification.

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Inside the Department of Refugee Affairs, a shared facility with UNHCR, Mohamed is quiet and stays close to Kaltumo throughout a hectic day. They are shuttled between offices — Room 14, Room 39, inside Room 30, outside Room 30, back to Room 30 — that overlook two caged areas containing new arrivals and those waiting to be registered. They are instructed to join haphazard lines — one for fingerprints, one to verify Mohamed has not been registered twice. They and more than a hundred others from Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia, and Somalia are ushered around by private security guards and staff. There is a stall selling mangoes and “high-energy biscuits” behind the fences.

“I’m so frustrated by this,” Kaltumo says several hours in. “This is what I go through every time we come. If he was older, I would tell his mom to come and get her son.” But throughout the day she never raises her voice or gets frustrated with the staff. She keeps a close eye on Mohamed as he plays with a little girl, a new arrival, who is on the other side of the floor-to-ceiling fence. She laughs with a Somali couple who have waited all day for the past three days to be fingerprinted. One woman says that when they entered the building, the security guards said they could jump the queue for a $2 bribe.

“I don’t wish this on anyone, to go through this,” Kaltumo says. “It’s so hard. It’s not a one-day thing. You have to go very early, over and over, all the time. Mohamed gets tired.”

Finally, Mohamed and Kaltumo sit for an hourlong interview. Kaltumo fields most of the questions and Mohamed is asked only his mother’s name. In the end, he is registered as a refugee in Kenya and his fingerprint is entered into the system.

Mohamed immediately falls asleep on the rush-hour drive home. He walks into the apartment smiling, clutching a box from the refugee agency with two packs of biscuits, crackers, soda, and water. Bilal immediately rips open the box. Kaltumo follows them, smiling, with the folder of Mohamed’s paperwork. They eat a late lunch of crackers and spaghetti with vegetables. She takes the boys down to madrassa, on the ground floor of their apartment building, for a few minutes.

She says Mohamed is too young to really understand what’s going on around him. “I tell him there’s a process, but sometimes he just packs his clothes and says, ‘Are we going? Let’s go.’”

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The day before Trump signed the executive order suspending entrance for Somalis into the U.S., Amina joined four other Somali women in an appeal for public support at a press conference aired on local TV in Columbus. None of the five women wanted to be there — they wanted to keep to themselves in their new lives — but all of them had pending family reunification cases that were now under threat. They dressed for the attention they did not want and stood to the left of the camera. They had come together to state their case and steeled themselves for questions.

“They followed all the rules to try to bring their family members here; we dangled that hope in front of them, and now we’re going to shut the door?” Angie Plummer, the local resettlement office’s director, told the assembled reporters. “This is not protecting national security; this is destroying families. This is so inhumane.”

Standing off to the side, Amina unraveled and began to sob. She wiped her tears with the loose cloth of her hijab. She had spent the last year and a half trying to will Mohamed’s reunification into reality. She had visited the resettlement agency so often that she knew how to sneak around the usual cluster that crowds the reception area and make a beeline for Plummer’s office upstairs. Rambunctious Mumtaz had become an institution there, terrorizing and delighting employees never too busy to stop and entertain her. “I have a few super-aggressive women,” Plummer said, “and Amina is one of them.”

Her approach was working; Mohamed’s case was moving faster than most. “In the refugee world, he was one of the luckier ones,” Plummer said. There were two remaining major obstacles to Mohamed’s application: proof of refugee registration and an interview with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.

On Tuesday, he received the proof of registration after the hours he and Kaltumo spent wading through the bureaucracy in Nairobi. But Trump’s order threw into chaos all previously planned interviews with the USCIS and suspended U.S. immigration officials from making decisions about applications from nationals of the seven restricted countries, including Somalia.

In the cloud of confusion, Plummer is instructing her clients not to travel. As for the future of many cases on her desk, she’s at a loss for words. “It’s all very vague, I don’t think we’ll know specifics; I don’t think the administration knows,” she said. “My window of hope is this case-by-case basis [allowing officials to make exceptions], so that even the administration could agree that Mohamed is not a national security threat and he should be moved along.”

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After her evening prayers, Kaltumo plugs in her phone, expecting a call from Amina. Through connection issues, Mohamed sits next to Kaltumo, staring at the screen, screaming, “Hoyo! Hoyo! Hoyo!” It means mother or mama in Somali. The call finally connects and he talks to Amina and his sisters Mumtaz and Mushtaq, calling them amino, or sweetheart.

“Amino! Amino!” Mumtaz shouts back into the phone as her brother’s face pixelates on the screen. The connection is bad, so they alternate between FaceTime and a basic phone call. “Amino, I love you,” Mumtaz screeches before Amina wrests the phone back from her. Mumtaz dances herself into a laughing fit and then returns to the British elves still scheming on the TV.

Kaltumo looks on from their end, laughing. She says Mumtaz is Mohamed’s favorite sister. Bilal pops in and out of the conversation, shoving Mohamed off the chair. The neighbor’s daughter is playing underneath. Kaltumo’s older sons are just returning home from school, puttering around to get their Korans and go down to madrassa class. Kaltumo’s mother sits quietly next to the neighbor, watching the call take place, fumbling with her prayer beads. Mohamed is fully focused on the phone.

Throughout the conversation, he is beaming. When the connection drops, his brow furrows.
“I want to come and see you,” he says. “When are you coming to get me?” In between, he answers, “I’m OK, I’m fine,” to questions from Amina and Mumtaz.

How can Amina explain presidential policy to a 4-year-old? It’s simple: She doesn’t. She repeats the only thing Mohamed wants to hear, and what she wants to believe to still be true, and possible. The conversation returns to the familiar contents of every call: a series of soothing refrains and promises. Amino, I love you, amino, how are you? Amino, I will come for you.

After the call, Kaltumo says she understands Amina can no longer come for a visit. “It’s sad. I’m very sad,” she says, tearing up but still smiling. “She won’t come. It will be hard. I’m a businesswoman. I was hoping to travel to Uganda and China [to buy clothes], but now I can’t leave here.”

Amina also feels helpless. She hasn’t slept since last Friday evening, when news of Trump’s order broke. “Now that I can’t go to him, and that he can’t come, there’s no hope,” she says. “Every day is getting worse.”

Amel Guettatfi contributed reporting. Graphics by Allison McCann.

Nick Miriello is a senior editor for VICE News.
Julia Steers is an East Africa-based reporter and producer covering politics and human rights.
Maddie McGarvey is a photographer based in Columbus, Ohio.
Adriane Ohanesian is an American photographer who has lived and worked in Africa since 2010.