American Dreams

CHAPTER 1 - Freedom

Liberated amidst subtle hills of Bowling Green, Ky., Steven Kamara was living the American Dream.
Steven arrived in America in 2006, a refugee from the war-torn African country of Liberia. For the first time in 15 years, he was not a nomad, he did not fear for his life every day, and he did not rely on the U.N. for his next meal.

Not only that, Steven had been reunited with his girlfriend, whom he had met in Africa.

“My first year living in the United States was like Heaven,” Steven said. “I had been reunited with my love, I had a place to sleep, enough food to eat, a job, clothes to wear and freedom.”

Once in Bowling Green, he moved in with his girlfriend, Bindu Kollie, and her family, whose real names are not being used in this story. Steven got a factory job and bought a car so that he could support himself and help support the Kollies. When Bindu became pregnant, Steven started planning their future.

“[Bindu] was still young, but everyone seemed to be very positive about the pregnancy,” he said.

On a wintry morning in January 2006, his phone rang. The police officer on the other end told Steven to come to the station for questioning.

“At first, I didn’t understand what the problem was,” Steven said. “Yes, [Bindu] was my girlfriend, we started dating in Africa and she was pregnant with my child.”

For hours, the officers questioned Steven. “I answered all of their questions honestly, even the ones that made me feel uncomfortable,” he said. “I assumed that everything was resolved and I would be allowed to leave.”

But following the interview, Steven’s wrists were draped in handcuffs as he was arrested for third-degree rape.

Steven was 25. Bindu was 14. He was about to discover, that in America, the age difference would make their relationship a crime.

In Liberia, it is not uncommon for men to date women much younger than them. In some traditions, men can reserve a bride before she is born.

Numerical age is a foreign concept to many tribal regions of Africa. Their concept of time is more fluid than that of America.

Steven, Bindu and all of their relatives who were born in Africa will never know their true age. Their year of birth was guesstimated and assigned by immigration officials upon arriving in the U.S.

Having lived in Bowling Green a mere 10 months, Steven was unfamiliar with the concept of statutory rape – that an adult cannot have sex with a minor, even if both are willing.

“I told the officers that I had never heard of such a thing and tried to explain that things did not work that way in Africa,” he said. “The officers told me that none of this mattered. I was in the United States now and I would have to respect the laws of the land.”

CHAPTER 2 - Crime and punishment

In 2007, nearly 2.8 million people around the world were seeking refuge from extreme poverty, civil war and persecution, according to the World Refugee Survey. But less than 2 percent of them – 48,281 people – were hand-picked to come to the U.S. as refugees. Of these, 1,576 refugees from Liberia arrived that year.
Under U.S. law, refugees must prove they fled their native country due to a “well-founded fear of persecution” based upon race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or a membership in a particular social group. Those who are admitted receive government assistance and a pathway to become citizens.

But this golden ticket carries restrictions.

Under strict immigration laws, refugees who commit a felony in the U.S. may have their special status revoked, making them vulnerable to deportation back to the country they once fled.

Rape is one of those felony crimes.

Steven had not become a permanent citizen at the time of his arrest. Even after serving a sentence for his crime in Warren County Regional Jail, he was susceptible to being picked up by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement and eligible for deportation at any time.

Steven’s love for Bindu would be the very thing that would tear them – and their families – apart. A survivor of civil war and massacre, he came to America naive of freedom’s stipulations and the repercussions for ignoring them.

“I never meant to harm anyone, least of all [Bindu],” Steven said. “I planned to make her my wife and live beside her for the rest of my life, until America split us apart.”

For the next year, Steven’s family – eight Liberian refugees living in a quaint home in the Bowling Green Housing Authority – would spend every Saturday walking down the florescent-white hallways of the Warren County Jail to visit Steven in detainment.

Mariama Kamara, Steven’s sister, remembered the day her family heard Steven was incarcerated. “We were so sad,” she said.

The sentence was only a precursor to a worse punishment to come. When immigration authorities found Steven, his newfound freedoms would be taken away. Again.

Steven was facing a one-way ticket back to Liberia, a land that held nothing for him except painful memories of bloodshed and displacement.

CHAPTER 3 - Liberia

The rebels began moving the crowd of 200 people towards an abandoned building and forced them to watch the murder of their leader. The men were forced to take off their clothes. Rebels tied their hands together, laid them on the ground, and shot them.

It was 1990, and rebel leader Charles Taylor had just invaded Liberia and formed the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, sparking an ethnic civil war. The U.N. reported war casualties to be between 100,000 and 150,000 people and an estimated 700,000 refugees displaced in neighboring countries.

Steven and his family, as members of the Mandingo tribe, were targeted. Because they came to the region originally as freed slaves in the 1800s and had become very successful, owning the majority of Liberian market, they were envied and discriminated against. They were easily detectable because of their dialect and practice of Islam, according to Steven.

“I witnessed the killing of my uncle. My father was hurt, stabbed in the chest,” Steven later testified at a court hearing. “I watched the rebels beat and then shoot my maternal grandparents in the back. They shot them for walking too slowly.”

Taylor’s army invaded Steven’s hometown, Bomi Hill, in July 1990.

“They started shooting their guns into the air to wake all of us up and they started shouting for ‘every Mandingo dog’ to come out,” Steven said.

Steven’s mother, Kema, said the family escaped to the bush, where they remained for about two months.
“We had to kill animals to eat and dig for water,” Steven’s sister Mariama said. “If you wanted to shower, you waited for it to rain.”

The Kamaras – Steven’s father, Shekou; mother, Kema; and sister, Mariama – joined other Mandigo families and began walking west towards the border of Sierra Leone.

As they trudged the vast terrain, they did not know that for the next 15 years, they would be displaced, moving from one refugee camp to the next, struggling to stay a step ahead of Taylor’s army.

CHAPTER 4- Refugee camps

Arriving at the border of Sierra Leone after three days of walking, the Kamaras took a boat across the Mano River and were greeted by the U.N. at a refugee camp in the town of Gba in Sierra Leon.

“At least we had a house. We made it ourselves,” Mariama said of their time spent in the refugee camps. “The camps were better, but life was not easy.”

The most severe dangers were yet to come.

Charles Taylor’s army of rebels crossed the border in March of 1991 and invaded Gba.

The Mandingo people fled east, traveling on foot for a month. Upon arriving in the city of Kenama, soldiers arrested Steven and his father, Shekou, along with 40 others. They stood together in a single jail cell for over 24 hours until the U.N. intervened, demanding their release.

“The locals did not want us to stay in Kenama because they were afraid the rebels would target them for allowing us to stay in their town,” Steven said.

The Kamaras settled peacefully in Water Loo Refugee Camp outside of Free Town, in Sierra Leone, for a number of years, and Steven was able to attend school.

In 1996 his classroom was disrupted by a group of bandana-wearing rebels wielding guns. He started fleeing toward camp, but was told that the rebels had been already been there. “I was so afraid that my family had been killed,” Steven said.

Reunited with his family, he resettled with them at Jui Refugee Camp in Devil Hall, Sierra Leone. Meanwhile, Taylor’s army expanded its rule throughout the country. The family was still at Jui in May 1997, when Taylor’s army invaded yet again. Steven began to run from the gunshots and fell, breaking his jaw. “I was unable to talk for a month and I still, to this day, suffer,” he said.

The U.N. transferred Steven and his family to another camp in the neighboring country of Guinea in June 1997.

Their first camp was burned down, and Steven and his family were then moved to another in September 2000. There he was arrested during a hospital visit for his jaw condition.

“They thought I was a rebel,” he said.

After being retrieved by the U.N., he and his family were again re-stationed, this time to Sembakounya Refugee Camp in Guinea.

It was there that he met Bindu Kollie.

CHAPTER 5 - Bindu

At their new camp, the Kamaras settled in with another 150 or so Mandingos. Two days later, Steven waited in line for emergency supplies and food. That is where he first laid eyes on Bindu.

“I thought she was very beautiful, and I told her that I would like to get to know her better,” he said. But two months passed before the two met again in the distribution line.

“We started talking and joking around and I felt comfortable, just like the first time we met,” Steven said.
They started to see each other regularly. “She told me where she lived and we started to meet each other to go for walks, talk and enjoy each other’s company,” he said.

They were friends for about two months before beginning to date and be intimate, according to Steven. After a month of dating, they announced their relationship to their families.

“My family was very happy for me and her family was also happy and they accepted me right away,” Steven said. “[Bindu] and I would see each other almost every day.”

When water sources were depleted in 2003, the refugees moved to Boreah Refugee Camp.

In 2004, the International Organization for Migration began conducting interviews with refugee families to determine if they were qualified to move to the U.S. Names of the families that had made the cut were posted at Boreah and, weeks later, the Kamara and Kollie families were taken to Conakry, Guinea, for interviews, blood tests and medical exams.

The Kollie family was chosen as the first family out of the refugee camp to move to the U.S. They arrived in Bowling Green, Ky., in August 2004. The Kamaras were ninth on the list.

“It was very difficult to say goodbye to [Bindu] and her family, but I was hopeful for the future and I knew that we would meet again,” Steven said. “From the time that we started dating, until the moment that [Bindu] left for the United States, the two of us had been inseparable. It was hard to be apart from [Bindu], and after she left, I had no way to contact her.”

CHAPTER 6 - America

The Kamaras were now a family of eight, comprised of Steven, his parents, Mariama and four children that his mother, Kema, gave birth to during their years in the refugee camps. They departed Africa, bound for Bowling Green, on March 7, 2005. In Atlanta, they were fingerprinted and photographed before boarding a final plane to Nashville, Tenn.

Arun Muremi, a caseworker for Bowling Green International Center, and Bindu’s brother, Mambo, were waiting for them when they got off the plane, according to Steven.

“They were a nice family,” Muremi said. “They didn’t give me any trouble.”

Steven is one of 89 Liberian refugees who have arrived in Bowling Green since 1990, according to the Bowling Green International Center. The non-profit center has resettled more than 4,500 refugees from around the world since it was founded in 1981.

Two days after arriving, the Liberian community of Bowling Green came to the Kamaras’ new home to welcome them. Steven was reunited with Bindu.

“I cannot describe to you the joy and happiness that my family felt at that moment,” Steven said. “Not only had we made it to the United States after living in refugee camps for almost 15 years, but we were finally being reunited with others that we knew and loved in Africa.”

He and Bindu started spending a lot of time together, as they had in Africa, but Steven worked at an automobile factory during the week and she went to school. Bindu would spend weekends at the Kamaras’ house and get picked up by her brother Mambo on Sunday evenings.

Esther, Bindu’s mother, asked Steven to move into the Kollie house in July 2005, Steven said.

“She knew that [Bindu] and I were in love and planned to get married some day and she thought it would be easier if we all just lived under the same roof,” he said.

He began to help pay the bills and drove Bindu’s brothers, Mambo and Umar, to high school, before driving Esther and himself to the Tyco factory, where he then worked.

Several weeks after Steven had moved in with the Kollies, Bindu began feeling sick and made a doctor’s appointment. She was pregnant. Unbeknownst to Steven, his freedom would soon expire.

CHAPTER 7 - Arrest

On Jan. 13, 2006, Steven took Bindu to her doctor’s appointment before returning to get ready for work. Steven and Esther were working second shift at Huish Detergents starting at 6 p.m.

Bindu began getting sick and Steven drove her and Esther to the hospital before heading to work. But on the way to work, he became worried and returned home. “I couldn’t bear the thought of working a whole shift without knowing what was going on with her,” Steven said.

Esther called three hours later, and Steven went to pick up Esther and Bindu at the hospital. The hospital had deemed the nausea morning sickness and said it was safe for them to return home.

He began driving, but at 45 mph the car began to decelerate. After pushing the van to a nearby gas station, he asked an employee to look at the vehicle. Smoke was spouting from the engine and the transmission was blown. Steven called Mambo at home to explain, and he paid $50 to have the car towed back to the Kollies’ house.

When he arrived, Esther and Bindu were stepping out of a taxi. Esther began yelling at him. “She was completely hysterical. She just kept threatening me, telling me that I better get the van fixed right away,” Steven said.

The damage was estimated at $1,500, and Steven began to worry. “She said if I couldn’t get her van fixed, than I wasn’t worth anything and I needed to get out of her house,” he said.

Esther Kollie could not be reached to comment on this story. Bindu Kollie, when contacted, declined to comment.

Steven left the Kollie home to live with his uncle. Upset, he went to speak with Marty Deputy, then the director of the International Center.

Deputy, a self-described advocate of Steven, told him to be patient and wait for the situation to blow over. “He was just a very nice, quiet little person,” she said. “He came to me, and it was just so frustrating, knowing that I couldn’t help him.”

Then came the fateful call that resulted in his arrest.

CHAPTER 8 - Charges

A search warrant was filed on Jan. 20, 2006, by Bowling Green Police Detective Melinda Howell.

Howell said that the girl, a 15-year old minor who was not named in the report, told Officer Mitch Walker on Jan. 16 that Steven was the father of her child. The report states that the girl was 14 at the time of intercourse and that it had occurred five or six times between May and November of 2005.

Steven corroborated the story. His arrest report noted: “During a scheduled interview at the police station, Mr. Kamara stated that he had engaged in sexual intercourse with a, then 14-year-old juvenile who is now pregnant with his child. The sexual intercourse occurred approximately six times, according to Mr. Kamara.”

Steven’s sister Mariama said that Bindu was mad at Steven when she talked to the police. “She didn’t want him to leave their house,” Mariama said.

According to court records, Bindu had testified that Steven would invite her into her mother’s car and would drive to a parking lot to engage in sex. She claimed in one interview that he paid her once for sex. In another interview, she claimed he paid her on three occasions.

Steven said that he gave Bindu money for school supplies, hygiene products and other essentials.
“Yes he bought her things…” Deputy said. “He liked her. It doesn’t mean he paid for sex.”

CHAPTER 9 – Court

Steven was indicted by a grand jury on six counts of third-degree rape on Feb. 1, 2006. He was held on $50,000 bond.

Court documents noted that Steven was short and thin, polite and cooperative. He did speak English, but his speech was heavily accented, and he was hard to understand.

Kentucky court rules require the appointment of a free translator for anyone who cannot adequately communicate in English. Despite Steven’s limited English skills, the Warren County court provided no translator at any of his hearings.

On Feb. 10, 2006, Steven stood before Judge Steve Wilson in Warren County Circuit Court for his arraignment.

“Do you have an attorney?” Wilson asked in a video recording of the hearing. After a pause, he continued, “Do you speak English?”

“Yeah,” Steven replied.

Wilson declared that the court would need to find an interpreter.

“This will stretch the resources to find a Liberian interpreter,” he said.

But an interpreter was never found.

Within a month, Steven was appointed a public defender, Renae Tuck. On March 6, 2006, she appeared in court for a bond reduction hearing. Commonwealth attorney Chris Cohron, as prosecutor, argued that Steven had slept with the daughter of the family that was providing a house for him.

Judge Wilson burst into a hearty laugh, saying, “Well, I don’t know what the rule is in Liberia, but over here it is against the law.” He declined to reduce Steven’s bond.

A new spectator appeared in the distant pews at another hearing a few days later where Steven pled guilty.
Wilson asked, “Sir, who are you?”

The tall, suited man stood from the audience pews to explain that he was a translator from the International Center. Wilson proceeded without acknowledging him further.

“Are you satisfied with, content with, Miss Tuck’s advice?” he asked Steven.

“Huh?” Steven responded.

“Has she done the best for you that she knows how to do?” Wilson reiterated.

“Yeah,” Steven responded quickly.

Judge Wilson read Steven’s rights in tongue of legal jargon, then stated explicitly, “You do not have to plead guilty.”

He spouted out a list of charges and possible sentences before being interrupted by a soft, clear voice.

“He’s likely to be limited in understanding the technicalities that you are using,” the voice interjected. The voice was that of the tall, suited translator. “He needs it explained on his own Liberian level that will get him to understand,” the man said.

Wilson spoke over him impatiently.

“Do you understand it is against the law in the U.S. to have sex with a 14-year-old?” he asked Steven.
“Yeah,” Steven says.

“That’s what you’re pleading guilty to. Is that what you did?” Wilson asked.

“It is understood,” Steven said softly.

“Then I accept the guilty plea as knowingly, intelligently and willingly made,” Wilson said.

Steven later said he believed this strategy would reduce his sentence.

“I went ahead and took the guilty plea out of desperation,” Steven said. “If I had known that taking the guilty plea was only going to bring me more trouble, I would have continued fighting my case.”

On April 11, 2006, Steven was sentenced for one count of third-degree rape- one year in prison without possibility of probation. He was required to register with the Kentucky sex offender registry for 10 years and to attend the Sex Offender Treatment Program.

It wasn’t until a motion for probation on May 22, 2006, that Tuck explained to the judge that Steven and his girlfriend had been dating since they lived in Africa.

“He and the victim had a relationship in Liberia. So while he is aware now that the relationship was illegal, I’m not quite sure that was the understanding when he came here,” she said, unaware of her factual blunder. Steven and Bindu began dating not in Liberia, but in Sierra Leone.

Cohron responded coolly, “I understand the cultural defense. We deal with it in all nationalities.”

Wilson emphatically added, “I guess it’s just our American civil religion that we understand there are just certain taboos about children.”

He denied Steven probation and kept the one-year sentence intact.

“Just sign your name right here,” Tuck told Steven. “That’s it.”

CHAPTER 10 – Prison

Behind the sheen of a glass pane Steven sat, separated from the heaven he had found in the city he had come to call home. While he was serving time in jail, Esther and Mambo visited him, Steven later said.

“[Esther] told me she was very sorry for what happened,” he said. “It was during this visit that [Esther] told me that [Bindu] and her other son, [Dorley], had been placed in custody of the state. It made me sick to think that the [Kollie] family had also been torn apart.”

Bindu and her brother were placed in Home of the Innocents, an orphanage for children located in Louisville, Ky. according to Deputy.

“I feel like that was the crime,” Deputy said. “They took children out of their home for cultural differences. They sent Steven to jail for cultural differences.”

A court-ordered sex offender risk evaluation labeled Steven to be “not a high risk of re-offending.” The evaluation said his treatment program should “focus on acculturation to United States values, mores, and practices, especially in the area of dating, sexual, social and family relationships.”

“I was arrested for my lack of knowledge,” Steven said.

Muremi, Steven’s caseworker, said that the International Center makes every attempt to inform refugees about American laws, including statutory rape.

“I think he knew,” said Muremi, who attended all of Steven’s hearings to support him. “It is sad for both sides. Good people got hurt.”

Steven was lawfully forbidden to contact Bindu. “I wanted to tell her that I loved her and assure her that everything was going to be okay, but I was never allowed to have contact with [Bindu] or my baby again,” Steven said. “This is something I will never get over.”

Steven’s daughter, Esther Penda, was born on May 18, 2006, while he was in jail.

“I fought hard to get visitation rights to see my daughter,” he said. “It pains me to say, that still, to this day, I have not seen her beautiful face.”

Steven wasn’t released from Warren County jail until January 2007, a year after entering. He couldn’t return home to his family because his status as a sex offender required him to live 1,000 feet away from any school.

He needed a place to stay and a job to pay child support if he wanted to stay out of jail.

CHAPTER 11 - Marty’s

Nestled in a pocket of lush trees beyond legions white picket fences, Deputy’s back yard became Steven’s new home.

He stayed there rent-free for seven months in a trailer behind the house where Deputy and her husband lived.

“She helped me out. I was like a son to her,” Steven said.

The Deputys’ neighbors were upset when they discovered that she was housing a registered sex offender.
Deputy, silver haired and sincere, stared out of her window gazing towards the trailer adjacent to the chicken coop.

“I’m afraid for what will happen if he does get to come back to Bowling Green,” she said. “It’s nearly impossible for ex-felons to find decent jobs, and my neighbors won’t have it, him living in my house again.”

Upon getting out of jail, Steven was hired at Dart Container Factory, where he made plastic cups.
“I was so happy to finally be out of jail and I wanted to make up for the time I had lost,” he said.

He began paying child support payments of $75 a month during this time, put a down payment on a car and took an entrance exam at Bowling Green Technical College. Meanwhile, he attended sex offender classes, paying $80 for each class.

In the early morning hours of his nightshift in August 2007, Steven was on the production line at work waiting for the maintenance people to fix the defunct machinery. His eyelids struggled and fell as he drifted into a sleep that would cost him his job. He was fired upon waking.

Urgently in search of another job, he scheduled an interview for the morning of Sept. 4, despite the time conflict with his sex offender class. He missed the class, and was kicked out of the program, per insistence of the instructor, David Brooks. Brooks did not return calls requesting an interview.

As a result, on Sept. 3, 2007, Steven found himself in a painfully familiar place – Wilson’s courtroom.
“Why didn’t you go?” Wilson asked Steven.

Steven made an unusually long statement in his defense: “I lost my job. I got a new job. I called to the office on Friday to let me go for my job, and when I call they told me she was not in the office,” he said, pointing to Brooks’ secretary. “And they told me to go for my orientation, and after my orientation I should give them a call.”

Wilson responded sternly. “You are to attend this counseling more than a job. In 60 days, if I’m not satisfied, I will have no alternative than to sentence you to three years in prison,” he said. “Obviously the parole board doesn’t like you, because they made you serve out a one-year sentence.”

Steven was arrested for violation of probation on Sept. 25, 2007 and sentenced to another 51 days in jail.

On Dec. 3, 2007, Tuck, Steven’s public defender, asked the judge to re-admit him into Brooks’ sex offender program. “Basically, we have somebody with no means of transportation and one person in town certified to do this type of treatment,” she said.

Wilson denied the request. After serving those 51 days, Steven would again find himself behind bars, but this time they would be those of a prison in Illinois, for federal offenses.

CHAPTER 12 - ICE

Steven was released from Warren County Jail on Dec. 6, 2007. Marty Deputy and Steven’s former probation officer helped him obtain government assistance and an apartment while he searched for a job.

Hired at Berry Plastics Company in April 2008, he worked for three weeks until he was taken into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, on May 28, 2008.

“My probation officer sent me a letter and asked me to come into her office for updates on my case, so I went to check in with her and I was arrested by ICE,” Steven said. “They told me I was under arrest for my felony in 2006.”

Steven’s probation violation was not a catalyst to his federal arrest, according to Hena Mansori, an attorney with the National Immigration Justice Center in Chicago who represented Steven in federal court. ICE gets tipped off by local enforcements and has the right to arrest immigrants with felony charges at any time.
Immigration authorities moved Steven to McHenry County Jail in Illinois, where he was detained until May 2008. During that time, he could contact his family only through letters.

“I miss them so much… to the extent that I can’t even have good sleep at all,” he wrote in a letter dated April 1, 2009. “It is like when you are in the grave.”

Because he was not a citizen and he had committed a felony, Steven was eligible for deportation back to Liberia. ICE took him to McHenry Country Jail to await his court date.

Steven’s family, having never been to a bigger city than Nashville, drove nine hours to see his hearing in Chicago.

CHAPTER 13 - Chicago trial

Past the metal detectors and manual security checks, and led by an escort to the windowless basement, Steven’s family waited outside the courtroom at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Center in Chicago.
“I’m a little nervous,” his brother Mohamed said.

Steven’s mother, Kema; brothers, Mohamed and Musa; Mohamed’s girlfriend and baby were present for Steven’s hearing April 9, 2009. The Kamaras settled into the seats inside the courtroom for another restless four hours of court proceedings.

Branded by the crisp orange attire of McHenry County jail, Steven cautiously sauntered into the Chicago courtroom.

Five pairs of his family’s eyes rested upon his back for the first time in six months as he faced the judge’s bench. The prospect of deportation loomed in the silence preluding the four-hour case.

The U.S. Department of Justice seal hovered ominously over Immigration Judge George P. Katsivalis’s head.

“Do you speak and understand English, sir?” he asked.

“Yes, your honor,” Steven responded, soft-spoken.

“Sir, I can’t understand you. You are going to have to speak up,” Katsivalis said before asking Steven to move to a seat directly facing the judge’s bench.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review guarantees a certified interpreter for immigration proceedings, but because Steven’s first language was so rare, an interpreter was not available for the proceedings. Mansori, Steven’s lawyer, decided to continue without one, so as not to prolong his sentencing and detainment.

She defended Steven with soft-spoken conviction as she asked him why he wanted to stay in the United States.

“I’m afraid to return to Liberia. I have been out of the country for 18 years. I have no family there. It is not safe.” He paused before continuing, “I want a better future for myself and my family back home.”

The home he referred to was Bowling Green.

Steven’s brother, Mohamed, after being quarantined in the hallway, was led in to testify.

“He was always a quite person. He never got into trouble,” Mohamed said. “ My family is sad. We are missing him a lot.”

Judge Katsivalis asked Mohamed why Steven should not be deported.

“If he got deported we are never going to see each other again,” Mohamed said. Before exiting out the gate to sit among the audience, he made one more plea: “Give Steven a chance. He is a very good person.”

After two hours of the hearing, Katsivalis went on recess to make his decision. The Kamaras were granted 15 minutes to speak with Steven in a private room, separated by the all-too-familiar glass barrier.

When the court adjourned, Katsivalis orally reviewed the entire court session, effectively lulling most of the courtroom with dense legalities. Finally, he read the verdict. After three years in detainment, Steven’s final order was reached.

Steven was granted withholding of removal to Liberia. That means he cannot be sent back to Liberia, because he would likely be persecuted.

Meanwhile, he can live legally in the U.S. and apply for work authorization, as long as he reports to ICE officers and abides by the rules of the sex offender registry.

Steven currently remains in legal limbo: He cannot be deported to Liberia, but he is no longer officially a refugee. He cannot apply for a green card or become a citizen, and he cannot leave the U.S.

Steven and Mansori accepted the decision and the government declined to appeal.

Steven nodded as Mansori explained his fate and was escorted out as calmly as he arrived, meeting glances from his family one last time.

The audience sat stagnantly, unable to comprehend the verdict.

A bang from the gavel resounded, and Mansori met with the Kamaras in the hallway to explain the decision.

“He could be home in less than a month,” she said. “But he cannot apply for his green card.” Swift smiles blazed across the Kamaras’ faces. “It’s okay,” said Mohamed. “He will be home. That is all that matters.”

Until then, Steven is back in Kentucky, at Boone County Jail, as he waits to be allowed to return to Bowling Green. The freedom he once enjoyed there is now restricted by his crime and will complicate his attempts to find a job and a place to live. Life won’t be easy, but it never has been. And he will be with his family. He will be home.

POSTSCRIPT

Steven Kamara was moved from McHenry County Jail following his deportation hearing, first to Jefferson County Jail, Ky., and then to Boone County Jail, Ky., where he will remain for an indefinite time.

 

WRITER'S NOTE

By Colleen Stewart

Steven’s account of his story was taken from a 14-page affidavit – a written statement comprised with help of an interpreter and confirmed under oath for use as evidence in court – as well as from written correspondence with Steven from various jails. Steven mailed me the affidavit from McHenry County Jail.

The story also references court records, including videotaped recordings of court hearings, obtained from the Warren County Courthouse.

While writing this story, I spoke regularly with Steven’s family; James Robinson, director of the Bowling Green International Center; caseworker Arun Muremi; and former International Center director Marty Deputy.
I sought legal explanations from Steven’s immigration attorney, Hena Mansori, as well as Kentucky immigration lawyer David Funke.

Bindu and her brother Umar were difficult to find, and when I did find them, they declined comment on the story, saying that they wished to move on with their lives. Their names have been changed in the story in order to conceal their identity. Bindu was released from the orphanage when she turned 18 and lives with her and Steven’s child. Bindu’s mother was unable to be contacted.

I spoke with Renae Tuck, Steven’s Warren County defender, on the phone and through e-mail. She said that immigrant felonies cases are not typical in Bowling Green.

Judge Steve Wilson did not return my many calls and e-mails.

Commonwealth attorney Chris Cohron did not return my call.

Steven’s sex offender class instructor, David Brooks, also did not return my calls.