Amazon Asylum Denied Category:  Memoir Publisher: University of California ISBN-10:  0520255100 Type: Non-Fiction Pages: 360 Copyright: May 1, 2008 ISBN-13: 9780520255104 "Asylum Denied is riveting and essential reading for anyone interested in the lives and struggles of immigrants. Kenney's story will astonish, frustrate, and inspire you."–Dave Eggers, author of What is the What "This is a fabulous book-a love story, a law story, a struggle against death, a battle for justice, and much more. I urge you to read it."–Bruce Ackerman, Yale University. "This is a powerful story, human and legal. It is as tense as a fictional thriller, but it really happened. The hero battles official torturers in Kenya, then American bureaucrats out of the pages of Kafka." –Anthony Lewis, author of Gideon's Trumpet 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.    David Ngaruri Kenney came to the United States after he was persecuted in Kenya. He continues to pursue a career in public service and currently works at the Montgomery County State 's Attorney's Office in Maryland, USA. Philip G. Schrag is Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Applied Legal Studies at Georgetown University Law Center. He is the author of many books including Ethical Problems in the Practice of Law, with Lisa G. Lerman, and A Well-Founded Fear: The Congressional Battle to Save Political Asylum in America.   Excerpt Chapter 1: The Farmers’ Boycott After the security officers decided not to shoot me in the forest, they blindfolded me again and forced me back into the van. I lost track of how much time passed as we drove through the night. They told me to get out of the van. They took me to a building and led me through it. They removed the handcuffs from my wrists and the blindfold from my face. My eyes adjusted slowly to the light from the only bulb. I could see that I was in some kind of prison. Heavy wire links covered the window. They ordered me to remove all of my clothing. When I was naked, they pushed me through a doorway. I fell into what seemed to be a dark room. Soon I realized that it was a small cement cell below the level of the prison floor: in essence, a pit. This was the beginning of the worst ordeal of my life. I landed in cold water, up to the level of my ankles. The lights went out immediately. There were no windows in the pit. I was very cold and in total darkness. I was completely disoriented, and more frightened than I had ever been. I ran my hands along the walls and felt the corners where they met. I stretched both my arms and touched the walls on each side simultaneously. I heard the officers’ footsteps receding somewhere above me. I was in some kind of small tank or box. There was no sound. Then the water level started to rise. It came up to my knees, my waist, and my chest. I thought that my jailors were going to drown me, because the walls reached above my head. I had no way to climb higher to escape the rising water. After a while, the water receded, back to ankle level. This became the pattern for days: at apparently random intervals, the cold water would rise and fall. When it was high, I had to stand to avoid drowning. When it was low, I tried to curl up and rest on the wet floor. The cell was not wide enough for me to lie down without twisting myself around on the wet floor. I could not sleep for more than minutes at a time, because I was afraid that the water would rise and drown me while I was asleep. I was entirely without light. I never had any food. There were no toilet facilities. To stay alive, I had to drink the water on the floor into which I had urinated and defecated. I could estimate how long I was in that cell by the length of my growing whiskers and by comparing how hungry I became with how hungry I had been, a few years earlier, when my brothers had forced me to live as a homeless person on the streets of my village. By those measures, I was in the water cell for about a week. Eventually, I had the experience of leaving my body. I felt that my mind separated from my physical body. I could see my body lying naked on the floor, as if I were floating above it. In my mind, I had long conversations with my dead father. Once, I walked over to my body on the floor and kicked it. I saw my own death, and I attended my funeral. I was only about 20 years old, but my life seemed to have ended.

Asylum Denied
Imagine a man whose sweetest childhood memories are of playing in a forest, who has to hide toys in a forest for fear his siblings will destroy them—the same siblings wishing him dead over property—and who one day finds himself blindfolded in a forest listening to Kenyan security officers debating whether to execute him. Welcome to the world of David Ngaruri Kenney. In Asylum Denied he and his lawyer, Philip G. Schrag, chronicle his journey from dissident farmer to political asylum seeker. These books are typically written for policy wonks and academics. Instead, Kenney and Schrag use a novelistic narrative to make us intimately feel the frustration of being at the mercy of a bureaucracy and maneuvering through the minutia of a judicial labyrinth. Kenney not only conveys his own resilience, but that of courageous ordinary citizens willing to challenge a daunting system with the cards stacked against those who need the promise of America most. His father once advised him that “the best way to be understood is to tell a story,” and he does just that. The book brings refugee status laws to light by having readers ride on Kenney’s shoulder, from a childhood where infant mortality and bribery are a way of life, to being tortured, to discovering true love along the way. The tale takes him from a land where women sell their daughters for profit to earning a law degree, and a human face finally replaces newspaper headlines in an inspiring call to action to reexamine the political asylum process. Kenney is able to make his troubles our own. He lets us know what pure racism is and what it is like to be a political prisoner who is treated like a felon by those with the powers to help asylum seekers most.

Eric Wasserman is a former AmeriCorps volunteer and the author of the short fiction collection The Temporary Life. He teaches creative writing and literature at The University of Akron and in the Northeastern Ohio MFA program.