A Kenyan professor has escaped narrowly after he temporarily won a court battle with the United States immigration,however the Augsburg University professor, Mzenga Wanyamwa, still faces an “uphill battle” to avoid deportation.
According to his lawyer Ms Rachel Petersen, Mr Wanyama received a stay of deportation from the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) pending its decision to reopen his immigration case.
After an earlier bid for asylum failed, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had allowed Mr Wanyama and his wife to stay as long as they made regular check-ins.
However with the new US government immigration authorities are more keen on final orders of removal, and in April Mr Wanyama had 90 days to show a path to legal status or leave the country.
His deadline to leave the US has been extended by the ICE at least twice and his deportation had been slated for September 9 but Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar’s office asked for 30 more days so he could get a visa to Namibia.
Mr Wanyama had made a contingency plan to teach at an Augsburg satellite campus in Namibia after ruling out a return to Kenya.
Accoprding to Lawyer Petersen, “If BIA decides to reopen Wanyama’s case, he and his wife will have to reargue it before a local immigration judge but they have another check-in with ICE on October 1.”
Mr Wanyama has been teaching English literature at Augsburg for more than a decade after having received his doctorate degree from the University of Minnesota. The university lecturer went to the US in 1992 on an exchange visa to study at Howard University in Washington, D.C.