RSSKidnapped as a kid, Transylvania student now fears deportation
Carolyn Hileman - The Voice | April 13, 2008
By Andy Mead
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Lino Nakwa has a head for numbers. His goal is a career in finance, perhaps banking.
Friends and professors at Transylvania University, where he is on the dean’s list, say he has the personality and brains to do anything he wants.
What he doesn’t want is to be deported to his native Sudan, the war-torn African country he fled after being kidnapped by militants as a boy. There, he says, he could be killed simply for being a Christian.
“Anything could happen,” he said in an interview Friday in the school’s library, where he holds down one of two campus jobs.
But deportation seems like an increasingly likely scenario for Lino Loboi Joseph Nakwa. A little more than six weeks ago, the Department of Homeland Security’s Citizenship and Immigration Services turned down his request for a green card, blocking the first step toward his goal of U.S. citizenship.
Holly Holland, a Louisville book editor who is active in immigration issues, said Nakwa is just one of many people snagged by unbending government regulations.
“So many people are being caught up in this because it’s just some vague interpretation of the Homeland Security Act,” she said. “Some bureaucrat is just stamp, stamp and there’s no appeal.”
The government’s reason for denying Nakwa’s green card request seems, on its face, to defy logic:
In 1992, when he was 12, Nakwa and an older brother were kidnapped by a rebel group called the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army.
His father, a chief, had taken the family into the mountains of Eastern Sudan to hide from warring factions. The soldiers descended on a Catholic prayer service one Sunday and rounded up all boys 12 and older. A boy who tried to escape was shot and killed.
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