It took 17 years for this Boise refugee to find his child. Trump’s travel ban delayed their reunion

The Rwandan genocide was long over by 2003, but the same hatred that spurred the massacre of nearly a million people was spilling over into the Democratic Republic of Congo.

One day, armed men showed up at Mwamba’s home in the DRC. They murdered his wife, a Rwandan refugee, in front of him, and demanded that he turn over his half-Rwandan daughter, too.

Mwamba and his wife had known this might happen, so they had recently hidden 1-year-old Ornelie with friends in their village. The men gave Mwamba an ultimatum and a two-hour deadline.

“If you don’t show up with your daughter,” Mwamba said they told him, “we’ll kill you.”

Ornelie was hidden well, blending in with the other children in his friend’s large family. Mwamba worried that if they tried to flee the DRC, any checkpoint guard would notice her Rwandan features and mark father and daughter for death.

It was the most difficult decision of his life. In the end, he fled to Zambia, leaving his daughter behind.

Nearly two decades and one miraculous discovery later, Mwamba paced in the arrivals lounge of the Boise Airport late on July 10. As the minutes ticked down, he stood quietly, eyes fixed on the glass doors, waiting for the young woman he sacrificed so much to save years ago.

“Fifteen minutes to go,” he said.

THE SEARCH FOR ORNELIE

The Mwamba family’s reunion would be a miracle, in more ways than one.

Mwamba eventually made it safely to a refugee camp in Zimbabwe, but he lost contact with the friends caring for Ornelie. No one in his village had cellphones at the time, Mwamba said, so he had no way of knowing that Ornelie was even alive. And there was no way he could go back home.

While in the Zimbabwe refugee camp, Mwamba remarried, to a fellow refugee named Victoria. They started a family and eventually resettled in Boise in 2011. Once his family was safely settled in the U.S., Mwamba restarted his search for his oldest daughter. He approached Boise’s Red Cross office for help, and the organization finally located his friend and Ornelie after a two-month search.

But his family’s joy at finding Ornelie alive was short-lived. Mwamba’s friend was leaving the DRC for South Africa, and he didn’t want to bring Ornelie. He offered to leave Ornelie at the Tongogara Refugee Camp in Zimbabwe, where she could apply for a visa to rejoin her father.

Mwamba was hopeful, but horrified. He finally had a chance to reunite with his long-lost daughter, but it meant leaving a teenage girl to wait for a visa in a foreign country. Even worse, Ornelie didn’t learn her true backstory until the people she thought were her family left her in a refugee camp, alone.

“Why did you leave me?” Mwamba said she would ask him, once she learned he was her father. “That is the question she asks me every time.”

The Mwamba family’s struggle to bring her home was only just beginning. In 2016, Mwamba applied to bring Ornelie, then 15, to Boise on a special refugee visa meant to reunite families that had been separated. The I-730 Refugee/Asylee Visa was supposed to take only a year. But when newly elected President Donald Trump instituted a travel ban in January 2017, severely curtailing refugee arrivals, applications like theirs came to a halt.

Julianne Tzul, director of the International Rescue Committee’s Boise office, said only two Idaho refugee families who applied for that visa have been reunited since the travel ban. The first, 9-year-old Patient from Mali, was reunited with his mother in March, the Idaho Press reported. Ornelie Mwamba would be the second.

Roughly 16,000 refugees have called Idaho home since 1975. Just 400 arrived in Boise during fiscal year 2018, a five-year low, according to data from the Idaho Office for Refugees. In comparison, more than 1,100 refugees were resettled in Idaho in 2016, according to data from The Associated Press.

“Before the current administration, all of these applications were vetted very carefully, but it was slow and steady,” Tzul told the Idaho Statesman in July. “What’s happened now is that it’s almost entirely stopped.”

IRC’s Idaho office has 63 other cases like Ornelie’s still pending. And it took almost three years before Ornelie even got a visa interview.

Groups such as the IRC are also bracing themselves for refugee arrivals to stop entirely. In July, Politico reported that the Trump administration is pushing to slash diminishing refugee resettlement numbers to zero next year. Tzul told the Statesman that would not only further devastate refugee families in Idaho, but also would cut the IRC office’s budget by 65%.

“With the number of displaced people in the world, now is not the time to shut down humanitarian programs,” Tzul said. “Each cycle that we’ve had under the current administration has been one of pretty extreme uncertainty.”

Tzul said the wait to be reunited with loved ones can be difficult and frustrating for the refugee families they serve. The families follow the rules, Tzul said, and still their cases get trapped in long administrative processing times surrounded by a “wall of silence.”

“Imagine the person you love most taken away from you for circumstances out of your control,” Tzul said. “Imagine knowing they are alive, but not knowing day to day if they are OK. We work with folks … who watch the world going by in this theoretical way, but are constantly worrying about what’s going on.”

‘THIS IS YOUR FAMILY’

The Mwamba family didn’t let the time spent waiting for Ornelie go to waste. Once her application began moving forward, around January, they prepared her bedroom, painted pink and decorated with family photos. Joshua, Angel and Rachel — Mwamba’s youngest children — spent hours video-chatting on WhatsApp with their new older sister. She spoke little English, and they spoke little Swahili, but they shared details of their days. Victoria, Mwamba’s wife, called Ornelie her “best friend.”

In between discussions about visa interviews, money and the logistics of helping a teenage girl live on her own in a refugee camp, Mwamba worked to rebuild a relationship with Ornelie. He’d had only a baby photo to remember her for so long. Now, she was struggling to adjust to the revelations of a new father, a stepmother and a whole new family.

While waiting at the airport on the night of July 10, Victoria said their kids have been pestering them for months, asking when their sister was coming home.

“We went to Walmart and they told everybody ‘my sister is coming today,’” Victoria told the Statesman, laughing and clutching a pink bouquet of flowers for Ornelie.

The crowd of family and friends standing in the Boise Airport’s arrivals lobby grew more excited as each minute passed. Members of the Light of the Nations Church, where Mwamba is a pastor, gradually joined the crowd to support the family. Together, they cheered when the arrivals screen said Ornelie’s flight was in range, craning their necks to see who would be the first to catch a glimpse of her.

Mwamba stood off to the side, quietly preparing himself to see the daughter he once thought he lost forever. When he left her in the DRC, he fled with nothing but what he could carry. Now he was giving her a new family and a city she could safely call home.

Just after 9 p.m., Victoria glimpsed her through the glass doors. She threw up her hands, waving frantically, then clasped them over her heart.

Together, Victoria and her children surged forward, enveloping Ornelie in a hug just seconds after she passed the security doors. Mwamba hung back, laughing joyfully.

“Wow, wow, wow,” he said, overcome with emotion. “I don’t know what to say.” He finally stepped forward, embracing his wife and Ornelie, who had picked up Joshua, her little brother.

Angel, 5, jumped beside them, waving a sign she made to welcome the sister they’d prayed for.

“We love you,” the sign read. “This is your family.”