Biden has rescinded Trump’s travel restrictions, but it will take years to undo the damage.

By Ty McCormick

Mr. McCormick is the author of a forthcoming book about a Somali refugee family’s struggle to resettle in the United States.

On May 30, 2019, Mohamed Abdulrahman Ahmed should have been in class preparing for exams. Instead, neighbors found the gifted high school senior hanging lifeless from a beam in his home in the Dadaab refugee camp in northeastern Kenya. He had taken his own life.

A sea of sand and thorn scrub and makeshift tarpaulin dwellings, Dadaab is home to more than 200,000 people — a city the size of Richmond, Va., or Spokane, Wash., except without electricity or running water. The camp was established in 1992, a year after neighboring Somalia collapsed into civil war and refugees streamed into Kenya.

Twenty-nine years later, the mostly Somali residents of Dadaab, now including second- and third-generation refugees, are forbidden to work formal jobs or to find homes outside the camp. They cannot even construct permanent dwellings, since doing so would run counter to the camp’s official status as temporary.

Mr. Ahmed, who was 26, had grown up in Dadaab and dreamed of finding a way out through education. He had been a star student, especially in the younger grades, and his classmates called him Qaddafi — not because he had any of the Libyan strongman Muammar el-Qaddafi’s traits but because he had been their elected student leader long enough to be a Middle Eastern despot.

Over the years, refugees in Dadaab have clung to one hope: resettlement overseas, sometimes in Europe or Canada but mostly in the United States. Tens of thousands of Dadaab’s residents have come to the United States; in 2015, for instance, more than 3,000 people from the camp were resettled there.

Those hopes of a better life were dashed on Jan. 27, 2017, when on his eighth day as president, Donald Trump suspended all refugee admissions and banned entry to citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, including Somalia. (Restrictions were eventually applied to 13 countries in all.)

The travel ban all but slammed shut the gates of the United States, which has accepted roughly three million of the more than four million refugees resettled anywhere in the last four decades.

When Mr. Trump’s ban went into effect, about 14,000 of Dadaab’s 200,000 residents were at some stage of the process to come to America. A mere eight refugees from Dadaab were resettled in the United States in 2018 and 14 in 2019. Even refugees with life-threatening illnesses were denied travel authorization to seek care in U.S. hospitals.

Although refugee admissions resumed in February 2017 after a federal judge suspended parts of Mr. Trump’s executive order, the resettlement pipeline from the countries affected by the travel ban remains mostly blocked.

In the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, the United States welcomed just 11,814 refugees, compared with 85,000 in 2016, the last year of the Obama administration, and the lowest since the modern U.S. resettlement scheme was created in 1980.

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