A Los Angeles resident of 27 years, Chuck Birdie now lives on a floor in Nairobi and fears for his life.

The U.S. Deported This Gay Asylum-Seeker to Kenya Where Police Punched Out His Teeth

Editors Note: The subject’s name of this piece has been changed to protect his identity. For his safety, some details about his story have been omitted.

Resting on a mattress on an apartment floor outside Nairobi, Kenya, Chuck Birdie is dreaming of toilet paper, a new toothbrush, and the British Open.

In his mind, he’s at The Abbey—West Hollywood’s iconic gay club—or driving his Mercedes to the office where he worked as a computer engineer. But that life of 27 years is gone.

There’s no computer in the safe house he found his way to since he was deposited onto the streets of Nairobi after being deported seven months ago. Fifteen LGBTQ people cram into the three-bedroom apartment, most of them refugees from West African countries.

Birdie’s story is an immigration story not often told: What happens after an LGBTQ asylum claim goes wrong? At age 48, he’s spent more than half of his life in California only to be sent back to Kenya where he now fears for his safety.

“There is a lot I miss,” he tells NewNowNext over video chat via a cell phone he managed to purchase in Nairobi. “When you don’t have it, all of a sudden, it’s amplified.”

Over the blurry video connection, he opens his mouth wide and points to a gap in his molars: It’s the place where police punched out two teeth a few weeks ago after raiding the safe house and dragging him to the Ongata Rongai Police Station.

“It was a blow to the face, to put it lightly,” he says.

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Birdie came to Los Angeles in 1991 on a student visa to attend the University of California, Los Angeles. After graduation, he settled down in Culver City, on a hill overlooking the Westfield Mall. He made a comfortable living and traveled for work, his Taylormade golf clubs always in tow.

“Any free moment was selfish,” he recalls. “I was appreciating the dream.”

His friends joked that golf was his girlfriend, an incongruous comment because Birdie is gay. But in the U.S., being out-and-proud felt awkward for Birdie, who couldn’t safely come out as a youth in Kenya.

In California, he saw same-sex couples marry for the first time; then he watched the state’s voters strike down that right with 2008’s Prop. 8 vote. But in 2015, he celebrated when marriage equality became legal across the nation. He dated someone seriously and even came close to marriage himself, but as the U.S. advanced LGBTQ equality, Birdie’s expression remained muted. Still, he found joy in watching the country move forward and “being able to be a part of consciousness that was right and right by my heart.”

But during the years that Birdie called Los Angeles home, his legal status loomed in the background. Since graduating from UCLA, he had overstayed his student visa, unwilling to return to Kenya where he knew he would face hostility from his family and community as a gay man.

More than 70 countries around the globe still criminalize being LGBTQ, Kenya among them. In May, Kenya’s High Court upheld the country’s law criminalizing homosexual acts. While Birdie had once attempted to get a work visa through his company, the business was acquired in the middle of the process, and he was laid off.

In 2016, ICE arrested Birdie, and he was sent to Adelanto ICE Processing Center in the Mojave Desert, a two-hour drive north of Los Angeles.

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Adelanto has been plagued by human rights violations since it converted into a detention center in 2011. In 2017, the Los Angeles Times reported that three people had died at Adelanto, while a number had attempted suicide. Among those to report being suicidal was gay asylum-seeker Udoka Nweke, who said last year that he was beaten and verbally abused for being gay in custody.

Birdie says he, too, experienced homophobia throughout the four years he spent at Adelanto.

“A cellmate from Tongo found out about my identity from a detainee from Kenya and he confronted me in our cell during count time. He demanded to confirm what he’d been [told], as he did not associate with ‘fags,’” Birdie explains. “He continued to verbally insult me, and when [he] shoved me, my fellow detainee cellmates jumped in and summoned the dorm officer.”

ICE Media did not respond to a request to comment on Birdie’s claims of assault in detention or the details surrounding his case.

Birdie found a lifeline in an unlikely friendship with senior Unitarian Universalist Minister Dr. Betty Stapleford, who’d been trekking to Adenanto with fellow congregants for two years. An Atlanta native, Stapleford spent the 1960s steeped in the civil rights movement. Her social justice advocacy has brought her to Adelanto, where she regularly meets with detainees in hopes of offering comfort and support.

Birdie refers to Stapleford as a mother.

“From the very beginning there was just a real bond,” says Stapleford. “When the conversation came to an end, it was like, Has it been an hour?” The two talked about religion, about his case, and about his family back in Kenya.

At Adelanto, Birdie had been fighting his immigration case alone. He tried to claim asylum as a gay man who had faced stigma and cruelty before leaving Kenya more than two decades prior. But because he wasn’t out in his home country before leaving, his claim was denied, he says. It was impossible to predict the persecution he would face, a judge ruled. He lost an appeal, and in November of 2018, he was deported.

He arrived on the streets of Nairobi without a passport, an ID, or money. The only underwear he had was the pair he was wearing. He was homeless.

“My situation brings a stain to my family,” he says of being gay. He couldn’t turn to them for housing help or support.

But Stapleford had made connections for him to a safehouse and sent him money to buy a phone. There wasn’t room for him officially in the house, but he’d be able to sleep on a mattress on the floor. He couldn’t buy the phone in his own name because he didn’t have an ID, so he borrowed phones from Ugandan LGBTQ refugees.

Over the choppy video call, Birdie introduces a few housemates. They hang out on bunk beds, stacked high in a bright white, unadorned room. A gay man waves at the screen. A trans woman smiles from the middle bunk.

Police have twice raided the apartment after people in the neighborhood heard that the house was promoting homosexuality, explains Birdie, after showing his teeth. While residents there are careful to conceal the fact that they are LGBTQ in the streets, neighbors still know, he says. They notice people smoking cigarettes on the balcony wearing wigs. A number of people coming to and from the address are foreigners. These signs make the house a target.

Neela Ghosal, a senior LGBTQ rights researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), says her organization has documented serious violence against LGBTQ people in Kenya and a lack of accountability for that violence by the government. Between 2008-2015, HRW documented six times that health workers or advocates serving LGBTQ people were attacked or threatened.

The U.S. should take that into account when looking at cases like Birdie’s, Ghosal tells NewNowNext.

“What they ought to be evaluating is the legal situation and the overall security for LGBTQ people,” explains Ghosal, adding that a person’s own security will be heavily impacted by whether or not they have a safety net when they arrived. “None of those are ideal in Kenya. The law still does criminalize same-sex conduct.”

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Immigration Equality, which fights for LGBTQ asylum seekers, reports a 99% success rate in its asylum claims because LGBTQ people have such strong cases, according to the organization. Those numbers remain even as the Trump administration increasingly moves to block asylum-seekers at U.S. borders.

“For LGBTQ people who have fled their countries of origin where they’ve been persecuted, deportation can really be a death sentence,” says Spencer Tilger, public affairs manager at Immigration Equality. “So it’s incredibly important that we fight for LGBTQ asylum seekers and that they get the justice that they deserve.”

For Birdie, that means trying to seek asylum in another country, even if it’s not the U.S. But until he finds another—safer—home, he waits. He turned 48 in July, and no one acknowledged the occasion.

There is no television at the house, so Birdie observes the world from his cell phone. He’s a Megan Rapinoe fan, and is deeply invested in seeing the U.S, Women’s National Soccer Team achieve equal pay. He watched them battle for the World Cup in July—not on a live stream but by constantly refreshing the score on ESPN. As with most things in his life, he was waiting for the win with pained patience—checking for an update, hoping, and checking again.

“It was beautiful,” he remembers. “I knew what the outcome would be, but it was not an easy journey.”