DADAAB REFUGEE CAMP, Kenya—Brownkey Abdullahi was born here in the world’s largest refugee camp 23 years ago and has never lived anywhere else. Now the Kenyan government has distressed its Western allies by renewing a push to close it, throwing residents’ lives into confusion and uncertainty.

“I’m somebody who doesn’t know where to move if they tell me to move from here,” she said on Tuesday by telephone from Dadaab, where she was born to Somali parents.

The government said last week that it had disbanded its department of refugee affairs, the official liaison to the Dadaab camp, the United Nations-run complex that houses some 350,000 people around 60 miles west of the Kenyan-Somali border. The department appeared to stop operating immediately.

The move to dissolve the department was necessary, the government said, to speed up the closing of Dadaab and Kakuma, a smaller camp housing mainly South Sudanese refugees. Kenyan officials say Dadaab in particular has become a haven for al-Shabaab, the Islamist militant group that is fighting the Somali government and has carried out major attacks in Kenya.

Interior Ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka said Kenya also was moving to shut the camps because of what the government describes as years of international neglect even as the number of refugees in the East African nation swelled to more than 600,000.