“Why did you bring me here and why then you let the people hate us?” Kamal asked. “You’re bringing me here and you tell me to blend into the society, and then you tell the society that these guys might be terrorists and just be afraid. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Kamal is the antithesis of the stereotype of the humble immigrant. He is bashful about his English, but that is all (“Basically, the most strange thing is the language,” he said of America). In June, he joined Houston’s Syrian-American leaders at a community meeting with Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security. He introduced himself to the secretary and other officials, and made a plea for help in bringing his mother, who remains in Syria and was injured in a mortar attack, to the United States.

As Kamal ran errands on a recent afternoon, his status as a Syrian refugee was as much of a secret to those he passed as the scar under his polo shirt — a thin pale line over his right hip. Kamal’s body is its own record of the Syrian civil war.

In 2011, he was a chef who owned a catering company in Damascus, the capital of Syria, and he joined demonstrations against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. He was arrested and detained by military forces, spending 14 months in jail off and on. He speaks of electric shocks and beatings and, grimly, the removal of a kidney, which left the scar. Doctors operated while he was detained, for reasons that he says remain unclear.

“They took my kidney, like, as a punishment,” Kamal said. “I feel like I lost a part of my humanity there.”

Even now, he is unable to stand for long, and he has problems with his nervous system, neck, back and concentration.

It took him two and a half years to get to America, from the time he applied to the United Nations refugee program to his arrival in Houston. In Egypt, he was interviewed by Homeland Security officials. “It’s like an investigation, and it lasted for like five or six hours,” Kamal said. They asked him why, if he had problems with the Assad government, he did not flee to areas in Syria controlled by the Islamic State.