Obama’s ‘illegal’ Kenyan Auntie wins the right to stay in America

President Obama’s “Auntie Zeituni”, who was discovered by The Times living illegally in Boston, was granted asylum in America yesterday in a controversial decision that will fuel the already charged debate on illegal immigrants.

A judge ruled that Zeituni Onyango, 57, the Kenyan half-sister of President Obama’s late father, would be allowed to stay in the country despite ignoring a 2004 deportation order.

Ms Onyango received the notification by mail three months after she turned up in a wheelchair to testify before an immigration judge at a closed-door hearing in Boston. The rationale for the judge’s decision was not made public.

She made a previous unsuccessful application for asylum, based on violence in her native Kenya, after which she was ordered out of the US.

There had been speculation that her relationship to the President could put her at greater risk in her homeland in the eyes of an immigration judge. “The asylum process is confidential and she wants to keep it that way, so we can’t get into details on why the judge granted asylum or the exact basis for her claim,” Scott Bratton, her lawyer, said.

Ms Onyango and Mr Obama share the same Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama. Ms Onyango is Mr Onyango Obama’s daughter by his third wife, the woman Mr Obama calls Granny because she raised his father.

But Mr Obama’s father, Barack Sr, was actually Mr Onyango Obama’s son by his second wife. That makes Ms Onyango a half-aunt of the President.

She was an important character in Mr Obama’s best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father. At the time of Mr Obama’s celebrated voyage of self-discovery to his ancestral home, in 1988, she was a computer programmer at Kenya Breweries in Nairobi.

However, just days before Mr Obama’s election victory in 2008, The Times discovered that Ms Onyango was living in a disabled-access flat on a housing estate in Boston — just miles from where Mr Obama studied at Harvard Law School.

Ms Onyango sought to avoid The Times’s inquiries. In a first telephone call, a woman believed to be her said that Ms Onyango had gone to California. In a second call, she said that Ms Onyango was dead. In a third call, she spoke French. When The Times finally caught up with her, walking outside her flat, she said that she had been going back and forth between Kenya and the US since 1975.

It quickly emerged that Ms Onyango was in the US illegally. She arrived in America on a temporary visa in 2000 to join a son who had been accepted at a college in Boston, her lawyer said. Her first request for asylum was rejected, but she did not comply with the 2004 deportation order.

After she was discovered, Ms Onyango hired a lawyer and filed a new asylum request — turning up to one hearing in a bizarre disguise that included a curly red wig, sunglasses, and an ankle-length coat of black and white fake fur.

Although Ms Onyango attended Mr Obama’s swearing-in as a US senator in 2004, Mr Obama insisted that he had not known she was living in America illegally. She also attended his inauguration as President.

Ms Onyango has tried to keep her distance from her famous relative in case she damages his presidency. “Right now, with this controversy, I don’t want to disturb him because he’s got a big job to do,” she told WKYC TV.

A frail woman, Ms Onyango says that she is learning to walk again after being paralysed by an auto-immune disorder known as Guillain-Barré syndrome. In 2008, she served as a volunteer resident health advocate for the Boston Housing Authority, earning a small stipend for six hours of work a week. But it is unclear who has paid for her medical treatment in the US.

Also unknown is what became of her brother, Mr Obama’s half-uncle, Obama Onyango. A partner in a convenience store, “Uncle Omar” also lived in Boston until at least 2000 when he was evicted. Friends told The Times that he did not wish to be contacted.

Ms Onyango plans to apply for a US work visa and is now eligible for a green card, conferring permanent residency after one year.