The Papers in Her Pocket: How Kenya's Students in America Learned to Live With Immigration Fear

On weekday mornings in Lewiston, Maine, Margaret Ndirangu runs through the same checklist before she leaves her room at Bates College: her Kenyan passport, her I-20 form, and a folder of letters from the college confirming that she is enrolled, funded and exactly where she is supposed to be. Only then does the 20-year-old engineering student step out into the cold to start her day. "You carry everything," she says. "It gives you peace of mind."

The habit is not paranoia. It is the texture of studying in the United States as a Kenyan in 2026, a year in which immigration rules have shifted quickly enough that students have learned to treat their legal status as something to be defended daily, documented, photocopied and carried in a backpack between the lecture hall and the dining hall. Margaret's story, and that of a fellow Kenyan student an hour down the coast, was first told by Business Daily and Mwakilishi this week. Together they sketch a portrait of a generation that still believes in the American degree, but no longer takes any part of the journey for granted.

The Scholarship That Almost Wasn't

Margaret's route to Maine was never guaranteed. Back home in Kenya she put her education on hold to care for an uncle who had fallen ill, watching agemates move ahead while she waited. Her way back came through the Kenya Scholar Athlete Project, the programme better known as KenSap, which for two decades has placed high-performing Kenyan students in selective American colleges. KenSap helped her win admission to Bates with a full scholarship.

Even then, timing nearly undid everything. Her student visa was approved only days before Washington tightened its rules, a window that later closed on other applicants who met every requirement on paper and were refused anyway. Margaret does not dwell on how narrow that escape was; she is too busy. She divides her weeks between engineering coursework and shifts at the college IT desk, where her earnings of up to about Sh129,000 a month cover the expenses a scholarship does not reach. In the gaps she plays tennis and knits, and quietly sketches a postgraduate future she hopes will unfold in Europe rather than the country she worked so hard to enter.

When the Campus Becomes a Perimeter

The unease on campus is not abstract. After reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity near Bates, the college advised its international students not to move around alone and arranged grocery deliveries so they would not need to leave campus for essentials. A liberal arts college in a small New England mill town found itself, in effect, drawing a protective perimeter around its foreign students.

"Having all those rules around you, it makes you feel uneasy," Margaret says. The guidance was practical and well meant. It was also a lesson in how quickly a student's world can shrink: the same campus that promises expansive American opportunity can come to feel like the only ground on which that promise safely holds.

Forty minutes down the coast at Bowdoin College, Jada Amani has absorbed the same lesson. She, too, now carries her immigration documents whenever she steps off campus, a paper shield against an encounter she hopes never comes.

The Trip Home She Will Not Take

Jada has not returned to Kenya since she arrived in the United States. It is not money or time that stops her, but the arithmetic of risk: if entry rules were to change while she was away, she might not get back in to finish what she started. "If Kenya is banned, how am I finishing my degree?" she asks.

So she stays, through summers and holidays, missing her grandmother most of all, and the Kenyan food that no Maine dining hall can replicate. A mathematics and computer science student, she supports herself with part-time work in Bowdoin's IT department, earning between roughly Sh77,600 and Sh130,000 a month. Maine's long winters she has met with borrowed strategies: dance clubs for the body, fellow students for the spirit, and a light therapy lamp for the grey stretch of the year when the sun barely commits to the day.

The Sponsorship Door Swings Shut

What worries both women more than the present is the exit ramp. The traditional bargain of American study, a degree followed by practical training and then an employer-sponsored work visa, is fraying at every joint. Business Daily reports that many employers have scaled back or stopped sponsoring work visas altogether, deterred by costs that can run to about Sh1.2 million per hire. Proposals circulating in Washington would go further still, curtailing the Optional Practical Training programme that has long given international graduates their first year of American work experience.

"Only the big companies like Google and Apple offer sponsorships," Jada says, and competition for those offers is ferocious, concentrated among tens of thousands of international graduates chasing a shrinking pool of employers willing to pay the premium.

For students who calibrated their ambitions around the old bargain, the recalculation is constant. Which internships still lead somewhere? Which degree justifies its cost if the working years after it must happen elsewhere? Which country should be Plan B, and when does Plan B quietly become Plan A? Margaret's hope of postgraduate study in Europe is one answer to those questions, arrived at early.

What It Means for the Next Applicant

Kenya, notably, has not been placed on any American entry ban list, and Kenyan students continue to receive visas; Margaret and Jada are living proof. But the environment around each application has hardened. Kenyan applicants face elevated scrutiny in part because of reported visa overstay rates among their compatriots, figures that shape how consular officers weigh every file. The result is a process where preparation, paperwork and timing matter more than they have in a generation.

None of this has emptied the pipeline. KenSap and programmes like it keep sending Kenya's brightest to American lecture halls, and families across the country still regard a US degree as a transformative investment. What has changed is the question students must answer. It is no longer only whether they can get in, but how they will live once inside: documents in the backpack, holidays on campus, one eye on the news from Washington.

In Lewiston, Margaret has settled her own answer into routine. Passport. I-20. Letters. Then out the door to class, to the IT desk, to tennis, to the life she paused once before and does not intend to pause again.