Nkeze wasn't home when Cameroonian militants came knocking, probably to deliver their signature ultimatum to join their separatist movement or have his writing arm cut off.
The 24-year-old economics student escaped to Douala, the country's largest city, only to learn that the government wanted to arrest him for participating in a university protest.
He then flew to Ecuador and traveled through eight countries to the U.S. border with Mexico, including a trek through Panamanian jungle where he saw corpses and refugees crying for shelter, food and water.
In his quest to settle with relatives in Houston, Nkeze now faces a potentially insurmountable obstacle: a new American ban that forbids anyone who travels through another country to the US-Mexico border from applying for asylum there.
When you find yourself on US soil, you are well-protected, Nkeze said, sounding upbeat as he waited in Tijuana for a chance to make his case.
You are protected by human rights. He spoke to The Associated Press on the condition that he be identified only by his last name due to safety concerns.
The US is increasingly aligning itself with wealthy countries in Europe and elsewhere to make asylum a more distant prospect.
On Thursday, American authorities sent a Honduran man from El Paso, Texas, to Guatemala.
It marked the first time the US government directed an asylum-seeker back to that country under the new policy, which gave him an option to file a claim there. He decided against filing a claim and returned to Honduras, according to Guatemala's foreign ministry.
Asylum was once almost an afterthought, until an unprecedented surge of migrants made the United States the world's top destination in 2017, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency.
The US held its leading position last year, followed by Peru, Germany, France and Turkey.
Trump has called asylum a scam and declared that the country is full. In nine months, the administration returned more than 55,000 asylum-seekers to Mexico to wait for their cases to wind through US courts.
Another asylum ban on anyone who crosses the border illegally from Mexico is
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