Growing in a refugee camp in Darfur, four-year-old Wesal Adam knew her parents mostly as faces in photographs and voices on the phone. She knew that her father Motasim Adam and her mother Wejdan Adam lived in Brooklyn. But she did not know what they felt like or smelled like or how much they loved her — if at all.

But on Monday morning at John F Kennedy International Airport, Wesal and her father walked off a plane, reuniting the family and bringing a joyful end to a struggle that lasted more than two years.

Unlike many families splintered by the violence in Darfur, the Adam family’s separation was caused by the US immigration law.

Adam, while in the US as part of an educational programme for Sudanese professionals, sought asylum. He had been jailed five times by the Sudanese Government for speaking out against its treatment of civilians in Darfur. He was given asylum in 2002, and two years later, Adam was also granted asylum.

But their daughter was conceived after Adam was granted asylum, and outside the US, in Chad, where his wife had been living in a refugee camp.

A 1998 amendment to immigration regulations required that the relationship between applicants for asylum and their children must exist at the time an asylum application is approved. Wesal did not qualify.

“It’s unbelievable that a child like mine, who was a year old, did not get approval from the US,” Adam said. “I did not understand. You cannot take a child that is two or three from her parents.”

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