Updated at 5:17 p.m.
ST. ALBANS — Steven Tendo stepped out of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building with a stack of papers in his arms and a smile across his face. “I am so happy,” he told a group of friends and supporters gathered just outside the front door, some of whom had started to embrace him. “I am here.”
Tendo, a Ugandan asylee living in Colchester whose plight spurred an 11th-hour campaign by advocates across Vermont to prevent him from being sent back to his home country, found out Tuesday morning that a top U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official had decided to grant him a yearlong stay on his deportation.
Tendo had characterized deportation back to Uganda — where he said he was brutally tortured for years and members of his family were killed — as “a death sentence.” He fled the East African nation in December 2018 and applied for asylum in the U.S., yet his claim was denied, as were subsequent appeals, as recently as last month.
But in a letter dated Nov. 12 that Tendo received Tuesday morning at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in St. Albans, the federal agency’s field office director in Boston, Todd Lyons, said Tendo can remain in the U.S. until at least Nov. 12, 2023.
“After a careful review of the evidence, you submitted and the immigration file, your request for a Stay of Deportation or Removal is granted,” Lyons wrote.
Tendo, who was required to check in with immigration officials Tuesday, had feared the agency would detain him and begin the process of deportation. His attorneys had applied for the stay on his deportation Oct. 24.
It was not immediately clear Tuesday what may happen to Tendo come next November. Hassan Elsouri, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney who’s been advising Tendo, said the stay of deportation means the federal government has determined that removing Tendo from the country is not a priority, and he can continue to live and work legally in the U.S.
Elsouri said he and other members of Tendo’s legal team are weighing multiple next steps, including reapplying for asylum or applying for a religious worker visa (Tendo is an ordained Pentecostal minister).
“This just gave us a bandage on the wound,” Elsouri said. “Now, we need to tend to it a little bit more.”
Tendo said he still must check in periodically with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. His next visit is scheduled for March 2023.
About 20 people — many of whom had written to Vermont’s congressional delegation and to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, asking that Tendo be allowed to remain in the country — accompanied Tendo to the St. Albans facility on Tuesday. The modest brick building is surrounded by fields just off Interstate 89’s Exit 19.
U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., as well as Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., wrote last week to the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Washington, D.C., asking that the agency give Tendo’s case special consideration.
Tendo went into the agency’s building alone and emerged about 20 minutes later. He read the Boston field director’s letter aloud to cheers from the small crowd.
Tendo said he is grateful for the opportunity to remain in the U.S. for another year. He is thinking about buying his own house, he said, and he wants to find a partner. Dian Kahn, a member of the Central Vermont Refugee Action Network who has been helping Tendo navigate life here, said she was “cautiously jubilant” for him.
“This is a step to citizenship,” Tendo told the group of supporters.
Tendo said he had no issues with how he was treated inside the building. He has met U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in Vermont several times before, and said they have always been kind to him — which, notably, was not the case with officials from the federal agency in Texas, where Tendo arrived to seek asylum.
Tendo was held in federal detention in Texas for more than two years before he was released in 2021 on humanitarian grounds and came to Vermont. He currently works at a Winooski-based nonprofit as well as a plant in Georgia that makes baby formula.
Tendo, who is a son of Ugandan royalty, also leads a charitable organization that he founded in Uganda called Eternal Life Organization International Ministries. In 2011, he said the organization began civic education efforts that drew the ire of the country’s government, which led to him being repeatedly detained and tortured by government forces.
Lynn Gardner, who is Tendo’s landlord and upstairs neighbor at his Colchester apartment, was among the first to give him a hug after he came out of the federal building Tuesday. Tendo, whose parents died when he was a teenager, said he views Gardner as a mother figure.
“I’m ecstatic. I’m so happy for him,” Gardner told a reporter several minutes later. “It’s gonna go right. This is gonna work out.”