President Barack Obama has admitted to living with his uncle, who was almost deported, one year after the White House said he never met the man.
The president said he lived with his Kenyan-born uncle Onyango "Omar" Obama while attending Harvard Law School, the Boston Globe reported Thursday. However, after Omar Obama's drunk driving arrest in 2011 the White House press office said there were no records of the president ever meeting his uncle. Omar Obama dodged deportation Tuesday when a judge gave him legal resident status on Tuesday due to "his good moral character and a section of federal law that allows him to get a green card because he arrived before 1972."
President Obama "briefly" lived with his uncle until he could move into his Cambridge, Mass., apartment. According to the White House, the two Obamas saw each other occasionally through the president’s law school career and allegedly fell out of contact afterwards.
According to the Globe:
Onyango Obama, now a 69-year-old liquor store manager in Framingham, said he had helped numerous students and had relatives in the United States, including his nephew, Barack Obama.
He said the president had stayed with him at his Cambridge apartment for three weeks when he came to attend Harvard Law School in the 1980s."It’s a good thing to let your nephew stay with you," he said after the hearing, adding that in his family, "your brother’s kids are your kids as well."
The president’s father, Barack Obama Sr., had helped Onyango Obama come to America in 1963 to attend an elite boys’ school in Cambridge. But Obama testified that he could not afford the tuition after the first year and graduated instead from public school in Cambridge. He said he went on to earn a degree in philosophy from Boston University, but the university would not confirm that.