After Canada cancelled his deportation, Charles Mwangi pushes for status for all [Video]

For Charles Mwangi, the past five years have been “mental torture,” a series of bureaucratic hurdles and sleepless nights barrelling toward his possible deportation.

But on Saturday night, he felt something that had previously proven elusive: relief.

“I have experienced that torture for five years, then (Saturday) was the greatest day that I had ever seen something good in Canada,” he said in an interview.

“I slept like a baby.”

Hours before he was set to be deported on Sunday morning to Kenya, a country where he said he fled persecution as a bisexual man, Mwangi received a call that his deportation order had been cancelled. After a wave of petitions, protests and an emergency application to the United Nations, his pleas had been answered.

While grateful, he wondered why he had been made to endure years of anguish and uncertainty only for an intervention to come in the eleventh hour.

“Why all this denial?” …