PUTNEY — My adopted daughter is now a beautiful, healthy 20-year-old student at Greenfield Community College, but my recent passage through the Miami International Airport brought back the painful memory of her first trip from Colombia to the United States.
With every story I hear about the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service, detaining someone on the border or in an airport, this day also floods back.
I have no idea how Colombian adoptions proceed today, but 20 years ago, the new parents had to go there to meet the baby and be approved, then wait four to 10 weeks for a judge to give the final stamp on the documents.
We met our baby when she was 10 weeks old and in an orphanage in Bogotá. She was clearly too thin and too small for her age, and I was concerned for her health.
When I flew home after a week, I couldn't get her bright eyes and her skinny body out of my head. When eight weeks passed with no final nod from a judge, I decided to say goodbye to my family and work and to spring her from the orphanage. That meant an open-ended stay in Colombia.
When I arrived, I was dismayed to find that she had gained only 4 pounds in eight weeks - up to a mere 12 pounds at 3{1/2} months. I was ready to feed her nonstop!
Three weeks passed before a judge approved our exit from Colombia. On Labor Day, 1993, many pages of documents in hand, I arrived, with baby, baby supplies, suitcases, and high hopes for a smooth trip, at the Bogotá airport at around 6 a.m. There were lots of soldiers with machine guns all around. Numerous body and luggage searches later, and three different airplane gates, we boarded the plane.
* * *
After an uneventful flight, we arrived at immigration in the Miami International Airport. I was ready with all the legal papers for a smooth ride.
Instead, I was whisked out of line and led into the bowels of the airport, into a really hot, large room with about 60 people in folding chairs, all who appeared to be Latin American peasants.
I was told to sit, and that I would be released from this room only after the two women in charge of this room read through all the documents of all those who had arrived before we had. Only then would they get to my daughter's “green card,” which was really a large sheaf of papers.
The two women appeared to be doing anything but reading documents - buffing their nails, discussing supper options, taking long breaks.
I asked the women in charge if I could use the phone to call my family. No, the phone only calls Dade County. Could I refrigerate the baby's formula? No. Could I speak with a supervisor? No, it was a holiday. Could I get an estimate about when we would get out, so we could rebook our flight? No. The only way I could get out was to “ask every one of these people if you can go before them.”
After six hours, and with an increasingly agitated 4-month-old, the shift changed. Very few of the Latin Americans stuck in that room had been released in that time, but when a new man came on, he took one look at me and blew up.
“What is she doing here?”
He made it clear that I would be getting out right away, that I could call my family (from the phone that only called Dade County), and that this ordeal was a big error.
It was evening when I arrived at the American Airlines counter, only to find that there were no more seats that night on any plane to New York. I must have had a major meltdown, which I have forgotten, because, after being selected for a complete item-by-item search at customs, I found myself with a screaming baby on a New York-bound plane.
Amazingly, a Colombian woman seated in front of me took one look at me and at the baby, and she took over, calming my daughter and holding her for the entire flight.
* * *
While passing through Miami a few weeks ago, I asked an employee who looked like she was an old-timer about my experience.
She said that it is called “hard secondary,” and that sometimes people are stuck in that situation for days - only now, you are in your own little cubicle. She said I should have gone to the media - that it is so wrong, and that it happens all the time.
We all have experienced the security excesses in the post-9/11 world, but I always wonder what else was and is happening behind the scenes, in places like the basement of the Miami Airport.