As the young West African woman languished for two years in an immigration jail in New York, all she had was her story. She said her name was Adelaide Abankwah and that she needed asylum in the United States because, back home in Ghana, she had been chosen "queen mother" of her tribe. If forced to return, she claimed, her people would discover she was not a virgin, as tradition demanded, and would subject her to painful genital mutilation.
The story shocked many who heard it.
Feminists and human rights activists rallied to her cause, drawing extensive media coverage and support from celebrities and politicians. Among the famous and influential who sympathized with her were Gloria Steinem, actresses Julia Roberts and Vanessa Redgrave, members of Congress and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. After judges twice ruled against her, she was released from detention last year and won asylum from a federal appeals court.
But an Immigration and Naturalization Service investigation has concluded that the story is a fabrication and the woman an impostor, according to INS officials and documents. The confidential INS inquiry -- and separately, The Washington Post -- found that the woman claiming to be Adelaide Abankwah is actually a 31-year-old former Ghanaian hotel worker named Regina Norman Danson. In an interview, Danson acknowledged her identity but stood by other parts of her story.
Armed with documents collected in Ghana, INS investigators recommended more than a year ago that Danson be prosecuted on a fraud charge. The case was referred to the U.S. attorney's office in New York, but, according to U.S. officials familiar with the case, the Justice Department has been reluctant to proceed for fear of embarrassing politicians and top administration officials who weighed in on Danson's behalf. The U.S. attorney's office declined to comment.
With a forged passport, an innocent demeanor and her startling tale, Danson managed to exploit the weaknesses inherent in U.S. asylum policy.
That policy is designed to accommodate people fleeing political persecution abroad, often with false documents or no papers at all. Over the years, it has allowed thousands of genuine refugees to start new lives here, but it is vulnerable to abuse by people whose stories are difficult, if not impossible, to verify.
While Danson has found a job and is awaiting a green card that would make her a legal permanent resident, another young Ghanaian -- whose passport Danson used and identity she assumed -- has been living a furtive life in Germantown, Md.
The real Adelaide Abankwah, a former college student whose passport was stolen in Ghana four years ago, has been afraid to come forward until now, living in fear of deportation because of her own immigration problems unrelated to Danson's. She objects to Danson's use of her identity.
"I feel like I'm being buried alive," Abankwah, 27, said in an interview. "I still want my name. . . . I refuse to let her [Danson] take that name."
When Danson arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport on March 29, 1997, immigration inspectors saw at once that the passport identifying her as Adelaide Abankwah had been altered and moved immediately to deport her. When she expressed fear of returning to Ghana, she was sent to a detention facility in Queens to await an asylum hearing.
Appearing before an immigration judge six months later, she told a tale of persecution at the hands of unnamed tribal elders in her village, Biriwa, about 80 miles west of Ghana's capital, Accra.
She testified that her mother had died in July 1996, leaving her to inherit the position of "queen mother" of her tribe. She said tradition required the new queen mother to remain a virgin until she took office but that she had already had a sexual relationship.
When the truth was discovered, she said, she would be forced to undergo a cutting of the clitoris and labia, sometimes called female circumcision. She said she also would be punished if she refused to accept her selection as queen mother.
Judge Donn Livingston rejected the asylum claim, noting that Ghana had outlawed female genital mutilation in 1994 and that reportedly it was not practiced in the woman's home region. Her fear of returning to Ghana, he concluded, was not reasonable.
The judge also remarked that "there appears to be some question as to the applicant's identity."
In July 1998, the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld Livingston's decision. But feminist groups and politicians had learned of the case and began denouncing her detention. Sen. Charles E. Schumer and Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, both New York Democrats, visited the woman they knew as Adelaide Abankwah at the detention center and wrote letters to Attorney General Janet Reno to support her asylum request. The women's rights group Equality Now lobbied the INS, the Justice Department and the White House in a "Free Adelaide" campaign.
Hillary Rodham Clinton "was very helpful in ensuring that INS was aware of the case at the highest level," said Jessica Neuwirth, president of Equality Now.
A spokeswoman for Clinton said recently that "the first lady followed the case very closely" at the time and passed information on it to the National Security Council. Clinton then "welcomed the ultimate outcome [the asylum grant], but she really did not believe it was appropriate to inject herself into the immigration service's ongoing process," the spokeswoman said.
However, according to three INS officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, higher-ups in the agency made it clear that Clinton sympathized with the asylum seeker and that top administration officials wanted the woman released to end criticism of the government over the matter.
The INS district office in New York was told that "the White House wants you to release her, so they released her," one agency insider said. In failing to defend the INS's handling of the case, the administration "has been willing to allow people working in the field to look terrible to avoid political embarrassment," he said.
In July 1999, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the Board of Immigration Appeals, saying the board had been "too exacting both in the quantity and quality of evidence that it required." The opinion did not mention doubts about the woman's identity.
But those doubts continued to rankle the INS. Suspecting that the asylum seeker was lying, the INS district office in New York launched a rare investigation into her background.
After three months of inquiries, a half-dozen agency investigators assembled what one called "overwhelming evidence" of fraud.
Agents in Ghana interviewed the parents of the real Adelaide Abankwah, took statements from tribal leaders and villagers and collected school, employment and other records on both women.
An INS report dated Aug. 20, 1999, which later was shown to The Washington Post, stated the agents' conclusion: The woman in New York was an "impostor" whose "real identity is now established to be Regina Norman Danson."
Among documents the INS found was a 1996 marriage certificate, contradicting Danson's claim -- central to her case -- that she has never been married. In one affidavit, a cousin of Danson's says she was never "selected to be a queen mother" and had no problems with authorities in Biriwa.
Furthermore, Danson's mother, Esi Esson, was not a tribal queen who had died, another INS report said. Ghanaian police found her in June this year buying fish at Biriwa Beach, and she picked out her daughter from a photo spread, it said.
In Biriwa, a warren of mostly mud-walled, tin-roofed shacks that straddles Ghana's coastal highway, neither local residents nor record-keepers recall anyone named Adelaide Abankwah. But some remember Regina Danson -- a quiet worker at a local hotel who had little education or prospects yet seemed eager to escape Biriwa's poverty.
At the Biriwa Beach Hotel, run by a German family, Claudia Kleinebudde, the manager, produced photos and employment records of Danson. "She was a cook and was a good worker," Kleinebudde said.
Danson had never been called Adelaide Abankwah, was not the daughter of any queen mother and never faced genital mutilation, Kleinebudde said. "Her whole story is a complete lie," she said. "Her name is Regina, and she left because she wanted to go to the United States."
At the Central House of Chiefs, a ramshackle building just east of Biriwa where records of the region's chiefdoms are kept, dusty files also contradicted the tale told in New York courts. Registrar Isaac Dadzie-Mensah said Danson was never eligible to be a queen mother since "she is not from the royal family."
At his house in Biriwa, local chief Nana Kwa Bonko V said a woman who is still alive, Nana Ama Osei II, served as queen mother from 1990 to 1993 and that the position has remained vacant since. Before her, he said, there had been no queen mother in Biriwa for 70 years.
Sitting in a receiving room stuffed with furniture, Bonko said that female circumcision plays no role in his tribe's tradition and that there is no punishment for rejecting nomination as a queen mother. Thousands of miles from her village, Danson sat in a New York City coffee shop recently and parried questions about her identity.
She admitted that Regina Norman Danson was her original name but denied having lied about her identity in court.
Asked by Judge Livingston three years ago whether she had ever used any other name, she testified that her mother had named her "Kukwa Norman." Kukwa is a nickname.
She also asserted that the name Adelaide Abankwah was legitimately hers because her great-grandfather had been named Abankwah and she was called "Adelaide" in school.
Told this fall that her school, employment and other records identify her only as Regina Norman Danson, she said that she began using "Adelaide Abankwah" after leaving her hotel job in Biriwa and moving to Accra. She produced an affidavit from a man she said was her uncle to support her other claims.
Speaking hesitant English in a soft, girlish voice, Danson disputed Bonko's refutation of her story. Informed that police reportedly had found her mother alive in Biriwa, her eyes widened and she fell silent. After a lengthy pause, she reaffirmed her story. Her mother had "started complaining that something was wrong" with the back of her neck in 1996 and died soon afterward, Danson said. She declined to discuss the matter further.
Danson now works selling French beauty products in a store while studying for her high school equivalency diploma. She said she eventually hopes to go to college and become a lawyer.
In Washington, the real Adelaide Abankwah, the daughter of a well-to-do Accra businessman, said she does not know how Danson wound up with her passport. Abankwah said she came to the United States in 1994 and got a student visa the following year.
When her passport was about to expire in 1996, she said, she sent it to her father in Ghana to have it renewed, but her father told her it was stolen from his car in Accra. Eventually, he sent her a new one, Abankwah said.
Abankwah later dropped out of college and lost her student status. In March 1998, she received a letter from the INS ordering her to leave the country. After fleeing briefly to Canada, she returned illegally to the United States last year but fretted that the INS would find her and felt helpless to expose the misuse of her name, she said.
Abankwah recently began cooperating with the U.S. attorney's office in New York in hopes of legalizing her status.
"I have no life, I have no life," Abankwah said, sobbing. "Friends of mine have graduated from college, and I'm still sitting at home and I can't do anything. . . . I want to go back to school. I want to be able to work. I want to have a life." Farah reported from Biriwa, Ghana.
As the young West African woman languished for two years in an immigration jail in New York, all she had was her story. She said her name was Adelaide Abankwah and that she needed asylum in the United States because, back home in Ghana, she had been chosen "queen mother" of her tribe. If forced to return, she claimed, her people would discover she was not a virgin, as tradition demanded, and would subject her to painful genital mutilation.
The story shocked many who heard it.
Feminists and human rights activists rallied to her cause, drawing extensive media coverage and support from celebrities and politicians. Among the famous and influential who sympathized with her were Gloria Steinem, actresses Julia Roberts and Vanessa Redgrave, members of Congress and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. After judges twice ruled against her, she was released from detention last year and won asylum from a federal appeals court.
But an Immigration and Naturalization Service investigation has concluded that the story is a fabrication and the woman an impostor, according to INS officials and documents. The confidential INS inquiry -- and separately, The Washington Post -- found that the woman claiming to be Adelaide Abankwah is actually a 31-year-old former Ghanaian hotel worker named Regina Norman Danson. In an interview, Danson acknowledged her identity but stood by other parts of her story.
Armed with documents collected in Ghana, INS investigators recommended more than a year ago that Danson be prosecuted on a fraud charge. The case was referred to the U.S. attorney's office in New York, but, according to U.S. officials familiar with the case, the Justice Department has been reluctant to proceed for fear of embarrassing politicians and top administration officials who weighed in on Danson's behalf. The U.S. attorney's office declined to comment.
With a forged passport, an innocent demeanor and her startling tale, Danson managed to exploit the weaknesses inherent in U.S. asylum policy.
That policy is designed to accommodate people fleeing political persecution abroad, often with false documents or no papers at all. Over the years, it has allowed thousands of genuine refugees to start new lives here, but it is vulnerable to abuse by people whose stories are difficult, if not impossible, to verify.
While Danson has found a job and is awaiting a green card that would make her a legal permanent resident, another young Ghanaian -- whose passport Danson used and identity she assumed -- has been living a furtive life in Germantown, Md.
The real Adelaide Abankwah, a former college student whose passport was stolen in Ghana four years ago, has been afraid to come forward until now, living in fear of deportation because of her own immigration problems unrelated to Danson's. She objects to Danson's use of her identity.
"I feel like I'm being buried alive," Abankwah, 27, said in an interview. "I still want my name. . . . I refuse to let her [Danson] take that name."
When Danson arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport on March 29, 1997, immigration inspectors saw at once that the passport identifying her as Adelaide Abankwah had been altered and moved immediately to deport her. When she expressed fear of returning to Ghana, she was sent to a detention facility in Queens to await an asylum hearing.
Appearing before an immigration judge six months later, she told a tale of persecution at the hands of unnamed tribal elders in her village, Biriwa, about 80 miles west of Ghana's capital, Accra.
She testified that her mother had died in July 1996, leaving her to inherit the position of "queen mother" of her tribe. She said tradition required the new queen mother to remain a virgin until she took office but that she had already had a sexual relationship.
When the truth was discovered, she said, she would be forced to undergo a cutting of the clitoris and labia, sometimes called female circumcision. She said she also would be punished if she refused to accept her selection as queen mother.
Judge Donn Livingston rejected the asylum claim, noting that Ghana had outlawed female genital mutilation in 1994 and that reportedly it was not practiced in the woman's home region. Her fear of returning to Ghana, he concluded, was not reasonable.
The judge also remarked that "there appears to be some question as to the applicant's identity."
In July 1998, the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld Livingston's decision. But feminist groups and politicians had learned of the case and began denouncing her detention. Sen. Charles E. Schumer and Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, both New York Democrats, visited the woman they knew as Adelaide Abankwah at the detention center and wrote letters to Attorney General Janet Reno to support her asylum request. The women's rights group Equality Now lobbied the INS, the Justice Department and the White House in a "Free Adelaide" campaign.
Hillary Rodham Clinton "was very helpful in ensuring that INS was aware of the case at the highest level," said Jessica Neuwirth, president of Equality Now.
A spokeswoman for Clinton said recently that "the first lady followed the case very closely" at the time and passed information on it to the National Security Council. Clinton then "welcomed the ultimate outcome [the asylum grant], but she really did not believe it was appropriate to inject herself into the immigration service's ongoing process," the spokeswoman said.
However, according to three INS officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, higher-ups in the agency made it clear that Clinton sympathized with the asylum seeker and that top administration officials wanted the woman released to end criticism of the government over the matter.
The INS district office in New York was told that "the White House wants you to release her, so they released her," one agency insider said. In failing to defend the INS's handling of the case, the administration "has been willing to allow people working in the field to look terrible to avoid political embarrassment," he said.
In July 1999, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the Board of Immigration Appeals, saying the board had been "too exacting both in the quantity and quality of evidence that it required." The opinion did not mention doubts about the woman's identity.
But those doubts continued to rankle the INS. Suspecting that the asylum seeker was lying, the INS district office in New York launched a rare investigation into her background.
After three months of inquiries, a half-dozen agency investigators assembled what one called "overwhelming evidence" of fraud.
Agents in Ghana interviewed the parents of the real Adelaide Abankwah, took statements from tribal leaders and villagers and collected school, employment and other records on both women.
An INS report dated Aug. 20, 1999, which later was shown to The Washington Post, stated the agents' conclusion: The woman in New York was an "impostor" whose "real identity is now established to be Regina Norman Danson."
Among documents the INS found was a 1996 marriage certificate, contradicting Danson's claim -- central to her case -- that she has never been married. In one affidavit, a cousin of Danson's says she was never "selected to be a queen mother" and had no problems with authorities in Biriwa.
Furthermore, Danson's mother, Esi Esson, was not a tribal queen who had died, another INS report said. Ghanaian police found her in June this year buying fish at Biriwa Beach, and she picked out her daughter from a photo spread, it said.
In Biriwa, a warren of mostly mud-walled, tin-roofed shacks that straddles Ghana's coastal highway, neither local residents nor record-keepers recall anyone named Adelaide Abankwah. But some remember Regina Danson -- a quiet worker at a local hotel who had little education or prospects yet seemed eager to escape Biriwa's poverty.
At the Biriwa Beach Hotel, run by a German family, Claudia Kleinebudde, the manager, produced photos and employment records of Danson. "She was a cook and was a good worker," Kleinebudde said.
Danson had never been called Adelaide Abankwah, was not the daughter of any queen mother and never faced genital mutilation, Kleinebudde said. "Her whole story is a complete lie," she said. "Her name is Regina, and she left because she wanted to go to the United States."
At the Central House of Chiefs, a ramshackle building just east of Biriwa where records of the region's chiefdoms are kept, dusty files also contradicted the tale told in New York courts. Registrar Isaac Dadzie-Mensah said Danson was never eligible to be a queen mother since "she is not from the royal family."
At his house in Biriwa, local chief Nana Kwa Bonko V said a woman who is still alive, Nana Ama Osei II, served as queen mother from 1990 to 1993 and that the position has remained vacant since. Before her, he said, there had been no queen mother in Biriwa for 70 years.
Sitting in a receiving room stuffed with furniture, Bonko said that female circumcision plays no role in his tribe's tradition and that there is no punishment for rejecting nomination as a queen mother. Thousands of miles from her village, Danson sat in a New York City coffee shop recently and parried questions about her identity.
She admitted that Regina Norman Danson was her original name but denied having lied about her identity in court.
Asked by Judge Livingston three years ago whether she had ever used any other name, she testified that her mother had named her "Kukwa Norman." Kukwa is a nickname.
She also asserted that the name Adelaide Abankwah was legitimately hers because her great-grandfather had been named Abankwah and she was called "Adelaide" in school.
Told this fall that her school, employment and other records identify her only as Regina Norman Danson, she said that she began using "Adelaide Abankwah" after leaving her hotel job in Biriwa and moving to Accra. She produced an affidavit from a man she said was her uncle to support her other claims.
Speaking hesitant English in a soft, girlish voice, Danson disputed Bonko's refutation of her story. Informed that police reportedly had found her mother alive in Biriwa, her eyes widened and she fell silent. After a lengthy pause, she reaffirmed her story. Her mother had "started complaining that something was wrong" with the back of her neck in 1996 and died soon afterward, Danson said. She declined to discuss the matter further.
Danson now works selling French beauty products in a store while studying for her high school equivalency diploma. She said she eventually hopes to go to college and become a lawyer.
In Washington, the real Adelaide Abankwah, the daughter of a well-to-do Accra businessman, said she does not know how Danson wound up with her passport. Abankwah said she came to the United States in 1994 and got a student visa the following year.
When her passport was about to expire in 1996, she said, she sent it to her father in Ghana to have it renewed, but her father told her it was stolen from his car in Accra. Eventually, he sent her a new one, Abankwah said.
Abankwah later dropped out of college and lost her student status. In March 1998, she received a letter from the INS ordering her to leave the country. After fleeing briefly to Canada, she returned illegally to the United States last year but fretted that the INS would find her and felt helpless to expose the misuse of her name, she said.
Abankwah recently began cooperating with the U.S. attorney's office in New York in hopes of legalizing her status.
"I have no life, I have no life," Abankwah said, sobbing. "Friends of mine have graduated from college, and I'm still sitting at home and I can't do anything. . . . I want to go back to school. I want to be able to work. I want to have a life." Farah reported from Biriwa, Ghana.
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