When Antje Croton took her three-month-old daughter, Clara, on a trip from New York to Berlin in December 2003 to visit family in Germany, she never could have imagined the ordeal that she would encounter upon her return to JFK airport. The wife of a United States citizen, Croton was awaiting approval of her application for permanent residency when she made the trip. Fearful that unauthorized travel plans would disrupt the grueling process of becoming a permanent resident, Croton took her travel document to an immigration official in New York to verify its validity well before her planned departure. After the immigration official confirmed the validity of the travel documents, Croton and her daughter went to Germany, only to return three days before Christmas to a hear a border security agent tell her that the original immigration official was wrong, more added Christmas stress, her Advanced Parole had expired in July 2003, and she would have to leave the country. Poorly treated in a detention center for eighteen hours, Croton compared the ordeal to her former home of communist East Berlin and blamed the bureaucratic confusion on the recent Department of Homeland Security takeover of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and the United States government’s concern for safety rather than innocent people’s rights and needs. Although pressure from national media resulted in a federal ruling that allowed Antje Croton to remain in the United States, she and many others like her continue to believe that a
nation with such high regard for family values should not be so quick to tear immigrants and their families apart. . . .
