Adelaide Abankwah

Adelaide Abankwah (born c. 1971) was a pseudonym taken by Ghanaian Regina Norman Danson when she tried to immigrate to the United States as a refugee claiming to be fleeing female genital cutting and seeking political asylum.

"Adelaide Abankwah" appeared in the United States in 1997 from Ghana. She claimed that she had inherited the position of a female chief of her tribe after her mother had died. The position, however, demanded that she would be a virgin. She had fallen in love with a Christian and if she went back, the tribe would discover she was not a virgin any more and she would be forced to submit to genital mutilation. Thus she applied for political asylum on 29 March 1997. The INS officials suspected that her passport had been forged or otherwise altered, had her detained and began proceedings to expel her. Abankwah was detained for over two years in the privately operated Queens Detention Facility in Jamaica, Queens, New York, when her application for asylum was twice rejected, first by an immigration judge, and then in 1999 by the Board of Immigration Appeals.[1][2]

Eventually, the INS investigation determined that the "Abankwah" was an impostor. Her real name was Regina Norman Danson. She had adopted the name of another Ghanaian woman who was living in Maryland and whose passport had been stolen in Ghana. Danson admitted that she had given a wrong name but that her story was still true, which Norman refused to acknowledge, insisting her mother was deceased. Further inquiries from Ghana showed that her mother, who had never been a tribal leader, was still alive. Immigration Judge Donn Livingston noted that the practice was predominant in the northern part of Ghana, had been decreasing, and that the Ghanaian government had declared female circumcision illegal in 1994.[2]

The case came to the attention of feminist and human rights activists who began to lobby for her release. They included actresses Julia Roberts and Vanessa Redgrave and then-First Lady Hillary Clinton. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision in July 1999 and granted Danson asylum. INS continued to investigate and found "overwhelming evidence" of fraud. The U.S. Department of Justice was still hesitant to pursue a fraud conviction because of possible public furor and bad publicity but indicted her in 2001 on fraud shortly before the statute of limitations ran out. The real Abankwah cooperated with INS to have the case cleared.[3][1]

The fraud trial began on 14 January 2002. Prosecutor Ronnie Abrams stated that the bid for political asylum made a "mockery of the immigration system and real victims of genital mutilation".[4] Tribal Chief Nana Kwa Bonko V testified that Danson was not in the tribe's royal succession and that they did not practice female circumcision. According to GhanaWeb,[5]

Danson was to be sentenced for fraud on 23 March 2003, "for up to 16 months in prison, after which she will be deported to Ghana".[6] However, she was sentenced to time served by federal Judge Charles Sifton. (She spent 29 months in an immigration detention center.)</ref> And, based on an amici curiae brief ("ON PETITION FOR REVIEW FROM THE BOARD OF IMMIGRATION APPEALS"), on behalf of Regina Danson Norman in 2014 by the Immigrant Defense Project, she apparently was never deported or removed from the United States.[7]