The Time I Lied to an Immigration Officer

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

I didn’t know I needed a passport to get back from Canada. I had lived my entire life in Southern California, and when we came home from Mexico, which was often as this was long before the cartels got really freaky, this was the process:

Immigration Officer: Citizenship?

Us: American.

Immigration Officer: Have a nice day!

So easy! Plus, coming home from Canada, I had my California driver’s license, and everyone knows Gil Cedillo’s bill to allow illegal immigrants access to California driver’s licenses had been vetoed like seven times already, so if I weren’t a proper Californian, I would not have been allowed to have one (a license, not an illegal immigrant; we can have as many illegal immigrants as we would like!). I figured this was obvious, if the Border Patrol in Montana paid attention to California politics, and why wouldn’t they?

It was the summer of 2002, which means of course that it was post-9/11, but in addition to that, we were in the midst of a summer-long abductathon of every child ever, starting with Elizabeth Smart and working out from there. After Elizabeth Smart was grabbed from her bed by her itinerant lunatic captors, the news kept finding more and more child abductions, everywhere. There was also Samantha Runnion, a five-year-old girl in Orange County where we lived, who was snatched from her front yard and murdered. The quick capture of her murderer was what made my friend, sexy Sheriff Mike Carona, into a national name (Larry King called him “America’s Sheriff”) before America’s Sheriff eventually went to prison on all manner of sexy fraud charges.

My point about all the abductions and child murders and such is that when I was trying to come back from Canada with my eight-year-old son, I had no paperwork for him. I didn’t bring his birth certificate because it showed another woman’s name on the line for “mother.”

I was his legal guardian; I had cared for him since he was 18 months old, a few months after his first mom (my stepmom) died. But the state had never given me any sort of paperwork attesting to my guardianship, because the state is very stupid.

Our father was the one who had insisted we go to Canada and visit Lake Louise on our monthlong road trip to Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse and Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, where we stayed on the ranch of an abusive bigot, “Roy” (that is his name), and he screamed at me, purple-faced, after his wife let me use his computer to check my email. Of course I couldn’t give up the wife, who stood terrified in the corner, smile frozen on her face as she wordlessly begged me to keep his abuse on me. She had been so nice, and she seemed delighted to have another woman in the lodge. She had cooked us dinner, and done our laundry, and her small daughter had ridden trikes with my small son all day, a blissful day while I lolled on a sofa and read a novel and looked out the window at the 20,000 acres of ranch.

It was blissful while Roy was gone, hunting prairie dogs with the Jersey Italians who were the lodge’s other guests. And so I just stayed and got screamed at, for about half an hour, and later, after he’d calmed down, he said some stuff about interracial marriage, and also about how, since I was “self-described as being from California,” he didn’t care to listen to me having an opinion while he was trying to have a political discussion with the dagoes (imagine trying to interest The Situation in a political discussion, oh they did not care so hard), and that once I’d served my country, well, I could have an opinion then. So that was Wyoming.

So my father had insisted we go to Banff and Lake Louise, and we did, and it was somewhat twee, but we canoed on the lake, and it was gorgeous, and I was a supercool 28-year-old mom, and I kept us from getting grounded on the shore a whole bunch of times, and I was very proud of me.

And as we were trying to come across the border, the lady border guard was very angry with me for not having a passport, and for not having a birth certificate for my son. She was actually angry, and I explained about Southern California and Mexico and she did not care. She (angrily) told us to go inside and speak to a supervisory man.

Now, my son had called me his mother instead of “Becca” since the first day of Head Start, when he was four. The teachers there knew our relationship, but that first day, when I picked him up, they said, “Jimmy, your mommy is here!” and they looked at me pointedly, daring me to contradict them. Sometimes, when no one was around, I would whisper to him, “I’m your mommy,” but I had felt doing so out loud would be presumptuous somehow, thieving that title from his first, dead, mom. But those Head Start ladies had made the decision for us, and I was so happy to let them. Every boy needs a mother.

And so we went in to talk to the supervisory man, and we cooled our heels in the lobby a while with some fried-out acid cases who seemed to have been chilling there since ’78, and the old man called us back, and we went.

He asked some questions, and I was very much on my toes. “Is Schoenkopf your maiden name or your married name?” he asked, and I replied instantly, “My married name!” because otherwise Jimmy would have had a different last name from me! Clever! Smart! Smart and clever!

“What was your maiden name?” he asked me.

“Oh, I’ve never been married,” I answered.

That nice old man pretended not to notice.

Finally, thinking he would solve everything easily, he simply asked Jimmy, “Son, is this your mom?”

I had told Jimmy not to lie, in case the border guards had been trained to notice that eyes-rolling-left, or up, or whatever, meant untruth. It seemed easiest just to take the onus of our lies for myself.

“Son, is this your mom?”

“Nooo!” my son wailed, terrified.

And everyone in there, from the fried dudes to the secretaries, let out a simultaneous groan.

Shortly after that, the old man let us through anyway, I have no idea why, except that I was a very nice young lady and my son was a very nice boy. I bless that old man to this day.

Also, I totally had weed in the car, hidden inside a half-eaten tuna fish sandwich in our garbage bag in the back seat, so I guess that angry border lady wasn’t as good at her job as she thought she was.

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