Woman, 38, ordered back to Mexico after lifetime in U.S.

TACOMA, Wash. - A 38-year-old Omak woman who was taken from a Mexican orphanage as a baby and adopted by a U.S. family has been ordered back to Mexico after a judge ruled she never legally immigrated to the United States.

Tara Ammons Cohen, who has lived in the U.S. virtually her entire life and is married with three children, thought her mother had legally adopted her when she was a child and that she was an American citizen.

But an immigration judge ruled Thursday that she has no choice but to order Cohen deported back to Mexico, because her adoptive family never actually completed her immigration paperwork when she was a child.

Cohen says she has no family in Mexico, doesn't speak Spanish and is frightened at the prospect of facing life in a foreign country she knows little or nothing about.

"I guess that's the reality I don't even want to think about right now," she said in an earlier interview. "I'm scared. I'm scared to be just dropped off at the border and (they) say, 'Good Luck.' To me, that's so horrendously inhumane."

"I was just shocked, because I've gone to college. I've paid taxes. It was just ... there was no words to even describe it," she said. "This should have been taken care of when I was brought over the border."

Cohen says she didn't know about her illegal status until she ran into trouble in 2007.

She says she had too much to drink one night, and accidentally took her neighbor's purse, which was very similar to her own. Cohen was dealing with alcohol abuse at the time, and the purse contained prescription drugs, she said.

"We have similar purses. I walked out of the house with her purse. It was not done on purpose whatsoever. But unfortunately the next morning, I figured out what I had done. I had used her ATM card. I had taken her purse, and instead of doing the right thing, which I should have ... I got rid of the purse. And when the cops showed up at my house, I guess I could've lied and said, 'No, prove it,' I said, 'Yes, I did do it,'" said Cohen.

While serving her sentence of three months and undergoing drug treatment, Cohen told authorities she was trying to sort out her immigration status. The day she walked out of prison, however, immigration officials were waiting to haul her away.

Now she's being held at a detention center bordered by a barbed wire fence and trying to decide whether to appeal Immigration Judge Tammy L. Fitting's deportation order.

Fitting's ruling marks the second time that a court has ruled against her in her immigration case, and Fitting says she had no choice but to rule against Cohen.

In her decision, Fitting wrote that Cohen has no grounds to apply for political asylum, and that there is no evidence that Cohen would be tortured or mistreated if returned to Mexico.

Fitting also ruled that drug violence in Mexico is an insufficient reason to grant Cohen's petition to remain in the United States.

So the judge ordered Cohen to return to the country of her birth.

Cohen's husband, Thomas Lee Cohen Jr., has said he will not move to Mexico with his wife, if she loses all appeals, because it is too dangerous for their three children.