Adelaide Abankwah
Ghanaian refugee
Adelaide Abankwah (born c. 1971) was a pseudonym taken by Ghanaian Regina Norman Danson when she tried to gain asylum in the United States, claiming to be fleeing female genital cutting and seeking political asylum.
Life
Birth
Regina Norman Danson is believed to have been born around 1971 in Biriwa, Central Ghana.
1999
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.
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, insisting her mother was deceased. Further inquiries from Ghana showed that her mother, who had never been a tribal leader, was still alive.
The case came to the attention of feminist and human rights activists who began to lobby for her release.
The public source identifies “Adelaide Abankwah” as ghanaian refugee. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Adelaide, Abankwah and Ghanaian.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 4, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4681662. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1971 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “Adelaide Abankwah” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.