The WORST way to find out you're adopted!!!!

I was 18, had just graduated high school on the honor roll, had received a full scholarship to an art college in my home state and went to fill out my first job application for a summer job until I started college in the fall. On the application I checked the box saying I was an American citizen and gave them my drivers license, social security card and birth certificate to photocopy for employment records. Instead of a call saying I had gotten the job I got ICE/DHS on my doorstep putting handcuffs on me and saying I was illegal. Over the next three hours as I was strip-searched and processed I learned that I had been adopted from overseas as an infant (something my adoptive parents never told me before they died in a car accidet six months previous) but that since my parents never officially filed the adoption paperwork with ICE (it was INS then) I was not a citizen, I was illegal, and I was being detained for deportation. I screamed. I cried. I had a temper tantrum. I didn't even know how to process it--in one minute everything I believed true about mysel was taken away. My name wasn't mine, my birthday wasn't mine (I have no original birth certificate so I don't know exactly how old I am) Dad and Mom wern't my blood parents and the US is not my home. I will tell you that the way I found out has to be absolutely the WORSTway; as you're standing naked in front of a deportation official who is getting ready to body-cavity-search you to make sure you aren't hiding drugs before they put you in prison. It's very hard to relax your sphincter when you're hysterical! They sent me to a regular womenҒs prison in my home state. Because the missing adoption record apparently had my name change on it, they refused to refer to me with my name; they called me by the name on my baby passport and in a fit of childish anger I refused to answer whenever they used that name. A week in soliary confinement broke me of that--I was terrified they would put me back in so I started to answer by my passport name. I was in a womens' prison for a year before they moved me across the country to a detainee camp. The detainee camp--I can't describe it. Awful, for someone who had lived her life in nice houses with the best private school education, spoke regular American teen English, grew up with computers and TV and music and all my books and my drawing materials--I wanted to be police sketch artist. I was allowed to have three books, which were soon stolen. I was allowed paper but no pencils or pens--people can commit suicide or assault with them. I could draw with a pencil one hour a day under a guard supervision; when the hour was up or if the guard got tired of listening to the pencil scratching and fed up with having to sharpen it for me (I couldn't sharpen it myself, pencil sharpeners have razors in them) he took it all away and I went back to my cell. I registered to work around the center; cleaning toilets, scrubbing dishes and floors, doing laundry. The strongest stuff allowed to clean with was dishsoap because you can throw bleach on a guard and hurt them. No toilet plungers--wooden handles can be shaped into shivs. No rubber gloves--those who were in for actual crimes like drug running could cut the fingers off and put drugs in them, then swallow them and use them to smuggle drugs from camp to camp--ICE can load you on a plane in the middle of the night and ship you out without notifying local authorities, relative, and any lawyers who might be handling your case. One day of work equaled one stamp, another day equaled one envelope. The one hour a week I could go to the camp library and use the computer (no internet) I spent looking up the addresses to and then writing letters to, every courthouse in every state my parents had ever lived in trying to figure out where my adoption had ben finalized. Letters I wrote to those courthouses had to be given to the guards unsealed so they could check it for 'factuality and relevance' before I could put a stamp on it and any violations were punished by revoking the privilge of working and putting me in solitary confinement. I finally found my adoption record in a courthouse in Maryland, and I was then free to go. I walked out of that detention center wearing someone else's clothes in a city I had never been in before and knew no one; no money, no job, and the stigma of being illegal I would have to carry for the rest of my life--because every employer I apply with now needs to be told I was formerly illegal and have a file with immigration. It automtically eliminates me for a lot of jobs; a lot of employers don't want to deal with ICE in any way, shape, or form. My college scholarship was gone--I had been in ICE detention for three years. My high school ring was gone--taken from me at the women's prison and lost or stolen by the guards somewhere. Everything that was in the apartment I was living in at the time was confiscated and disposed of by the governmnt as 'seized civil assets'; my yearbooks, my high school transcripts, my elementary school report cards, honor roll certificates, even my 6th grade spelling bee trophy and all my paintings. The only thing I have left is my Dad's Vietnam service revolver; it is a collectors item and my old landlord stole it from the apartment before ICE cleaned it out, and when I went back years later he still had it and gave it back to me when I threatend to call the police about stolen property. not that I would have; since the rent wasn't paid it as legally 'abandoned property' and he did have a right to it, but **** it, it was Dad's and it was the only thing I had left! I don't have a problem with my adoption. I do have a problem with Mom and Dad never telling me, and I have a problem with the NEVER KEEPING any of the paperwork! I know they didn't want me to know and I suspect that they didn't keep any paperwork for that reason; I think back on it now and I realize that once they had the adoption paper and they filed for a reissued birth certifiate that showed I was their child, thought there wasn't anything ele they had to do, and that was it. I don't think they ever suspected ICE would come after me 18 years after the adoption and try to deport me as illegal. I don't think that either of my parents, paricularl my Dad, an Army vet (Vietnam and Korea, where he met Mom) would ever have thought that the US would have 'deportation camps' and 'deportation camps for unaccompanied minors' in which they could stick people like me who are ot illegal, just undocumented and only missing a piece of paper.