The 50-year-old newspaper was turning yellow and its edges fraying, so she had it laminated, not as a memento but as proof — America made a promise to her, and did not keep it.
She pointed to the picture in the corner of her as a little girl in the rural Midwest, hugging the family Yorkshire terrier, with dark pigtails and brown eyes so round people called her Buttons. Next to her sit smiling, proud parents — her father an Air Force veteran who had survived a German prison camp in World War II and found her in an orphanage in Iran. She was a skinny, sickly 2-year-old; he and his wife decided in 1972 to take her home and make her their American daughter.
