Law-abiding traveler is always getting detained

The airport routine is always the same, whether I'm in Miami, Washington, Atlanta or any other city. I step off the plane after sitting in coach for hours, my knees bruised from hitting the seat in front of me, and watching films that I swore I'd never pay to see. I'm always cautious as I wait in the immigration and customs line. On the Transportation Security Administration's Web site is a running total of the number of people arrested each week for suspicious behavior or fraudulent travel documents. (For the week ending Dec. 21, 15 people were arrested due to suspicious behavior or fraudulent travel documents and 19 guns were found at checkpoints.) I do my best to act relaxed.

The real terror begins when my toes touch the yellow line, where I wait to be called forward. Approaching the immigration officer before being summoned could make me appear too eager. On the other hand, any hesitation could be interpreted as a sign that I'm afraid of facing the law. So I walk up to the officer and nonchalantly hand over my bright blue passport. Seconds feel like hours as he starts hitting the "page down" key on his computer, scanning screen after screen, periodically glancing at me and my passport. This is when I break out in a cold sweat, which makes the officer even more dubious. I'm so familiar with airport-security personnel that I often recognize the officers who escort me. In Miami, I cringe to see the large female officer who once screamed across the room that her advice, if I wanted to spare my family some trouble, was not to name my son Juan. Of course, not all officers are like that. I occasionally run into a young woman who stopped me once a few years ago. New to the job and eager to help, she took down my information and assured me that I would never be stopped again. But she was wrong; upon my next entry into the country, I was held for longer than ever before.

The little room in Miami is my favorite, partly because it has vending machines and partly because it is always full of people who, like me, seem familiar with the routine of being waylaid by airport security. Most of us are cleared within minutes or hours, though the process continues to be intimidating and cold. Others are taken into still smaller rooms, where I can only imagine what happens. Maybe I should stop watching all those bad in-flight action movies.

Time and time again, I've been cleared for entry into the United States. So why does my name remain on the list? Will I have to go through this for the rest of my life? In desperation, I always ask airport-security officers how my name can be removed. I've heard it all, from writing to my congressman to filling out a form (never mind that no one has been able to produce the document or tell me where I can find it). The most honest answer came from a young Afghan-American officer at Washington's Dulles airport a couple of weeks ago: "There's absolutely nothing you can do."

It's not the countless missed connections that bother me or the fact that I have to politely decline offers from well-meaning travel companions to wait for me, because they don't know that they might be waiting for hours. It's the powerlessness of being unable to clear my name and of having to go through this humiliation over and over.