He left all that behind July 13 as he and his wife, accompanied by their 9-year-old daughter — an American citizen — were deported from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to the country of his birth: the Czech Republic.

"Nothing makes sense," Daneček said, speaking four days later, as he moved his belongings from a temporary apartment in Smíchov to a new residence in Prague's Řepy district. "My world is upside down."

American immigration authorities deported Andrew and his Czech-born wife, Blanka, after discovering the reason the couple had entered the United States no longer applied. In 1990 officials in Vienna allowed Daneček and his wife open-ended entry to the United States on "humanitarian parole" so they could seek treatment for their son Chris, who had leukemia. Chris, now 26 and living in Boston, has been healthy since the early 1990s.

"We are hopeful that we can straighten everything out," Andrew Daneček said. "We consider the U.S. our home. We are of course frustrated, but we're trying to be positive."

Herbert Igbanugo, the family's lawyer, called Chris' applications routine but said they could take up to 18 months to process. Aids to senators from Minnesota and Massachusetts, including Ted Kennedy, have promised to help expedite the applications, but the family has no way of knowing when the visas will be granted.

Timing critical

It's no idle question: Daneček arranged a two-month leave of absence from his job as an enforcer of court orders for child support and alimony. His wife, who works in a bank, has two months' leave as well.

"We are in this strange limbo," Daneček said, unsure if their jobs will be waiting for them by the time they return to the United States. They don't know if they should rent out their house, for instance. They aren't sure whether to enroll their daughter, who speaks only broken Czech, in a Prague school in the fall, and they don't know whether they should start looking for jobs here.

"I suppose I can find translating work — I don't know," said Daneček, who hadn't been home since fleeing Czechoslovakia in 1988. "It's strange. I feel like I'm in a foreign country. I get confused. I catch myself speaking Czech to foreigners and English to Czechs."

Immigration officials have said to reporters and the Danečeks that they were merely following the law in expelling the Danečeks. Authorities have re-examined the status of thousands of immigrants following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. With Chris Danečeks' leukemia in remission, the stated reason for the family's indefinite stay no longer applies. One judge called the case "unpleasant" but said the law gave him no leeway.

Another factor is a 1996 change to U.S. immigration law. Until then, immigrants could apply for exemptions to deportations if they had lived in the United States for seven years. The family had six years behind them when the requirement was changed to 10 years.

Also under the old law, applicants for exemptions had to prove that returning home would cause them hardship, for which the Danečeks would likely have qualified. Under the new law, they have to show their deportation will cause "extreme and unusual hardship."

U.S. authorities decided that Blanche's relocation to a country she had never visited does not constitute such a hardship.

Igbanugo, the Danečeks' lawyer, said U.S. officials did not fully consider the daughter's emotional ties to Minneapolis and criticized them for giving the family just 30 days to move rather than three months.

The family had once before missed a chance at U.S. citizenship by one year, says Daneček: At the time they fled Czechoslovakia, an asylum claim from refugees of the Soviet bloc was possible and fairly routine for such immigrants. By the time they entered the United States, however, the 1989 revolution and Czechoslovakia's subsequent freedom eliminated their chance at the claim.

Chris Daneček will presumably be granted citizenship in about a year, which should pave the way for the family's return via immigrant visas, his father believes.

"The whole time we figured Chris getting married would basically resolve our status."

Before 2001, the family says they hardly thought about their immigration status, believing they had the right to stay indefinitely. Chris, although healthy, continued to have cancer checkups once a year and immigration clerks renewed their work permits each year without incident.

"It was in the back of my mind," said the elder Daneček. "But I never worried much. After Sept. 11, they started looking into our case. We thought our lawyer could work it out. Everything sort of snowballed."

More than 400 Czechs are either deported — forcibly or voluntarily — or are turned down at the U.S. border each year, according to Richard Appleton, consul general at the U.S. Embassy in Prague. This includes several who have been in the United States for more than 10 years. Most cases, however, involve Czechs who have overstayed tourist visas. "I haven't seen a case involving humanitarian parole in the three years I've been in Prague."

Now the family faces an additional obstacle in returning to the United States. Because they appealed the immigration decision to the courts, American law considers them involuntarily deported, which means a mandatory five-year re-entry ban. They plan to apply for a waiver of the ban, though, again with the support of U.S. senators.

Appleton declined to comment directly on the Danečeks' case, saying he isn't familiar with the details. Re-entry ban waivers, he said, are sent to an office in Rome after being processed in Prague and in the past, decisions on them took up to six months. Changes at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security make future waits hard to predict.

"It's sort of like aiming at a moving target," said Appleton.

"From what I've seen in the press," he added, "with the support they had from senators, I'm really surprised it got to this stage."

Daneček, who was a lawyer in Czechoslovakia before emigrating in 1988, says he understands that authorities are just following the law. But, he added, "After 18 years, it is very difficult for us to live in the Czech Republic. It feels like we slipped through the cracks of U.S. law. Other families could go through the same thing we did. Something should be done about this."

—Petr Kašpar contributed to this report.