In Israel, my parents decided that my father should head to America first, to find work and housing. He entered the United States with a tourist visa and got a job in Maryland as a dishwasher. He made his way to New York City and secured work as a hydraulic engineer, his field in Iran, and eventually, an apartment for us in Rego Park, Queens. A few months later, my mother followed — a 26-year-old woman with two children and a suitcase stuffed with pots and pans, a few items of clothing for each season, photo albums and a couple of toys.

The three of us arrived at J.F.K. Airport on Dec. 24, 1979. The tourist visas that we had in our Iranian passports were almost certainly fake; my mother had bought them at an exorbitant price from a travel agency that sold them to us in combination with our one-way tickets. And even if they had been real, we didn’t look like tourists. How many tourists take their rice cooker on vacation?

When it was our turn for inspection, the Immigration and Naturalization Service officer — very reasonably — challenged my mother’s claim that we had come for a short visit. My mother didn’t say that what she really wanted was asylum, that we had a well-founded fear of persecution in our country of origin. My mother didn’t know that those words had the power to keep us in America, that anyone on American soil had a right to be heard on that claim. Maybe because she had grown up in a country with no such protections, she couldn’t imagine such a thing.

We could have been turned away. But that nameless I.N.S. officer — about whom I know nothing other than how he conducted himself in that moment — made a different decision. Before him stood a young mother traveling alone with her babies, visibly in need of refuge. She told him that the children wanted to see their father, that they had spent months apart. And he granted us “deferred inspection” — meaning that we had permission but not authorization to enter the country — and told us to come back to the airport right after the holiday for deportation.

I have thought a lot about that night in the years since. As a child, I attributed my freedom in this country to a small miracle — the accident of having arrived on Dec. 24, a holy day for a vast majority of my new countrymen and women. Maybe that was why the officer exercised the law with mercy and compassion.