The Paper That Stood Between Jung Wing and Deportation
Arrested at a Point Roberts cannery for lacking a registration certificate, Jung Wing wins a month to prove he is the man named on a lost Portland certificate—or face deportation.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Jung Wing was recently arrested at the Point Roberts cannery because he had no certificate of registration, and was about to be deported, but yesterday his attorney obtained from Judge Hanford, in the United States court, a stay of proceedings for thirty days, in order that Jung might find the certificate.
He explained that his client was registered at Portland, that the number of his certificate was 3,879, but that it had been lost. Jung would make an affidavit reciting the circumstances under which it had been lost, with his photograph attached, and these would be forwarded to the collector of customs at Portland, and if Jung was the man a new certificate would issue.
The law upon which a new certificate may be issued reads as follows: 'Duplicate certificates may be issued by collectors upon receipt of written application therefor with evidence satisfactory to them, in the form of affidavits, that the original has been lost or destroyed by unavoidable accident, and without fault or negligence on the part of the applicant. Collectors will in all such cases assure themselves of the identity of the applicant with the person to whom the original certificate was issued, and, to that end, will require with each application a photographic likeness of the applicant which, after comparison and identification with the photograph filed with his application for a certificate, shall be attached to the certificate issued in lieu of the one lost or destroyed.
'Across the face of each duplicate so issued and the stub thereof the collector shall write, in red ink, the words, "Issued in lieu of the original certificate, No. ——, which, upon evidence submitted, appears to have been unavoidably lost or destroyed, as the case may be," to which shall be attached the collector's official signature.'
“He explained that his client was registered at Portland, that the number of his certificate was 3,879, but that it had been lost.”
The Chinese Exclusion Act turned paperwork into a matter of freedom and deportation. Jung Wing's case shows how immigrants had to prove identity through affidavits and photographs—a bureaucratic gauntlet with echoes in today's visa and asylum systems.
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