The last time Janina Wasilewski walked through O'Hare International Airport, she and her son, Brian, said a tearful goodbye to her husband, Tony, and boarded a plane for Poland on orders from a U.S. immigration judge.

The separation four years ago sent Tony Wasilewski into a spiral of depression, filled with half-smoked cigarettes, late-night beers and open talk of killing himself as he struggled to support his family back home and care for a father in the U.S. struck by cancer.

But, in a rare U.S. government reprieve against a backdrop of record deportations across the country, Wasilewski's suffering has won his wife permission to come back to the U.S. six years earlier than initially allowed.

On Monday, Janina and Brian, now 10, are scheduled to land at O'Hare, greeted by a phalanx of Polish news media that have followed their plight since the Tribune first published a story about the couple in 2007and, later, after they became the subject of the film documentary "Tony and Janina's American Wedding."

"I'm very excited," Tony Wasilewski said Sunday. "I don't know if I'm going to sleep or not tonight. I feel like I won the lottery."

The couple had met a string of legal defeats, starting with a denial for U.S. political asylum for Janina Wasilewski a few years after she arrived as a former Solidarity movement activist in communist Poland and allowed her temporary visa to expire.

Royal Berg, Wasilewski's attorney, took the case as high as the U.S. Supreme Court before finally winning a waiver in June against what was supposed to be a 10-year bar against her return after she had violated an order for voluntary removal in the mid-2000s. Berg said she won her legal battle after she was able to show that her husband was suffering from "extreme hardship."

"It's been a long hard battle for the family; They've been torn apart," said Berg, describing the legal odyssey that Wasilewski and other immigrant families face. "We are ripping apart family after family after family."

For the Wasilewskis, their new life will begin Monday, after Tony Wasilewski picks up his wife and son at the airport and takes them back to the one-bedroom Schiller Park apartment he now rents about a mile from their former house.

"I'm a little afraid," Tony Wasilewski said. "It's been four years."

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