The United States has brought hundreds of thousands of children from abroad to be adopted by American families. After several years, it however appears thousands of them have been left without citizenship, through a bureaucratic loophole that the government has been aware of for decades, and hasn’t fixed.
Some of these adoptees live in hiding, fearing that tipping off the government could prompt their removal back to the country the U.S. claimed to have rescued them from. Some have already been deported.
A bill to help them has been introduced in Congress for a decade and is supported by a rare bipartisan coalition — from liberal immigration groups to the Southern Baptist Convention. But it hasn’t passed. Advocates blame the hyper-partisan frenzy over immigration that has stalled any effort to extend citizenship to anyone, even these adoptees who are legally the children of American parents.
They say they are terrified about what could happen if former President Donald Trump is reelected because he has promised massive immigration raids and detention camps.
How did this happen?
The modern system of intercountry adoption emerged in the aftermath of the Korean War. American families were desperate for children because access to birth control and societal changes had caused the domestic supply of adoptable babies to plummet. Korea wanted to rid itself of mouths to feed.
Adoption agencies rushed to meet the intense demand for babies in the United States. But there were few protections to ensure that parents could take care of them, and that they acquired citizenship.
The U.S. had wedged foreign adoptions into a system created for domestic ones. State courts give adopted children new birth certificates that list their adoptive parents’ names, purporting to give them all the privileges of biological children.
But state courts have no control over immigration. After the expensive, long process of adoption, parents were supposed to naturalize their adopted children, but some never did.
Has the U.S. tried to rectify this?
In 2000, U.S. Congress recognized it had left adoptees in this legal limbo and passed the Child Citizenship Act, conferring automatic citizenship to adopted children. But it was designed to streamline the process for adoptive parents, not to help adoptees, and so applied only to those under 18 when it took effect. Everyone born before the arbitrary date of Feb. 27, 1983, was not included. Estimates for how many lack citizenship range from around 15,000 to 75,000.
Efforts since to close that loophole have failed.
“It’s the most classic example of wanting to bang your head against the wall, because how in the world have we not fixed this?” said Hannah Daniel, director of public policy for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the lobbying arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. Foreign adoption is particularly poignant for Evangelical churches, which preach it as a Biblical calling.
“In this day and age in Congress, if not doing anything is an option,” Daniel said, “that is the bet I’m going to take.”
How do adoptees find out they aren’t citizens?
There is no government mechanism for alerting adoptees that their parents did not secure their citizenship. When applying for passports or government benefits, they usually find out by accident. One woman learned as a senior citizen, when she was denied the Social Security she’d paid into all her life. If they ask the government about their status, they risk tipping authorities off to them being here illegally.
For some, their legal status is fixable through the arduous naturalization process — they have to join the line as though they’d just arrived. It takes years, thousands of dollars, wasted days, routine rejections from immigration offices on technicalities, the wrong form, an errant typo. But others are told there’s nothing that can be done.
The difference is in visas: Some American parents brought babies in via the fastest route — like a tourist or medical visa — not imagining complications down the road. This was particularly prominent in military families, who adopted children where they were rather than going through an adoption agency that brought them to the U.S.
Their status can mean they can’t get jobs or driver’s licenses, and some aren’t eligible for government benefits like financial aid and Social Security. Some who have criminal histories, even drug charges, have been deported back to the countries where their American parents adopted them from.
How are the adoptees affected?
— One was brought from Iran by her father, an Air Force veteran working there as a military contractor in 1972. She works in corporate health care, owns her own home and has never been in trouble. She is in her 50s, and she doesn’t know if she’ll be eligible for Social Security or other benefits. She lives in fear that the government will come for her.
— Joy Alessi was adopted from Korea as a 7-month-old in 1967. She learned as an adult that her parents never naturalized her, and she lived in hiding for decades. She was finally naturalized in 2019 at 52 years old. She says she was deprived all those years of what American citizens take for granted, like educational loans.
— Mike Davis was adopted to the United States from Ethiopia in the 1970s by his father, an American soldier. Davis, now 61, got into trouble with drugs as a young man, but then grew up, got married and had children. Years later, he was deported. Without him as a breadwinner, the family lived in cars and motels, and are desperate to bring him home. He’s lived in Ethiopia for two decades now, in a room with a mud floor and no running water.
— Leah Elmquist served for a decade in the U.S. Navy, but she wasn’t a citizen. She was adopted from South Korea as a baby in 1983, just 6 months too old to be grandfathered into citizenship by the 2000 legislation. When Trump won in 2016, she said she felt fear more intense than the night before she deployed to Iraq. She was eventually naturalized, after what she describes as a crushing process with immigration, including having to take a civics test.
— Debbie and Paul, a couple in California, adopted two special needs children, a boy and a girl, from a Romanian orphanage in the 1990s. Debbie sometimes lays awake at night thinking that her children wouldn’t survive a detention camp. The girl is a Special Olympian who can’t compete in international competitions because she can’t get a passport.