Thousands of children adopted by Americans are without citizenship

By CLAIRE GALOFARO and KIM TONG-HYUNG

HENDERSON, Nev. (AP) — The 50-year-old newspaper was turning yellow and its edges fraying, so she had it laminated, not as a memento but as proof — America made a promise to her, and did not keep it.

She pointed to the picture in the corner of her as a little girl in the rural Midwest, hugging the family Yorkshire terrier, with dark pigtails and brown eyes so round people called her Buttons. Next to her sit smiling, proud parents — her father an Air Force veteran who had survived a German prison camp in World War II and found her in an orphanage in Iran. She was a skinny, sickly 2-year-old; he and his wife decided in 1972 to take her home and make her their American daughter.

They brought her to the United States on a tourist visa, which in the eyes of the government she soon overstayed as a toddler — and that is an offense that cannot be rectified. She is one of thousands of children adopted from abroad by American parents — many of them military service members — who were left without citizenship by loopholes in American law that Congress has been aware of for decades, yet remains unwilling to fix.

She is technically living here illegally, and eligible for deportation.

“My dad died thinking, ‘I raised my daughter. I did my part,’ but not knowing it put me on a path of instability and fear,” she said. The Associated Press is using only her childhood nickname, Buttons, because of her legal status. “Adoption tells you: You’re an American, this is your home. But the United States doesn’t see me as an American.”

Every time she turns on the news, she hears former President Donald Trump, in his bid for reelection, promising to round up immigrants living illegally in the U.S. Now she lays awake at night, wondering what it would be like to be sent back to Iran.

“What is a detention camp even like?” she wondered.

“We have a plan, we won’t let that happen,” her friend Joy Alessi, a Korean adoptee, assured her. They have lawyers, media statements prepared, phone numbers of sympathetic congressmembers.

But they slumped their shoulders — they know it could happen, because it already has.

Out of the shadows

These two women grew up in military families, and were taught to be grateful to the nation that celebrated saving them. Then one day, as adults, they walked into passport offices and learned the news that would unspool their lives.

Their adoption paperwork, signed by judges and stamped by governments, declared they enjoyed all the privileges of being daughters of American families. But that was untrue in one critical respect: Adoption for decades did not automatically make children citizens.

They both hid for years, thinking they were the only one who fell through the cracks. Then Trump stormed into politics in 2015 on a promise to rid America of undocumented immigrants. They weren’t citizens, so they couldn’t even vote to try to stop him. Each decided they had nothing left to lose, emerged and found each other.

Other adoptees found them, too, and told stories of indignities endured by those not fully American — they can’t get jobs or driver’s licenses or passports, every interaction with the government is terrifying, some panic when there’s a knock on the door.

No one knows how many of them there are — estimates range from 15,000 to 75,000. Many were adopted from South Korea, home to the world’s longest and largest adoption program, but they’d also been brought from Ethiopia, Romania, Belize, more than two dozen countries.

They started the Adoptee Rights Campaign, and were joined by an unexpected coalition, from the Southern Baptist Convention to liberal immigration advocates, all baffled that the government let this linger.

The Adoptee Rights Campaign has heard from people who’d been deported, some still living in hiding, others freshly discovering they’d never been made citizens. There is no government mechanism for alerting them. They find out by accident, when applying for passports or government benefits. One woman learned as a senior citizen, when she was denied the Social Security she’d paid into all her life.

Buttons calls herself the group’s “adoptee wrangler;” she was visiting Alessi in Nevada, sitting at her kitchen table, fielding inquiries and checking in on people.

She’s 54 and has never been in trouble; she has a corporate job in health care, owns her own home in California. She was raised a Christian, so fears that deportation to Iran would be “a death sentence.” Still legislators won’t help.

She had hope. She’s lost that now. For a decade, legislation has been introduced over and over, it dies, and nothing happens.

So she lugs around the laminated newspaper clipping, stacks of adoption files and court records as proof she’s supposed to be here.

“It’s hard to give hope,” she said, “when I don’t feel like I have any left.”

‘One piece of paper can ruin your life’

Alessi anointed her friend Buttons “an honorary Korean.”

This problem they have both endured was born there, in Alessi’s motherland, and to her it represents the most glaring example of the neglectful system that brought them here.

The international adoption industry grew out of the wreckage of the Korean War in the 1950s. Americans were desperate for babies — the domestic supply of adoptable children had plummeted — and South Korea wanted to rid itself of mouths to feed. Alessi was among this early wave of adoptees, taken from South Korea at 7 months old in 1967.

The system focused on shipping children abroad as quickly as possible. Korea’s government, eager to curry favor with the U.S., did everything it could to speed up the process, including relaxing the obligation of agencies to ensure citizenship for adoptees.

The adoption industry took the model created in South Korea into poor countries around the world, shipping babies in bulk to American families.

South Korea has struggled to track the citizenship of children placed in U.S. homes, and the status of more than 17,550 remains unconfirmed, according to government data AP obtained. The Adoptee Rights Campaign used Korean figures to estimate up to 75,000 adoptees from all over the world could lack citizenship. But groups like the National Council for Adoption put the number somewhere between 15,000 and 18,000.

The Korean adoption diaspora has been hit particularly hard — there are simply more of them. At least 11 adoptees have been deported to South Korea since 2002, where they don’t know the language or the culture. An adoptee named Phillip Clay, sent to the U.S. at 8 years old in 1983, was deported. He killed himself by jumping from an apartment building in Seoul in 2017 at 42 years old.

Adam Crapser, adopted at 3 years old in 1979, was also deported to South Korea. The married father of two says he was abused and abandoned by two different adoptive families who never filed his citizenship papers. He got into trouble with the law — once for breaking into his adoptive parents’ home to retrieve the Bible that came with him from the orphanage.

He sued his Korean adoption agency, Holt Children’s Services, and a court last year ordered the agency to pay him damages for failing to inform his adopters that they should take steps to secure his citizenship.

For some adoptees, their 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.

Alessi looked at a picture of herself standing in a high school gymnasium, finally being made an American citizen at 52. “We welcome you!” she remembers the announcer saying, and the crowd cheered. But her body looks stiff, her mouth pursed.

“You don’t welcome us,” she thought that day in 2019.

Her friend, the adoptee called Buttons, was at the ceremony crying, genuinely happy for her friend, but also devastated for herself. Alessi felt a sort of survivor’s guilt.

“You were sitting right there, and I felt so conflicted, so shameful,” Alessi told her.

Because for some adoptees, there is no clear solution. The difference between them is what visa their adoptive parents brought them in on, and many chose the fastest route — like a tourist or medical visa — not imagining complications down the road.

“One piece of paper,” Buttons said, “can ruin your life.”

‘A collective failure’

A quarter-century ago, the U.S. Congress recognized it had left adoptees in this legal limbo.

By 2000, nearly 20,000 children were coming to America each year. But 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.

Those early decades of adoption were a “wild west,” said Greg Luce, a lawyer who has represented many non-citizen adoptees; there was no standardized procedure to help adoptive families.

“It’s a combination of adoption agencies that were neglectful, adoptive parents who should have known better, and the U.S. government that had lax oversight and a visa system that could allow this to happen,” Luce said. “It’s a collective failure on the part of everyone who was involved except the adoptee. They were a child, and they’re the ones left holding the bag.”

The U.S. is unique in this: No other nation that has taken in adopted children deprives them of citizenship.

In 2000, Congress acknowledged that injustice 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 younger than 18 when it took effect. Everyone born before the arbitrary date of Feb. 27, 1983, was not included.

Hannah Daniel, director of public policy for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the lobbying arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, said lawmakers often find this situation hard to believe.

“I agree that it feels unbelievable,” she said. “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?”

Adoption has been a rare issue championed by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, a way of saving children by making them American. Many churches preach intercountry adoption as a Biblical calling.