The United States has brought hundreds of thousands of children from abroad to be adopted by American families. But along the way, thousands of them were left without citizenship, due to a bureaucratic loophole that the government had been aware of for decades and which remains unresolved.
Some of these adoptees live in hiding, fearing that tipping off the government could result in them being returned to the country from which the US claimed to have rescued them. Some have already been deported.
A bill to help them has been in Congress for a decade and is backed by a rare bipartisan coalition — from liberal immigration groups to the Southern Baptist Convention. But it’s not over. Advocates blame the hyper-partisan frenzy over immigration that has blocked any effort to extend citizenship to everyone, even these adoptees who are legally the children of American parents.
They say they are terrified of what could happen if former President Donald Trump is re-elected, as he has promised mass immigration raids and detention camps.
Here are the findings from the AP report:
The modern system of intercountry adoption emerged in the aftermath of the Korean War. American families were desperate for children as access to contraception and societal changes had caused the domestic supply of adoptable babies to plummet. Korea wanted to get rid of mouths to feed.
Adoption agencies rushed meet high demand for babies in the United States. But there were few protections in place to ensure parents could care for them and gain citizenship.
The US had wedged foreign adoptions into a system created for domestic adoptions. State courts issue adopted children new birth certificates that list the names of their adoptive parents, with the intention of giving them all the privileges of biological children.
But state courts have no control over immigration. After the expensive, long adoption process, parents were required to naturalize their adopted children, but some never did.
In 2000, the United States Congress recognized that it had left adoptees in this legal limbo and passed the Child Citizenship Act, which granted automatic citizenship to adopted children. But it was intended to streamline the process for adoptive parents, not to help adoptees, so only applied to people under 18 when it came into effect. Anyone born before the arbitrary date of February 27, 1983 was not counted. Estimates of the number of people without citizenship range from about 15,000 to 75,000.
Efforts since then to close this loophole have failed.
“It’s the most classic example of wanting to beat your head against the wall, because how on earth have we not solved 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, when doing nothing is an option,” Daniel said, “that’s the bet I’m going to make.”
There is no government mechanism to alert adoptees that their parents have not secured their citizenship. They usually find out about it accidentally, when applying for passports or government benefits. One woman learned it as a senior citizen, when she was denied the Social Security benefits she had paid for all her life. If they ask the government about their status, they risk alerting the authorities that they are here illegally.
For some, their legal status can be restored through the difficult naturalization process; they should join as if they had just arrived. It takes years, thousands of dollars, wasted days, routine rejections from immigration agencies on technicalities, the wrong form, a bad typo. But others are told nothing can be done. The difference is in the visas: Some American parents brought in babies via the quickest route – such as a tourist or medical visa – without imagining complications down the road. This was especially prominent among military families, who adopted children where they were rather than going through an adoption agency that brought them to the U.S.
Their status may mean they cannot get a job or driver’s license, and some are ineligible for government benefits such as financial aid and social security. Some with criminal histories, even drug charges, have been sent back to the countries their American parents adopted them from.
– One was brought from Iran by her father, an Air Force veteran who worked there as a military contractor in 1972. She works in healthcare, has her own home and has never had any problems. She is in her 50s and does not know if she is eligible for Social Security or other benefits. She lives in fear that the government will come for her.
— Joy Alessi was adopted from Korea in 1967 as a seven-month-old child. She learned as an adult that her parents had never naturalized her, and she lived in hiding for decades. She was eventually naturalized in 2019 at the age of 52. She says all these years she has been deprived of things American citizens take for granted, like student loans.
— Mike Davis was adopted to the United States from Ethiopia by his father, an American soldier, in the 1970s. Davis, now 61, got into trouble with drugs as a young man but then grew up, married and had children. Years later he was deported. Without him as a breadwinner, the family lived in cars and motels, and they are desperate to bring him home. He has lived in Ethiopia for twenty years now, in a room with a dirt floor and no running water.
— Leah Elmquist served in the U.S. Navy for 10 years, but she was not a citizen. She was adopted from South Korea as a baby in 1983, just six months too old to receive citizenship under 2000 legislation. When Trump won in 2016, she said she felt the fear more intensely than the night before she left for Iraq. She was eventually naturalized, after what she describes as a crushing immigration process, which included having to take an integration exam.
— Debbie and Paul, a California couple, adopted two special needs children, a boy and a girl, from a Romanian orphanage in the 1990s. Debbie sometimes lies awake at night thinking that her children would not survive a detention camp. The girl is a Special Olympian who cannot participate in international competitions because she cannot obtain a passport.
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This story is part of an ongoing investigation led by The Associated Press in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS). The research includes several stories:
Widespread adoption fraud separated generations of Korean children from their families, AP finds
Western countries were desperate for Korean babies. Now many adoptees think they have been stolen
A South Korean adoptee needed answers about the past. She got them, just not the one she wanted
It also includes an interactive and documentary, South Korea’s adoption bill.
Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org.
