At Risk of Deportation – Decades Later • Legal limbo due to a loophole
The US government has been aware of the loophole for decades – and failed to fix it. It reports AP News.
Some of these adoptees are living in hiding, fearing that a tip to the government could lead to their deportation back to the country from which the United States claimed to have rescued them.
Some of them have already been deported.
The aftermath of the Korean War
The modern system of adoption emerged in the aftermath of the Korean War. American families were then desperate for children because access to birth control had caused the domestic supply of adoptable babies to plummet. At the same time, Korea wanted to get rid 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 care for them and ensure that they received citizenship, AP writes.
State courts gave adopted children new birth certificates showing their adoptive parents’ names, proof that allegedly gave them the privileges of biological children, but the court had no follow-up control.
After the expensive, lengthy adoption process, parents were supposed to apply for citizenship themselves—but some missed the information and never did.
Legal limbo
In 2000, the US Congress recognized that the country had left international adoptees in legal limbo and passed the Child Citizenship Act, which granted automatic citizenship to adopted children.
However, the law was designed to streamline the process for adoptive parents, not to help adoptees, and therefore only applied to those under 18 once it came into effect.
All those born before February 27, 1983 were not included. Estimates for how many lack citizenship vary from around 15,000 to 75,000, AP writes.
Since then, there have been several attempts to correct the law and to make it include all those adopted before as well, but no agreement in Congress has been reached.
Many are unaware – others are hidden
Many of the adoptees do not know that their parents did not secure their citizenship. They usually find out by accident when applying for a passport. If they ask the government about their status, they risk tipping off the authorities that they are in the country illegally.
The AP highlights several examples of adopted Americans who lacked citizenship, whose lives were immensely affected by the loss.
Joy Alessi was seven months old when she was adopted from Korea. She was told as an adult that her parents never made her a citizen, so she lived in hiding for decades. She became a citizen aged 52. She says that all these years she was deprived of things that American citizens take for granted, such as passports and student loans.
Mike Davis was adopted to the United States from Ethiopia in the 1970s by his father, who was an American soldier. After growing up as an American and having a family of his own, he was deported to Ethiopia. Without him as a breadwinner, the family lived in cars and motels.
Mike Davis has lived in Ethiopia for two decades now, in a room with a mud floor and no running water.
In just over a week, Donald Trump can be elected the next president of the United States. During his election campaign, the Republican candidate has promised – or threatened – mass deportation on numerous occasions. Tens of thousands who were adopted into the United States, and who have lived in the country for almost their entire lives, now fear being forced to leave.