The U.S. is unique: No other nation that has taken in adopted children deprives them of citizenship.
Buttons, who the Associated Press is referring to only by her childhood nickname because of her legal status, sits for a portrait behind her baby photo taken before she was adopted from Iran to a family in America, Monday, June 24, 2024, in Henderson, Nev.
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.Joy Alessi, right, talks with Buttons, at Alessi’s home Monday, June 24, 2024, in Henderson, Nev.
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. Joy Alessi sits for a portrait behind her baby picture from before she was adopted from South Korea to a family in America, Tuesday, June 25, 2024, in Henderson, Nev.
Joy Alessi, left, and fellow adoptee Buttons, get in a car as they leave Alessi’s home Monday, June 24, 2024, in Henderson, Nev. 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. focused on shipping children abroad as quickly as possible. Korea’s government, eager to curry favor with the U.S.
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. Joy Alessi, left, and Leah Elmquist toast during a dinner with fellow adoptees Sunday, June 23, 2024, in Las Vegas. Alessi and Elmquist have found strength in the community of adoptees who only learned as adults they were never citizens.
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.
Daniel is part of a bipartisan coalition lobbying for a decade for a bill that extends citizenship to everyone legally adopted by American parents. The groups insist that families formed by adoption are due the same respect, the same rights, as biological ones, including equal treatment under the criminal justice system.
Mike Davis, her husband of 27 years, was adopted by a soldier, a Vietnam veteran stationed in Ethiopia, who met him there as a boy and brought him to the U.S. Nothing happened for years. He married Laura Lynn, they had children to raise, and he pushed it to the back of his mind. His wife sold their house and moved their family to be with him. But life was hard in Ethiopia: There were people with M16s on the street, they couldn’t work or speak the language. Laura Lynn lost 30 pounds. She and their children went home to Georgia.
Laura Lynn has more hope than she has in a long time, she said, because a group she never expected came to their aid: Koreans. They’ve offered advocacy and legal help. He’s being represented by groups like Asian Americans Advancing Justice and Adoptees for Justice. Debbie and her husband, Paul, adopted two special-needs children from a Romanian orphanage in the 1990s, and they’ve been trying to make them citizens almost ever since. The Associated Press is using only the first names of the parents because they fear endangering their adopted children.
The boy was 10, and so small, just 40 pounds, that the school allowed him in kindergarten. The girl was 14 and legally blind, with limited vision in just one eye. They both had physical and cognitive impairments; the doctors believed the boy suffered fetal alcohol poisoning. Their son, 43, doesn’t understand the situation he’s in. But their daughter understands. She’s a Special Olympian, now 46, with a stack of gold medals. She can’t compete in international competitions because she can’t get a passport.They’ve called their legislators. Debbie wept again and again: “My adopted children deserve all the privileges of my birth children. They are no different in our eyes. Why are you looking at them differently?”Then Trump’s administration terrified them.
Elmquist had always considered herself “super-duper American.” She served in the Navy for 10 years; she was in a USAA commercial. That was all before she was actually made an American.“I felt like a citizen for the decade I was in the Navy. And I wasn’t one,” she said.
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