She Grew Up Believing She Was a US Citizen. Then She Applied for a Passport

For the better part of A’s life, she never suspected anything was wrong.

She breezed through getting her driver’s license. She applied to college and filed her taxes year after year without any hiccups. That is, until she applied for her passport.

Suddenly, the document she always relied on — a delayed registration of birth, which is fairly common among adoptees — was no longer enough. She realized the papers that would prove she was a citizen were not just missing — they had never existed in the first place.

“I just sensed there was something wrong and it seemed frightening,” said A, who asked to be referred to by her last initial out of fear of deportation.

A later found out that her adoptive parents never completed her naturalization. It meant she was technically barred from accessing things that she took for granted all her life — like college financial aid. It also left A, who is now in her 40s, vulnerable to deportation to her native South Korea — a country she has never been to, where she doesn’t speak the language or know of any family.

Congress tried to address this issue by passing the Child Citizenship Act in 2000, which grants automatic citizenship to international adoptees. But the law only covered future adoptees and those under 18 at the time the law went into effect, or only those born after February 1983. It also did not apply to children who were brought to the U.S. on the wrong type of visa.

For the past 25 years, advocates have been pushing for Congress to remove the age cutoff and narrow the citizenship gap among adoptees. A bill was reintroduced several times, but it has yet to make it past the House.

Now, advocates say President Trump’s second term has ushered in a new era of fear for adoptees without citizenship. Trump has consistently vowed to carry out the largest deportation program that the country has ever seen. To do so, his administration is casting a far wider net on who to deport — making adoptees like A question if they will be next.

“I definitely didn’t think it was possible for any adoptee to be in my state of limbo. I know now that it’s not only possible but common,” A said.

How adoptees fell through the cracks

It’s difficult to determine how many adoptees lack citizenship in the U.S. Many are unaware of their circumstances until adulthood, when they attempt to apply for a passport, try to obtain a Real ID or, in the worst-case scenario, get convicted of a crime, which makes them a priority for removal.

Arissa Oh, a history professor at Boston College who has written extensively about the origins of international adoptions, said a host of factors contributed to the phenomenon of noncitizen adoptees. In some cases, the adoptive parents were to blame.

“Either the adoptive parents did not know that naturalization was a separate process from immigration and adoption, or they couldn’t get around to it for whatever reason,” Oh said.

Sometimes, the adoptions were never fully legal in the first place. Last month, the government of South Korea, where A is from, admitted that its adoption agencies engaged in fraud or malpractice to keep up with demand, including not properly vetting prospective parents.

The report, led by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, urged the Korean government to investigate citizenship issues among adoptees sent to the U.S. and take steps to support those without citizenship, the Associated Press reported.

According to Oh, all of the systemic factors that kept adoptees from being naturalized underscore a long-standing discrepancy between federal and state roles in international adoptions. While U.S. citizenship is governed at the federal level, adoptions themselves are generally regarded as domestic matters, much like marriage, which is why they are processed through state courts, Oh said.

“That’s where you see a failure, in terms of the protection of the children,” she said. “Because they could fall through the gap between federal law and state law.”

‘I didn’t know who to ask for help’

A was just 3 weeks old when she was brought to the West Coast from South Korea. Her adoptive parents had trouble conceiving, she was told. It never occurred to A to ask if she was indeed a U.S. citizen.

Then in her 20s, while working at a coffee shop, A opened a letter from the U.S. State Department asking for more proof of her citizenship. She had no idea who to turn to and couldn’t afford a lawyer.

“I think I just felt really alone and scared,” A said. “I didn’t know who to ask for help.”

So, she tucked the letter away and returned to the mountain of dishes she needed to wash. Although part of her was worried, A figured it was some misunderstanding and could be easily resolved.

Later, when she asked her parents about her citizenship, they told her: “You were adopted by a U.S. citizen. So you’re a U.S. citizen,” she recalled.

Years later, in a Facebook group for adoptees, she confided to another member about her situation, who then urged her to contact attorney Gregory Luce as soon as possible.

An adoptee himself, Luce specializes in this area. After he and A connected in 2019, Luce spent the next two years going back and forth with various government agencies to determine if A was a citizen. The drawn-out wait was typical, he said. The truth was nothing short of gut-wrenching.

“Greg said officially: ‘You’re not a U.S. citizen,’ ” A said. “It was hard to hear, but a lot of it was that I was scared.”

Some deported adoptees have faced homelessness and mental health crises

Adoptees are supposed to be granted the same rights as if they were the biological children of their adoptive parents. Yet adoptees who lack citizenship live in limbo almost as if they newly arrived.

It makes them ineligible for most college financial aid, federal benefits and certain government jobs. Soon, they’ll also lose the ability to fly domestically when enforcement of Real ID, a driver’s license or ID card with stricter standards, kicks off in May.

Joy Alessi, a Korean adoptee who’s with the Adoptee Rights Campaign, did not gain citizenship until she was 52 years old. She worries about how the years she spent working as a noncitizen will impact her future retirement benefits.

“As children, we didn’t broker our own adoptions, nor did we bring ourselves across the border without the proper documentation. Nor did we fail to apply for our own citizenship,” she said. “So why are we holding children responsible for their parents’ mistakes?”

For decades, attorneys often advised Alessi to simply “lay low” rather than try to take steps to correct her immigration status. But leaving the issue unresolved puts adoptees at another kind of risk: a criminal conviction, no matter how minor, can expose them to the full weight of immigration enforcement.

NPR previously reported of an adoptee and father of five who was convicted of marijuana possession in Texas. Because his adoption was filed improperly, he was sent to his birth country of Mexico after having served a few years in prison.

Amanda Cho, a spokesperson for Adoptees for Justice, said adoptees who are deported often receive little to no support to navigate life in an unfamiliar country, putting them at significant risk of unemployment, homelessness, and mental health crises.

“They’re kind of just left to struggle and survive on their own,” she said.

In one case, an adoptee named Phillip Clay killed himself after struggling to adjust to life in South Korea.

Thousands of adoptees could have relief with this bill

The State Department said in a statement that it works to ensure intercountry adoptions are “safe, ethical, legal and transparent” but “[its] role in issues regarding adoptee citizenship is generally limited to adjudicating applications for a U.S. passport.”

Adoptee advocates argue the solution lies in eliminating the age cutoff from the 2000 law. Legislative efforts to do just that have historically received bipartisan support. But progress has been slow because the issue had been tied to immigration, an area that has been persistently difficult to reform, according Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., who has previously sponsored the bill.

“So it’s really paralyzed our ability to right a very simple and straightforward wrong,” he added.

But Cho said at its core, the bill is about preventing family separation.

“Adoptees were adopted into a family as children,” she said. “It’s not fair that a biological child can commit a crime, do their time and continue on with their life. But an adopted child is treated [differently].”

Beyond the federal level, states can also better support adoptees by allowing them greater access to their adoption records, according to Luce, who is also the founder of the Adoptee Rights Law Center.

These documents are often considered the most secretive of all court files given their sensitive nature. In many states, including California, Kentucky and Virginia, adult adoptees must secure a court order or permission from their adoptive parents in order to gain access to certain adoption papers. The fee to obtain these files can also be far higher than the cost to retrieve a non-adoptee birth certificate.

The issue impacts both those who were adopted domestically and internationally. In A’s case, Luce said he requested documents essential to her immigration case in state court three times over two years. Had it been easier to get those papers, A would have obtained her green card by now, according to Luce.

“It’s incredibly frustrating if not insane and ultimately dangerous for intercountry adopted people like A when they cannot get basic documents to prove they are lawfully in the United States,” he said.

“It is an issue of human rights and individual dignity that we’ve been fighting for more than 50 years,” he added.

A tries to get a green card amid the new Trump administration

In 2022, A married a U.S. citizen — opening up a new viable pathway toward citizenship. It’s promising, but A won’t be able to get a green card until she has obtained adoption papers.

A said her husband is “more nervous now than ever before because of the current administration.”

Soon, A won’t be able to fly within the country because she’s not eligible for a Real ID. It means missing work trips and her best friend’s birthday in New York, breaking a 12-year tradition. “It’s a really big loss,” A said.

It also comes at a time when she feels the most grateful for the life that she has built — securing her dream two-bedroom apartment nestled between parks and hiking paths, working a job she loves and having a close-knit group of friends, many of whom are fellow adoptees.

“I am so in tune with how lucky I am and somehow it feels like a way to measure how long and hard I worked and how many times I moved trying to find my place,” she said.