‘The US doesn’t see me as an American’: Thousands of adoptees live in limbo without citizenship

Mike was their breadwinner, and they struggled without him. They lived in cars and motels, but never blamed him.

Laura Lynn kept all his belongings neatly packed awaiting his return: clothes, sports memorabilia, his favorite music – on cassette tapes, a reminder of how the world changed since he left. He often gets sick as he gets older, she said, and doesn’t have access to medicine in Ethiopia.

He has five grandchildren whom he has never met. His youngest son, Adam, now 26, recently moved into his first apartment and thought how fun it would be to have his dad there to see it.

Laura Lynn has more hope than she has had in a long time, she said, because a group she never expected came to their rescue: the Koreans. They have offered advocacy and legal assistance. He is represented by groups such as Asian Americans Advancing Justice and Adoptees for Justice.

“I pray that we can show them that he did not ask to come here, but that he was adopted and brought here. He became a very good man,” she said. “He has a family who loves him and we are ready for him to come home to us.”

Emily Howe, a California attorney, carries a 5-inch binder that she calls “the simplified version” of the labyrinthine set of laws that dictate which adoptees could become citizens and which could not.

Howe was adopted from South Korea in 1984, barely young enough to receive citizenship under the 2000 law. Through a bit of luck and timing, this could have been her, she said. So she represents many adoptive families for free.

“It shouldn’t be a spin of the roulette wheel,” she said. She now asks every adoptee if he/she knows what their citizenship is. Things get complicated quickly; If they ask the government and find out they are not citizens, they tip off the authorities that they are living here illegally.

Her clients are panicking about what will happen if Trump is re-elected.

“I’m terrified,” a mother named Debbie shouted in Howe’s San Diego office. ‘What if he comes back in? I hear him talking about mass deportations.”

Debbie and her husband, Paul, adopted two children with special needs from a Romanian orphanage in the 1990s, and have been trying to make them citizens ever since. The Associated Press is using only the parents’ first names because they fear endangering their adopted children.

The California couple watched a “20/20” television special about the plight of the children there. They called them ‘unsalvageable’, they didn’t learn to read, there wasn’t enough food.

The couple belonged to the middle class and had three biological children. But Debbie couldn’t sleep thinking about those children, cold and hungry. So they refinanced their house to bring home two, a boy and a girl.

“We thought we had to get these kids out of there. Then we’ll deal with what we need to deal with,” Debbie said.

The boy was 10 and so small, only 40 pounds, that the school allowed him to attend kindergarten. The girl was 14 years old and legally blind, with limited vision in only one eye. They both had physical and cognitive limitations; the doctors believed the boy had suffered fetal alcohol poisoning.

The family was overwhelmed by their needs. Their new son was curious; in another life he might have been an engineer, Debbie thinks. But in this one they had to nail the front door shut because he would wander out at night. He was fascinated by electricity and couldn’t be left alone without fear of starting a fire.

Howe assures them that they did everything they could.

“We thought we did it the right way, we tried, I hope we did,” Debbie said. “Maybe we were naive. Maybe we missed something.”

They consulted with dozens of lawyers, all of whom said it couldn’t be resolved – it was a complicated calculation of the children’s ages, how their birth certificates were written, their visas. They can’t count how many thousands of dollars they’ve spent.

“It’s stupid, it’s outrageously stupid, it shouldn’t be this monstrous task,” Howe said. “This could be solved in a month if someone had the political will to do it.”

Their son, 43, does not understand the situation he is in. But their daughter understands. She’s a Special Olympian, now 46, with a stack of gold medals. She cannot participate in international competitions because she cannot obtain a passport.

“I really want to become a citizen,” their daughter said. “I want to stay here for a long time.”

They called their legislators. Debbie cried over and over, “My adopted children deserve all the privileges of my biological children. In our eyes they are no different. Why do you look at them differently?”