BIG TROUBLE AHEAD

LINK: https://www.msn.com/en-ae/news/other/uncertain-future-for-thousands-of-foreign-born-adoptees-in-the-us/ss-AA1tgegu#image=2

Uncertain future for thousands of foreign-born adoptees in the US

Foreign-born adoptees in the US ©Getty Images

Uncertain futures loom for thousands of foreign-born adoptees in the United States, as bureaucratic oversight has left many without citizenship. Raised as Americans, many of these individuals were adopted as children and now live in fear of deportation to a country unknown to them. Some have already been deported, while others have been pushed into hiding. The US government has not taken action to provide legislative interventions to correct the situation, creating another challenge relevant to immigration issues. 

What is the fate of these adoptees? Click through the following gallery to learn more about their situation.

GALLERY: https://www.msn.com/en-ae/news/other/uncertain-future-for-thousands-of-foreign-born-adoptees-in-the-us/ss-AA1tgegu#image=1

Deported, Not Forgotten Panel, Nov 16 2021

At the Adoption Initiative Conference in 2022, this discussion came full circle. Daniel was a panel speaker for a discussion on Adoptees as Immigrants [link ➤]

BLOG POST: PLEASE READ THIS

Tens of thousands of adoptees live in fear of deportation

Like other #Americans, #adoptees are struggling for stability during #COVID19. B/c some adoptees weren’t naturalized by their US citizen parents as kids, they can’t access disability, unemployment benefits, & healthcare. #Citizenship4Adoptees Learn more👉https://t.co/wkclZ2JGEU

— Adoptees For Justice (@Adoptees4Just) September 23, 2020

LINK https://www.nbcwashington.com/local/adoptee-says-learning-she-isnt-us-citizen-was-like-trauma-car-crash_washington-dc/2094/

 

The News4 I-Team found tens of thousands of people who were brought to the United States when they were adopted later learned they aren’t U.S. citizens.

Imagine growing up in the United States, with American parents, only to find out decades later that you're not an American citizen. The News4 I-Team found it's happened to tens of thousands of people.

"It's frustrating and it's devastating," said Joy Kim-Alessi who, at age 25, found out she wasn't an American citizen when she applied for a passport.

Her American parents, who brought her to the U.S. as a 7-month-old baby, failed to fill out the right form, even though her adoption was legal.

"It's hard to wrap your head around that," she said. "To live your entire life believing just concrete truths about who you are ... all of that means I don't have an identity."

Kim-Alessi is in the U.S. legally, with a green card, but she's been fighting for 27 years for her citizenship. Now she's also fighting on behalf of others, like a Virginia man who asked the I-Team only to identify him as "Tom."

WATCH AND READ: Tens of Thousands of Adoptees Learn They Aren’t US Citizens, Even After Decades Living Here – NBC4 Washington

 

 

#Citizenship4Adoptees is a #COVID19 issue @RepKenBuck @RepMGS @RepMcClintock @RepDMP @RepGregSteube @JacksonLeeTX18 @RepArmstrongND @RepEscobar @RepLouCorrea @RepZoeLofgren @RepDLesko @RepAndyBiggsAZ @RepJayapal @RepJoeNeguse @RepSylviaGarcia #HR2731 NOW pic.twitter.com/YrjFN9MjhL

— Adoptees For Justice (@Adoptees4Just) September 23, 2020

PART SIX: Victims of Adoptions and Lies: Identification (reposting)

wiki photo

Part 6: IDENTIFICATION

By Trace A. DeMeyer Trace Hentz

I woke up with two thoughts: there are two victims of adoption who need help and not necessarily from each other: the adoptee and the first mother. Each has its own burden and neither can heal the other.

My mind has been so focused on the new anthology Two Worlds, I apologize for my absence on this blog. It's not that I haven't been paying attention to comments and planning new interviews and posts.

There is no shortage of news and concerns on the topic of adoption.  One biggie is identification!

A recent comment on this blog was about possible deportation of a woman who was adopted at 4 months old in France by a military family and the adoptees' daughter is now very concerned that her mother can't produce adoption documents - made worse since her adoptive parents are now deceased and unable to tell her anything.

Who would have thought a 53-year-old woman adopted by Americans and raised here in America would have to worry about this?  Mother and daughter have a right to be concerned.  With documents and birth certificates and identification cards becoming the focus of elections, getting passports and drivers licenses, and after hearing so much about illegal immigration, we should ALL be concerned.

Adoptee and Adoptive Parents:  I've posted about this numerous times on this blog.  Adoptees are given a fraudulent birth certificate and we adoptees have to live our lives under these very scary consequences.

There is a governmental solution: GIVE US OUR BIRTH RECORDS - give us the real papers!

In the new anthology I wrote a piece, DWI: Driving While Indian, click here to read an earlier version on this blog.  It's about adoptees who have been deported for having fake birth documents!

I told the commenter she needs to take her mother to their state representative or local senator armed with as much information as she could find about this and explain her dilemma. I said it could take months for a resolution. Documents have to exist - if you are born, there is a record. But "adoption" changes our records. Why? To benefit and satisfy the adoptive parents. 

My adoptee friend VON made it clear on her recent blog that adoption is far from perfect!

"...In some ways adoption practice is worse than it has ever been because it is based on even more fraudulent information than it ever was – the plight of transnational adoptees who are viewed as ‘orphans’ but are not; the deception of mothers who are led to believe they are giving the greatest gift of all in giving their baby for adoption; the attitude of young women to adoption, encouraged by the industry, the media and the lack of connect with what they are doing and the outcomes for the child; the idea that adoption is beautiful; the views that open adoption makes it all o.k. and so on. Since adoption practice gives the illusion of getting better but gets worse, you’d have to wonder "where to next?..."
Read it here: http://eagoodlife.wordpress.com/2012/10/13/naming/ 

My point here is, there are real consequences for adoptees who live in America with fake documents that may or may not show YOUR actual birthplace and birthdate. You're living a lie on paper.  Today, ADOPTEES have to "get real" on paper and fast.

TAGS: DEPORTING ADOPTEES, RACIAL IDENTIFICATION, VISIT YOUR SENATOR OR STATE REP ABOUT FAKE BIRTH RECORDS

READ THIS: 2010 news story from Colorado:  http://www.boulderweekly.com/article-3990-judge-orders-woman-a.html

Deportation Cases:  http://poundpuplegacy.org/deportation_cases

Earlier posts can be found in the 2012 archive on this blog. ...Trace

The New Abolition: Ending Adoption in Our Time

Here is more from my brilliant articulate adoptee friend Daniel Ibn Zayd, a follow-up to my interview (on August 13).  He posted The New Abolition: Ending Adoption in Our Time on the website DISSIDENT VOICE... Here are a few quotes that resonated with me... He is working on a book!

"The implication here is that the adoptee also traverses the phases of being “colonized”: coddled by the seeming safety of his new-found place, seduced by the imposed mythology of a dominant culture, and abetted by the willfully distanced memory of his generational past. ...a clear definition for what is often referred to within adoptee circles as “the fog”, or “drinking the Kool-Aid”: the acceptance of a fragile notion of security sustained by a false sense of self within an alien and alienating environment....

"As our activism has grown over this near decade, I have been greatly inspired by adoptees in South Korea, for just one example, who have helped shut down adoption in that country as of this year. Other source countries are following suit, and I am further heartened to see an expansion of this activism, here citing just a few examples: mothers in Guatemala, demanding the repatriation of their kidnapped children; in Argentina, demonstrating for an accounting of the infants born to the imprisoned and then disappeared; in Spain, investigating the stolen children of the Franco era and beyond; in Russia, criticizing the despicable treatment of their children exported abroad; in indigenous American Nations, parents reclaiming their stolen progeny. This list grows longer every day.

"I invoke this term (abolition) fully aware of its weight as concerns the movement to abolish slavery, and to clarify this usage, I define adoption as follows:

Adoption is, in and of itself, a violence based in inequality. It is candy-coated, marketed, and packaged to seemingly concern families and children, but it is an economically and politically incentivized crime. It stems culturally and historically from the “peculiar institution” of Anglo-Saxon indentured servitude and not family creation. It is not universal and is not considered valid by most communal cultures. It is a treating of symptoms and not of disease. It is a negation of families and an annihilation of communities not imbued with any notion of humanity due to the adoptive culture’s inscribed bias concerning race, class, and human relevancy...

 "...And thus American Indian reservations, secret bases of extradition, Japanese internment camps, urban and rural ghettoes, the corporate-industrial prison complex, vigilante terrorism directed against immigrants, the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans. Shamefully added to this list are the children sent to adoption rehabilitation camps in Montana, Russian boys returned alone on airplanes, disrupted adoptions, deported adoptees, the stockpiling of children by adoptive collectors and hoarders, RAD therapies, rebirthings and other pseudo-treatments bordering on outright torture, over-medication of our “mental illnesses”, as well as our “treatment” and study by an army of therapists, social workers, academics, assorted quacks and other misery-industry profiteers. The very existence of this cavalcade of systemic jerry-builders is a greater condemnation of the dysfunctional societal structures undergirding the industry of adoption than anything possibly expressed by the critics thereof. This, in and of itself, should give us great pause...."

http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/08/the-new-abolition-ending-adoption-in-our-time/

Daniel Ibn Zayd currently lives in Beirut.  This article is distilled from a book in progress comparing the political and economic aspects of adoption. He can be reached by email at:daniel.ibnzayd@inquisitor.com. Read other articles by Daniel, or visit Daniel's website.

Deportation of adoptees? Yup!

Citizen of no land: The story of Kairi Shepherd

by Danish Raza May 25, 2012 First Post:India
#Adoption #India #Kairi Shepherd #OnOurMind #United States

Kairi Shepherd, a 30 year-old Indian-origin adoptee is staring at the prospect of deportation from United States to India and says being sent back to India would end her life as she knows it.

“The deportation order which may force me to part from my physicians, family, and friends here, could be a death sentence to me,” said Shepherd, who suffers from multiple sclerosis.
Hers is a strange and tragic tale that reveals how children adopted across borders often fall through the cracks of domestic law.
Utah native Erlene Shepherd adopted a three-month-old Kairi from a Kolkata orphanage. Kairi was one of the 11 children the single mother adopted from across the globe. Erlene died when Kairi was eight.

Kairi Shepherd. File image. Image courtesy Anjali Pawar/ Sakhi

When Kairi was arrested and convicted of felony check forgery – a crime she committed to feed her drug habit – a US court and Kairi discovered that she was not a US citizen. The court then upheld the right of the US government to deport Kairi to India.
How did Kairi fall through the cracks?
To claim Kairi’s citizenship, Erlene had to submit a form with the US authorities before her adopted daughter turned 21 years old. But Erlene died without doing so, making Kairi, a nobody’s child. If parents who are technically granted legal guardianship by the sending country, don’t re-adopt their children after their arrival in the US, then their children are not US citizens.
She also does not benefit from the 2000 Child Citizenship Act, which represented a significant step forward and provided automatic citizenship for adoptees, because it does not retroactively include adult adoptees.
“The Child Citizenship Act failed to include all adoptees upon its passage in 2000 and so brought into question adoption’s most fundamental claim, a forever loving home. Adoptee vulnerability to removal and undocumented status violates an adopted person’s rights as outlined in the Hague Convention on Inter-country adoption to which the U.S. is a signatory and the UNCRC, which sending countries like India have ratified,” said Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, community adviser with AdopSource, a resource group for adoptees in the US.
Dobbs has tracked 40 cases of adult adoptees who have been deported to their countries of origin.
In 2008, Jennifer Haynes was deported from the US to India in a similar manner. Adopted by an American couple, she was sexually abused by her foster father, and spent years being shipped from one foster parent to another.
Charged in a case of drug possession, she was sent back at the age of 32. Her children- eight and nine years old- are growing up in the US without mother.
“I am away from them for more than four years now and I am not sure if I will ever see them again. What kind of law is this?” said Haynes.
The Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA), central government body which sanctions inter-country adoption says that it cannot be held responsible because it was non existent when Haynes and Shepherd were adopted. CARA was formed in 1990.
“Currently we issue conformity certificates in case of every inter-country adoption to facilitate immediate citizenship of the adopted child,” said Anu J Singh, director, CARA, adding that the Authority has written to the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and the US Embassy for details of the Kairi Shepherd’s case.
The MEA has been maintaining that it is looking at ways to provide legal assistance to Kairi to challenge the US order.
International Mission of Hope, the Kolkata orphanage which put Kairi in adoption, shut shop ten years ago and Kairi’s last hope is a favorable order from the US Supreme Court.

The insanity of adoption continues - a child doesn't choose to be adopted, or asked to be placed in another country...and yet Americans who adopt didn't file all the proper and necessary paperwork for their acquisition, putting their "adoptee" at risk... It begs the question: why? Trace

Deportation Cases: Adoptees

As I wrote last year, children who were adopted by Americans have absolutely no idea who they are or where they were born or where their home country is - until they are old enough to read and ask questions.
Do you think a child knows or understands what it means to be a citizen? Hardly. It depends on their age, if they remember being brought to the USA for adoption.

The following stories on Pound Pup Legacy should shed a bright light on this horrific situation for adoptees who did nothing but be adopted by Americans.
Because their adoptive parents didn't get them their American citizenship, now they face deportation, immediate expulsion from America. Yes, a few of them have committed crimes, mostly minor, but in any case, how does an adoptee return to their place of birth when they have no recollection of their people or place or language?
Again, the billion dollar adoption industry pumps up the propaganda to convince more and more people to adopt - even today....to make money... [sigh] ... Trace

http://poundpuplegacy.org/deportation_cases
http://splitfeathers.blogspot.com/2012/03/adoptees-deported-by-us-yes.html

And last year's blog post ILLEGAL ALIENS: Deported Adoptees: http://splitfeathers.blogspot.com/2011/04/illegal-aliens-deported-adoptees.html

Link: Stop Deporting Adoptees: by John Raible
http://splitfeathers.blogspot.com/2011/11/stop-deporting-adoptees.html


If you want to know more about my memoir:
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Read an excerpt
Watch the trailer

Adoptees deported by US? Yes

By Kim Sung-soo
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2012/03/137_106204.html

Until 2001, when Korean children were sent to the U.S. for overseas adoption, it was their adoptive parents’ responsibility to naturalize them as U.S. citizens.

In addition, adoption agencies both in Korea and the U.S. were responsible for post-adoption services that should monitor adoptees and their adoptive parents until the children are fully integrated into U.S. society. This is a key principle of overseas adoption.

However, the reality is not the same as the principle. The U.S. deports foreign adoptees aged 29 and older who haven’t been naturalized when they commit certain crimes. Washington must stop this practice immediately.

Unlike European governments, the U.S. government did not automatically grant citizenship to overseas adoptees until 2001. The Child Citizenship Act of 2000 came into force on Feb. 27, 2001, allowing all internationally adopted children under 18 on that date, and all those adopted in the future, to become U.S. citizens automatically. However, adoptees 18 or older on that date could not be covered by the act.

Many adoptees discovered, usually when applying for federal student loans or a passport, that they had never been naturalized by their foster parents. I know three Korean adoptees ― Monte, Tim, and Matthew ― who could not benefit from the act.

Monte was born in 1970 in Korea and was sent to the U.S. in 1978. Although he served in the U.S. military, he was deported to Korea in 2009. Monte claims that when he was arrested, he did not know that he had been set up by his truck driving partner to transport drugs. Like most other Korean adoptees sent to the U.S., Monte is culturally American and does not speak Korean.

Tim was born in Korea in 1974, and in 1977 he went to the U.S. as an adoptee. His adoptive parents cut their ties with him after he graduated from high school, so he left his home and wandered throughout the U.S. He became homeless and addicted to drugs for over 15 years. Ultimately he was arrested, imprisoned, and deported to Korea, where he became homeless again in April 2011. He has no trace of his birth family on his adoption records.

Matthew was born in Korea in 1978 and he went to the U.S. at the age of six months, but his parents did not naturalize him. He was not deported, but willingly returned to Korea in February 2011 to be close to his family and experience Korea as a young man.

When the Seoul government discovered that Matthew, technically an “overseas Korean citizen,” was back in the country, he received a compulsory enlistment notice from the Korean military. After a prolonged struggle over paperwork that reflected both his permanent residency in the U.S. and his Korean citizenship, Matthew was finally granted an exemption from military enlistment because he is also technically an “orphan.”

Matthew would like to have dual citizenship, just as other adoptees have that option. But because he received his Green Card only in the past few years, he would be in his 40s by the time he gains U.S. citizenship. In the interim, he would be required to live within the U.S. Meanwhile, adoptees with only U.S. citizenship may live in Korea indefinitely on an F-4 visa.

As the U.S. leads the world in terms of the numbers of children adopted from other countries, it should also lead the world in the humanitarian treatment of them. However, we are now seeing that adoptees from not just Korea, but many other countries, are being deported from the U.S. even on minor charges.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), amended and expanded by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) of 1996, non-citizens may apply for “waivers” to deportations, based on factors such as length of residency in the U.S. and potential hardship if deported.

However, no such exceptions are available to “aggravated felons.” Aggravated felonies include crimes such as drug trafficking, but may also include misdemeanor charges. For instance, the IIRAIRA expanded the INA so a person may be treated as an aggravated felon for committing a theft punishable by only one year in prison. This opens up the risk of adoptees to be deported for petty crimes such as shoplifting.

While recognizing that non-adopted people who immigrated as children are also subject to this law, I believe that the U.S. Congress, through passing the Child Citizenship Act of 2000, has already shown its belief that international adoptees should be automatic citizens.

I urge the U.S. government to correct defects in the U.S. legal system by quickly passing an amendment that would allow all overseas adoptees ― even adults like Tim, Matthew, and Monte ― to rightfully receive their U.S. citizenship. This would stop the deportations and also give the benefits and protection of citizenship to all law-abiding international adoptees.

Dr. Kim Sung-soo is the author of a biography of Korean Quaker Ham Sok-hon and executive director of Transparency International-Korea. Reach him at wadans@empas.com.

Disgusted, dirty, and angry: You can help stop the deportation of Russell Green.

http://landofgazillionadoptees.com/2012/01/09/disgusted-dirty-and-angry-you-can-help-stop-the-deportation-of-russell-green/

My heart breaks reading stories like these...PLEASE sign the petition. I did!

STOP deporting adoptees!

I had to share this post as part of NO-Vember Adoption Awareness... Trace

Stop deporting adoptees!
Posted on November 18, 2011

Take the time to inform yourself about this special class of adoptees: They assume they are U.S. citizens. And then some issue arises and all of a sudden their citizenship is denied or questioned, or found out to be legally non-existent. As young adults they find themselves deported to their “home” nation, yet they know no one there (having grown up in the USA) and usually no longer speak their native language. Outrageous. Just another example of the “never quite belonging” way adoptees get treated in our society.
Read more here:


http://johnraible.wordpress.com/2011/11/18/stop-deporting-adoptees/

And any First Nations adoptees who have been deported to Canada, please comment here...

Adult Adoptees: Documentation and Deportation

In all but SEVEN states, adoption files are sealed tight. Adoptees don't have rights to see their own documents. Adoptees like me are given a fake birth certificate that says adoptive parents are your real parents.

Where were you born, adoptees? This is the new burning question!

I am still wrapping my brain around this since so many First Nations children from Canada were brought to America through the Indian Adoption Programs and ARENA. These children did not choose to come here! Thousands were brought here and adopted here!

Now this -- Adult Adoptees may be deported if their adoptive parents forgot to file paperwork and get them citizenship? This is real, folks. It's already happened!

I used to think it was hard being raised by strangers, forced to pretend I was someone else, given a fake birth certificate to show as my identification. Now adoptees must prove they are American-born or face deportation. 

Could this get any crazier? You spend your childhood in American and then get shipped out?

Unsealing my sealed adoption required nothing less than a miracle in Wisconsin, a closed record state. Fortunately, after many years and many attempts, I found my first family... And yes, Helen and Earl were American-born citizens. Even though Helen and Earl are deceased, I am still denied my OBC- my Original Birth Certificate - from Minnesota (another closed record state)... Other adoptees have this same dilemma and disconnect from the truth and their identity.

What if you were born in Canada or South America and adopted in America? These children did not choose to be adopted or choose to come to America. How are we supposed to know where we were really born? What if your adopters didn't tell you the truth or file the papers? 

This topic will surely gather momentum here in the USA very soon, with immigration so busy deporting adult adoptees who were not born here.  

How many adoptees will be affected? It's unclear.

How did this happen? Unknowing adoptive parents who didn't file papers.

Will immigration help First Nations adoptees find their tribal families? I honestly don't know. But I plan to find out and investigate!

If you were deported, please leave a comment on this blog so I can contact you.

To read the Guide for Adopted Adults,  Click here.

Read Von's excellent blog: Guide for Adopted Adults... Click here....

Illegal aliens? Deported adoptees?

Some stories keep me up at night. Some stories shake me to my very core. Last night I learned more about Navajo adoptee Leland Morrill who is one of 10 Native American children adopted by one Mormon family.
How does this happen? 10 kids? Did adopting this many children offer some form of financial gain? Or was there a religious conversion planned? His adoptive father worked for the Church of Latter-Day Saints education systems and retired recently after 40 years.  Lee's sister Virginia (also Navajo) was fostered two years then adopted with Leland. The day after their adoption was finalized, the family moved to Ontario, where they proceeded to adopt Shaun who is a mixed blood and seven who are Ojibwe Canadians: Sheila, Debbie, Cindy, Robert, Sharon, Keith and Adam who are all siblings.
Lee had the misfortune of losing his wallet which led to his discovery that his adoptive parents did not have the legal paperwork or proof of his citizenship in his Navajo tribal nation.
He said on his blog, "So, in January 2010, I visited the DMV. I filled out the application to replace my drivers license only and went up to use my Navajo Nation Final Judgement of Adoption and Social Security card as proof to get the replacement and was denied. New procedures had taken place on January 1, 2010 under the Real ID Act of 2005. I now was required to produce a state-issued birth certificate. I had none, as the Tribal Court of the Navajo Tribe Judicial District of Chinle Arizona had adopted me without any other documentation ...my only documentation: Final Judgment of Adoption. IT WAS THEN I REALIZED I AM AN ILLEGAL ALIEN."
I am sure this story will unravel in Leland's favor, as to his citizenship. He has been in contact with his Kirk relatives regularly on the Navajo reservation and I will post my interview with Leland very soon.

More news: Here is a story about an adoptee from India who may be deported....
...an example of international adoption meets immigration... Schultz is facing possible deportation to India due to his adoptive parent’s not getting him citizenship. His adoptive mother is white, and his case is quite unique in that he is Mormon, speaks only English and know nothing about his country, India or his culture.  Read his story here: http://kadnexus.wordpress.com/2007/03/29/indian-american-transracial-adoptee-faces-deportation-for-criminal-record/

Can it happen... will adoptees can be targeted for deportation when their adopters do not finalize their US citizenship? Only time will tell.