Tag Archives: adoptee deportation

Adoptee Deportation: An American Injustice.

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Unfortunately, many adoptive parents did not research or verify citizenship status at the time of adoption or follow through on the citizenship process. Some say they were unaware of naturalization requirements and believed citizenship was automatic upon adoption finalization. Some claim to have been misled about citizenship procedures by their adoption agencies, courts, lawyers, or federal immigration authorities. Some believed that it was up to the adoptee, at the age of majority, to choose their citizenship status. In some cases, adoptive parents disrupted the adoption, and either “rehomed” the children they brought to the US or turned them over to the state foster care system where they lingered with no legal closure. Continue Reading →

Adoptee Deportation: State-sponsored Adoptee Abuse

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The vigil brought one thing home to me: Adoption is how adoptees live abstracted lives without context, beginnings, endings, or agency. The rules are made and played by patriarchy, church, and state with all their subsidiary isms, ideologies, and agendas. For the first time, viewing the vigil performances, I seriously considered–felt–what it is really like to be sent away, first via shuttling us down the adoption chute—then through a second shuttle through the state. Adoption is analogous to deportation. To exile. No matter what happens later, we never really have a home we can go home to–and certainly not by state force. No home is ever forever. Continue Reading →

S2275: Good news for international adoptees in the US–but let’s read the bill first

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Known popularly as the Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2015, the bill reportedly will close the gap left by the Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2000, which left thousands of older cross-country adoptees in the US without the protection of US citizenship (and newer ones with) because adoption agencies, adoptive parents and even INS/ICE in the past failed to comply or follow-through with US law when these adoption were finalized. S2275 will automatically grant US citizenship to all IA’s upon finalization, and their new families will not be required to apply for naturalization for their internationally adopted children.

Despite the myth of the “forever family,” currently older international adoptees are subject to deportation to their countries of origin for any reason the national security state deems appropriate. Jao Herbert, adopted as child from Brazil and reared in Wadswrotoh, Ohio, near Akron, for instance, was deported after he was convicted of a misdemeanor pot charge . Federal law left the judge no wiggle room. He was subsequently murdered outside his home in Campinas. Like other adoptee deportees he had no familial ties, or cultural and language skills left over from his country of origin. Strangers in a strange land. Continue Reading →