Michael, a thirty-year-old in the American heartland, is surprisingly unflappable given the challenges he’s faced in the United States. “I try to enjoy my days to the fullest,” he says with an easy smile, “because who knows what tomorrow will bring?”
Michael—who requested that his real name be withheld to protect his privacy and not endanger his immigration process—flew from his birth country in South America to the United States when he was seven-years-old, carrying with him a backpack and his teddy bear. He was met at the airport by a U.S. foster family that had responded to a church appeal to help arrange critical medical care for the boy. Michael suffered from a venous malformation in utero that resulted in severe facial disfigurement. The previous year, in 2003, his biological father brought him to an overseas Catholic clinic in South America, which coordinated the move and found the foster family for Michael.
Michael’s foster mother in the United States recalls him being an engaging, surprisingly self-assured little boy right from the day he arrived. But during his first night in his new home, he clutched his teddy bear as he lay in his bed—“I cried and I cried and I cried,” he recalls to The Progressive. The following morning, the eldest daughter of his new family came to his bedroom to speak to him in Spanish, which she had been studying at school. “That was everything,” he says.
Over the next several years, Michael underwent a grinding series of more than a dozen surgeries to repair the venous malformation and damage to his lower face. He stayed in touch with his biological parents in South America, but hasn’t been able to visit them since 2016 due to his tenuous immigration status, and they couldn’t afford to visit him in the United States. Both families agreed that given Michael’s ongoing medical needs, it would be best for his U.S. parents to adopt him. The treatment was grueling: He required frequent trips to a specialist at East Coast hospitals more than 1,000 miles from his U.S. family’s home. He often developed painful infections after the operations, leaving him bedridden as his schoolmates learned their lessons, roughhoused on the playground, and faced off at soccer matches and swim meets.
In 2012, not long after being adopted by his U.S. parents, Michael nearly died from a serious infection linked to his most recent operation. He recalls a moment from this time when he bid farewell to his parents, believing he was close to death. “My heart rate and temperature spiked,” he says. “My mom immediately knew something was wrong as I cried, thinking it might be my last moments. I just wanted the pain to end and to finally be at peace. I was ready to let go, saying goodbye and telling them how much I loved them and how grateful I was to have them as my parents.”
Michael’s treatments have been largely successful—he’s seen a dramatic improvement of his facial issues, and received continued attention to a blood clotting deficiency discovered by his doctors. But though his medical situation has improved substantially, he and his U.S. family are still fighting another battle: obtaining his U.S. citizenship.
Though Michael was adopted as a teenager, that process didn’t grant him citizenship. Now, more than two decades after arriving in the U.S., his chief concern is being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). As a non-citizen, he can’t legally drive or work in his home state. Michael and his parents have been actively fighting to obtain his U.S. citizenship for fifteen years. They’re now on their fifth attorney: The previous lawyers each have been tripped up by obscure details of the case, or overlooked documents required by the complicated foreign adoption and citizenship laws.
Michael’s mother says she’s terrified that he’ll be snatched by masked ICE agents and shipped to a shadowy detention center where she’ll never hear from him again—as has happened to many immigrants in the past year. His parents—who have six other children from international adoptions, some of whom have special needs—have suggested to Michael that he consider self-deporting to his birth country, so the family would at least know where he is. But Michael is determined not to leave. “I don’t think self-deportation is an option right now,” he says—the United States is his home, and he is hopeful that he can work something out in time to stay.
While there is no official system that tracks all adoptees’ paths to naturalized citizenship, Minnesota-based immigration attorney Gregory D. Luce, who founded the Adoptee Rights Law Center and serves as executive director of a nonprofit advocacy group called Adoptees United, estimates that as many as 200,000 children brought from abroad to America since 1968 may still face immigration issues today, depending on their age, when they came to the U.S., and whether their parents followed up with steps required to secure U.S. citizenship. Even though they were adopted as babies or children by U.S. citizens, tens of thousands of them may still not be U.S. citizens themselves because of issues with how they entered the country, missing documentation, or because their adoptive parents failed to file required paperwork. Now, they find themselves at greater risk of immigration enforcement as the Trump Administration continues its nationwide mass deportation campaign.
In 2000, international adoptees and their families won a major victory with the passage of the Child Citizenship Act, which granted citizenship to those under the age of eighteen as of 2001, provided that they were legally adopted by at least one U.S. citizen, came into the country on the correct visas, and had all of their required paperwork. But these stipulations left out tens of thousands of childhood adoptees who couldn’t meet the requirements due to no fault of their own.
When foreign children are adopted by U.S. citizens, they’re supposed to enter the country on an IR-3 or IR-4 visa, or the more recently implemented IH-3 or IH-4 visa via the Hague Convention. But that pathway is riddled with potholes. In many cases, parents fail to properly finalize the adoption paperwork. They may have inadvertently brought the children into the country on the wrong visa, such as a tourist, visitor, or medical visa. Others may fail to secure any entry visa, assuming that their adopted child would automatically become a U.S. citizen, just as biological children do at birth.
Their experiences at the U.S. border may have also varied, especially decades ago, when there was comparatively less security. Luce tells The Progressive that in some cases adoptive parents may have simply been “waved through” the U.S.-Mexican border with their newly adopted child in their car simply by flashing their own U.S. passports—or merely announcing they’re U.S. citizens—leading them to believe, incorrectly, that they’ve complied with the law.
As in Michael’s case, many parents struggle for years to catch up to the adoption requirements as they negotiate a maze of what Luce has characterized as “Kafkaesque,” noting to The Progressive that only U.S. tax law is more complicated than the legal challenges of inter-country adoptions.
In Michael’s case, his mother says his birth country has failed repeatedly to provide required documentation for him to obtain U.S. citizenship.
Obtaining documentation is make-or-break in these cases. As Luce warned earlier this year in a workshop for the Adoptive and Foster Family Coalition of New York, if you can’t get your hands on crucial documents, “you’re in a world of pain.”
Becoming a U.S. citizen is far more than a matter of paperwork: Many adoptees say it’s about establishing identity and fortifying a sense of self, on top of protection from the threat of deportation and horrific abuses under the Trump Administration. One international adoptee, who requested anonymity for fear of being deported, tells The Progressive that she has struggled with her identity. “I don’t fit in with people from my birth country, and I don’t completely fit in with native-born Americans, even though I have lived here all my life,” she says.
Though she was adopted by American citizens as a toddler decades ago, she currently has an open Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deportation case against her, and she is losing hope she will ever obtain all the documents she needs to stay in the country. She’s far from the only one racing against the clock—Luce says that while the Trump Administration has yet to mass target international adoptees specifically, he’s currently overwhelmed by cases opened by adoptees motivated “almost predominantly by fear” of what may be yet to come.
Those who do make it to a court hearing to avoid deportation and become citizens now often face hostile judges. Minnesota-based attorney Steven C. Thal, who works on all types of immigration cases, notes that during the recent ICE operation in Minneapolis, judges from other districts with 95 percent refusal rates for immigrant requests were reassigned to local courts. Cases have also been fast-tracked by the courts, Thal says, in order to quickly deport immigrants. This has made it hard for attorneys and advocates to keep up—at one point, twenty-three of Thal’s cases were scheduled for a single week in February. In one case, an information packet for court was delivered to a detention center for his client, but not made available to him until the day before his court appearance.
In some particularly gut-wrenching situations, international adoptees who had lived in the United States nearly all their lives have been shocked to learn that they had in fact never been U.S. citizens. Monica Ross, who worked for the Social Security Administration in Baltimore, Maryland, for twenty-three years, was stunned to discover at the age of sixty-four that she was not a U.S. citizen after trying to renew her driver’s license in 2018. “I had been driving for thirty-seven years,” she tells The Progressive. Ross had renewed her license several times without issue, before Maryland’s implementation of REAL ID required her to provide documentation to verify her citizenship.
“I cried, prayed, and had no idea how to get the documents the Maryland Department of Motor Vehicles requested from me,” she says in a letter and video published by the Adoptee Rights Law Center in support of proposed federal legislation to increase protections for foreign-born adoptees.
Ross was the biological baby of a seventeen-year-old German girl and an American soldier who was stationed in Germany. In 1959, when she was four years old, she was adopted from a German orphanage by a U.S. Army sergeant and his wife. “I always knew I was adopted, but never questioned my citizenship,” says Ross in a video for the Adoptee Rights Law Center. Ross, who has written a book about her experience called My Journey from Citizenship to Naturalized Citizen, believes her adoptive parents assumed that she automatically became an U.S. citizen after she was adopted in Germany.
“I was raised with you,” Ross says in her video, appealing directly to the American public. “Adopted people like me went to school with you, worked with you, went to church with you, and may have served in the military with you.”
“Hell opened up” when she learned that she was not a citizen, she tells The Progressive. “It was traumatizing,” she recounts—to stay in the country, she needed to quickly acquire a raft of paperwork, much of it written in German, by appealing to officials who spoke another language. She couldn’t seek information from her parents, as they’d passed away by that point. Her late husband, King, was seriously ill at the time, and she could no longer drive him to his medical appointments without a valid driver’s license.
It took Ross six years to finally get her citizenship—years during which she feared being kicked out of the only country she’d ever called home due to the agenda of “a man in the White House who wants to hurt people,” she says.
Advocates for international adoptees continue to tout the proposed Adoptee Citizenship Act, which would provide citizenship to all adoptees in the United States, regardless of when they turned eighteen. It would also allow those deported under the previous law to return, and provide protections to a wider range of adoptees—though they would still have to meet most of the requirements of the current law.
“These adoptees grow up in American families. They went to American schools. They lead American lives,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, said in a statement when she initially sponsored the act in 2016. “This bill would ensure international adoptees are recognized as the Americans that they truly are.”
Neither the U.S. State Department nor the DHS returned a request for comment on the situation facing international adoptees amid the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown.
Meanwhile, adoptees like Michael live in a state of limbo. His several operations have been resoundingly successful though he needs ongoing medical treatment for continuing issues including hemorrhages. He takes jobs when he can, and works under the radar to avoid raising suspicions from immigration officials. Sometimes he works for his parents. Michael and his family don’t discuss his situation with anyone other than each other and their attorneys, for fear that word may somehow get back to ICE.
Michael’s current attorney has discussed making a hardship argument so he can seek a waiver to obtain U.S. citizenship, despite lacking some necessary paperwork. But to do so, he’d need to travel from the United States back to his birth country to be interviewed by U.S. consulate or embassy officials. Some international adoptees view this option as a potential trap: By returning to their birth countries, they risk being quizzed by anti-immigrant Trump Administration officials who may then prevent them from returning to the United States. Michael says he’s worried about that possibility as well.
“People often dream about coming to America, and make it sound like the greatest place in the world. Maybe in some areas it is, but it really depends on where you live,” he tells The Progressive. “As for the government and leadership, I think it’s a bit of a mess. I wouldn’t say I feel betrayed—just not pleased. Immigration shouldn’t be such a major issue in a country built by immigrants. It’s definitely not the same safe country I came to. But I still consider this my home, because my adoptive family has treated me like their own son, and my close friends motivate and inspire me to be a better person. The community has been amazingly supportive.”
Michael’s mother says that while growing up, he was mostly stoic during his medical ordeal. At first, he didn’t talk much to hospital staff, because he desperately wanted them to think he was American and feared his accent would betray him. But she recalls that as the drugs began to take effect when he would be prepped for surgeries, he sometimes became chattier. “I just want to look like everyone else,” he would tell the doctors and hospital staff at his bedside. “I want to be like you.”