As many as 200,000 adopted children who born overseas are now at risk of detention or deportation by the Trump administration because they never received U.S. citizenship, lawyers say.
Over the past 80 years, American parents have adopted a total of more than 500,000 children from abroad — some kidnapped from their biological parents by unscrupulous adoption agencies.
But some of those parents never got around to actually obtaining citizenship for their children, leaving tens of thousands who have spent almost their entire lives in the U.S. but have no legal status.
"Most immigrants know from the very beginning what they have to do to gain legal status, but many adoptees have never questioned whether or not they have it, until now," Minnesota-based family law attorney Mónica Dooner Lindgren told The New York Times in a recent report shedding light on the problem.
"The Department of State website says that a U.S. valid passport is sufficient to prove citizenship, but that is not preventing agents from detaining adoptees."
She added that the Trump administration's enforcement surge in Minnesota — which reportedly has one of the highest rates of international adoption of any U.S. state — had been targeting "all people of color" and were "not discriminating" between different categories of foreign-born people.
It comes after the administration deployed ICE agents to more than a dozen airports across the U.S. amid an ongoing funding battle in Congress over the agency's ballooning budget.
Democrats have refused to back any further funding for the Department of Homeland Security unless it bars its agents from wearing masks on the job and raiding people's homes without a warrant from a judge.
In recent months, federal judges have ruled more than 7,000 times that the Trump’s immigration agents illegally detained someone, with government lawyers often not offering a counter-argument.
That has left many international adoptees fearful of being locked up, whether or not they have citizenship, according to The NYT.
Gregory Luce, an immigration lawyer who runs the Minneapolis-based non-profit Adoptees United, estimates that around 200,000 foreign-born adoptees grew up without U.S. citizenship, often only finding out when they applied for a U.S. passport or Social Security benefits.
Congress has tried in the past to shore up the status of foreign-born adoptees, but often left large gaps. A 2001 law granting automatic citizenship to adoptees under 18 left out up to 75,000 adoptees who were older on that date.
A bipartisan bill called the Protect Adoptees and American Families Act, which would give automatic citizenship to all international adoptees, was introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives in September, but its chances of passing remain unclear.
Luce said many adoptees without citizenship are afraid of applying for it even if they are eligible, lest it cause Trump's immigration forces to take notice of them and target them.
"Naturalization in this environment is much harder and much riskier," Luce told The NYT. "Most people are super scared, and the hard question for me is always, what should they do? Naturalize, renew a green card, do nothing?"
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