Adoptee Citizenship and Deportation

NPR reports that a woman adopted from Iran at age 2 by an American Air Force veteran and his wife, raised on a Midwestern farm and now in her 50s in California, has received a Department of Homeland Security notice that formal removal proceedings have begun because she technically overstayed a childhood visa. She never obtained automatic U.S. citizenship because she entered on the wrong visa type and was excluded from coverage under the 2000 Child Citizenship Act, a loophole that advocates say has left an unknown number of international adoptees vulnerable to deportation. The woman, who has no criminal record, does not speak Farsi, has no family in Iran, and is a practicing Christian, says she is terrified of being sent to a country the group Open Doors ranks among the world’s most dangerous for Christians, especially amid current unrest and U.S.–Iran war talk. Her attorney argues the case shows how Trump’s mass‑deportation push is now sweeping up people who have lived as Americans their entire lives, while DHS declined to comment without her name and issued a generic statement that immigrants in removal proceedings get 'full due process.' The story also notes that bipartisan legislation to fix the adoptee‑citizenship gap has repeatedly stalled in Congress because it is tied to the broader immigration fight, leaving adoptees like her in legal limbo decades after their adoptions were completed.