Claire Galofaro and Kim Tong-hyung were reporting on decades-old abuses in foreign adoptions from South Korea when a source mentioned a very modern-day issue born out of that neglectful system: thousands of children adopted to the United States from abroad had been deprived of citizenship by loopholes in the law that Congress has been unwilling to address.
It was an especially pressing issue to many adoptees with the U.S. presidential election approaching, and Donald Trump promising massive raids to round up people living in the country illegally.
As the team reported on the larger package about fraud in adoptions from Korea, they continued chipping away at this story.
They found a dozen adoptees who’d never been made American citizens — people who’d been promised that the U.S. was saving them only to discover as adults it had made them stateless. Some live in hiding; some have been deported to the countries that the U.S. professed to have rescued them from. The team found people to represent the different experiences of adoptive families attempting to address their status — from a Navy veteran who served 10 years before being made a citizen, to parents who brought home two special needs children from a Romanian orphanage, only to get lost for decades in a bureaucratic immigration system that tells them there is no way to make their children Americans. Photographer David Goldman creatively came up with a solution that protected the identity of a source by obscuring her face behind a childhood photo. It worked to visually capture both how she must live in hiding, and how she feels she has been eternally infantized by the adoption system that supplied babies to American parents, then failed to support them once they grew up into adults.
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