• Please support citizenship act Please support citizenship act The absence of justice hurts. Its application is common sense. But more often than not, the intelligence to ensure it mysteriously disappears. This is what happened to approximately 35,000 foreign adoptees
• Please support citizenship act
Please support citizenship act
The absence of justice hurts. Its application is common sense. But more often than not, the intelligence to ensure it mysteriously disappears. This is what happened to approximately 35,000 foreign adoptees of American parents.
One would think legal adoption would guarantee American citizenship. Think again. This was not always the case since a large number of adopting American parents for one reason or another failed to apply for American citizenship, which would have guaranteed all rights of citizenship, for their foreign-born adoptees.
Many adoptees, now adults with families of their own, have been cruelly torn from their spouses and children in deportation proceedings to countries of their birth where they do not know the language nor culture due to the injustice of non-citizenship status, through no fault of their own. This could now be corrected with pending legislation.
In an effort to correct such injustices, the Adoptee Citizenship Act was introduced in Congress in 2015 by Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota as Senate Bill 2275, which would grant retroactive citizenship to all foreign-born adoptees, including those who have been deported already. So far, this bill has not passed in Congress.
In the interest of justice, please contact your senator and congressional representative to urge passage of the Adoptee Citizenship Act.
In the meantime, if you are the parent of a foreign-born adoptee, now age 19 or older, please make sure you have applied for that child’s citizenship since it was not automatically granted at the time of adoption. Legislation for children under 19 years of age is already in place ensuring their rights as American citizens.
Janet Ashkenazy, Honokaa
