‘US doesn’t see me as an American’: Thousands of adoptees live in limbo without citizenship

HENDERSON, Nev. (AP) — The 50-year-old newspaper was turning yellow and its edges fraying, so she had it laminated, not as a memento but as proof — America made a promise to her, and did not keep it.

She pointed to the picture in the corner of her as a little girl in the rural Midwest, hugging the family Yorkshire terrier, with dark pigtails and brown eyes so round people called her Buttons. Next to her sit smiling, proud parents — her father an Air Force veteran who had survived a German prison camp in World War II and found her in an orphanage in Iran. She was a skinny, sickly 2-year-old; he and his wife decided in 1972 to take her home and make her their American daughter.

They brought her to the United States on a tourist visa, which in the eyes of the government she soon overstayed as a toddler — and that is an offense that cannot be rectified. She is one of thousands of children adopted from abroad by American parents — many of them military service members — who were left without citizenship by loopholes in American law that Congress has been aware of for decades, yet remains unwilling to fix.

She is technically living here illegally, and eligible for deportation.

“My dad died thinking, ‘I raised my daughter. I did my part,’ but not knowing it put me on a path of instability and fear,” she said. The Associated Press is using only her childhood nickname, Buttons, because of her legal status. “Adoption tells you: You’re an American, this is your home. But the United States doesn’t see me as an American.”

Every time she turns on the news, she hears former President Donald Trump, in his bid for reelection, promising to round up immigrants living illegally in the U.S. Now she lays awake at night, wondering what it would be