It was a chilly January morning when a group of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents walked into a Hennepin County clinic and started asking about employee Hannah Beyers.
The officers did not explain why they were asking and left when they realized it was Beyers’ day off. After she learned about the visit, Beyers speculated it was a matter of racial profiling — she was adopted from South Korea decades earlier. She has kept her naturalization and citizenship paperwork, but like foreign adoptees across the nation, she was left to wonder if it was enough.
Among those caught up in ICE’s immigration crackdowns are people born in foreign countries and adopted into U.S. families. According to some estimates, about 200,000 internationally adopted people in the U.S. lack citizenship.
Many international adoptees have scrambled for their paperwork to prove they are naturalized citizens, only to learn their adoptive parents never completed the process. And even with all the right paperwork — passports, certificates, naturalization papers — the threat of racial profiling is never fully absent.
Despite her concerns, Beyers returned to work shortly after the ICE visit.
“I had a moment of fear. I felt like I couldn’t leave my house, but I was motivated to keep moving. I needed to keep moving,” she said.
Providing for her children took priority, even if that meant placing herself at greater risk. So far, the ICE agents have not returned to her workplace.
A loving Minnesotan couple adopted Beyers at just 13 months old from South Korea in 1988. “I grew up in such a secure environment that my race didn’t really matter,” Beyers said. After living in the U.S. for nearly her entire life, Beyers’ sense of safety began to waver — a feeling that rings familiar for many international adoptees, who face threats of arrest, detainment and deportation.
Minnesota has been a hotspot in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. In December, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem deployed hundreds of ICE and Border Patrol agents to Minnesota as part of Operation Metro Surge. One month later, President Donald Trump deployed 2,000 additional agents to the Twin Cities. The surge led to large protests and violent confrontations, including the shooting deaths of two Minnesotans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by federal agents.
‘You’re only as safe as you can be’
As the founder for the Minneapolis-based Adoptee Rights Law Center and the executive director of Adoptees United, Gregory Luce spends much of his time helping adoptees navigate complex legal processes. The attorney’s workload ballooned when ICE agents flooded Minnesota.
Adult adoptees, after a lifetime of living as Americans, approached Luce with concerns about their status in the country. Several of Luce’s clients discovered they lacked any citizenship identification. Based on his own research of adoptee records and archives, Luce estimates that out of all the adoptees born since 1968, up to 200,000 lack U.S. citizenship.
Arissa Oh, a professor of immigration history at Boston College, said one of the main reasons why parents do not complete citizenship requirements for their adopted child lies in the gulf between federal and state processes for adoption.
“Getting formally adopted is a state court issue,” she said. “But some adoptive parents don’t realize that there’s another federal level for naturalization.”
When state governments create new birth certificates for international adoptees, they usually include a notice that reads “Not Proof of Citizenship.” Unlike citizens who were born in the U.S., international adoptees need to prove their citizenship through additional paperwork, such as naturalization documents.
There are few laws that extend to all international adoptees. Of the protections that do exist, such as the Child Citizenship Act, Luce said there are still issues. The law granted automatic citizenship to underage adoptees when Congress enacted it in 2001 but left adoptees over the age of 18 without that protection.
For decades, adoptee advocates like Luce and members of Congress have tried to expand the Act to grant citizenship to all adoptees, regardless of age, but without success. Had the issue been resolved years ago, Luce said, hundreds of thousands of adoptees might feel more protected from the immigration crackdown today.
Even for adoptees whose parents went through all the steps to ensure their citizenship, Luce said, ICE presents a major concern. When asked if an adoptee could avoid ICE with a passport and citizenship documentation, Luce hesitated. “You’re only as safe as you can be,” he replied.
A citizenship crisis
Astrid-Ira McCarthy recalls the details of the standard, white envelope that appeared in her White Bear Township mailbox. When McCarthy read “USCIS” on the letter’s heading, she thought she had finally received the passport she requested months earlier, a move she made as Trump first started threatening his immigration crackdown.
The letter, however, said the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had instead assigned McCarthy a new Alien Registration Number — a unique identification code for non-citizens — even though she had a Social Security number and had become a U.S. citizen not long after her adoption from India in 1989.
“My brain exploded,” she recounted. “I called my wife and tried to explain to her what happened.”
For several nights after she received the letter, McCarthy jolted awake from nightmares about deportation.
She had no memories of her birth city of Kolkata (then Calcutta). McCarthy was 6 months old when she was adopted by a couple in Minnesota. Her fraught relationship with her adoptive parents became worse with their fervent support for Trump.
Yet, to rectify the USCIS’ mistake, McCarthy had to fetch a large binder of adoption paperwork from her mother’s house. After several negotiations, McCarthy’s mother agreed to give the documents to McCarthy’s wife and father. McCarthy also filed several public records requests to access her sealed adoption case file: the key to proving to the USCIS that her parents had gotten her U.S. citizenship in 1990. It took half a year to get a copy of her naturalization document.
Even though she resolved the issue, McCarthy worries for other international adoptees. She might never know why she appeared as a U.S. citizen in some federal records yet was not considered one in others.
Kelsey Arnston of St. Louis County harbors similar anxieties. Even though her parents completed her naturalization and citizenship processes, she worries about the possibility of racial profiling from ICE officers. When she is in areas with high ICE activity, she wears sunglasses to help hide her face.
Arnston is also completely deaf in her left ear and has about 20% hearing capability in her right. While she has a hearing aid, she often relies on reading lips to understand what others are saying — a skill that often cannot be used when so many ICE agents wear masks.
When ICE activity reached its peak in Minnesota around January, Arnston strapped a beige travel bag to her chest like a plate of armor. In it, she stuffed all the documents that she thought might help protect her: her passport, passport card, citizenship documents, work ID badge and a flashcard that reads, “I AM DEAF OR HARD OF HEARING.” If ICE agents approached her, she would show them that flashcard.
“If I speak, they’re going to hear me and think, ‘She has an accent,’” Arnston explained. Worried that her own voice could be cause for further racial profiling, she seldom went anywhere for several weeks without the flashcard.
Anxiety beyond Minnesota
Jessica Luciere is a Colombian adult adoptee based in New York and the associate director for the adoptee nonprofit group Spence-Chapin. While observing increasing anxiety levels among her clientele, she has grappled with her own sense of unease.
In late March, the Trump administration deployed waves of immigration officers to major U.S. airports during a partial government shutdown. Luciere, who travels frequently, began providing all her flight information to Luce and keeping herself extra equipped with her citizenship documents. Worried that ICE officials might racially profile and stop her, Luciere remarked, “With my brown skin … I’ve got to make myself as well-equipped as I possibly can.”
Even with all the right paperwork, Luciere worried she and other international adoptees are not entirely safe. “We see people who are getting detained and sequestered who are American citizens, some American-born,” Luciere said.
In the past, deportation seemed like an unlikely possibility to adoptees like Luciere. Sometimes, if international adoptees committed a felony in the U.S., or if their adoptive parents never secured their citizenship, they were vulnerable. In 2016, for instance, Adam Crasper — a married father of two who was adopted in 1979 by a U.S. couple in Michigan — was deported back to his birth country of South Korea after his criminal convictions. Still, Crasper’s fate seemed like an anomaly. Now, it has become a standard fear — one that therapists are hearing about more often in Minnesota and beyond.
In Buffalo, N.Y., Marcella Moslow is one of the few therapists who provides care specifically for adoptees. Long before ICE became a recurring topic in her sessions, she listened to harrowing stories from adoptees: estrangement, abuse, and persistent anxieties about not being wanted or loved. When ICE became a concern among her clients, Moslow noticed that many of them were struggling with their mental health more than ever. As a Colombian adoptee, she harbors her own anxieties.
“I don’t have the luxury of shutting this off when I leave a session,” said Moslow.
Nearly 400 miles southeast of Moslow, in Westchester County, fellow adoptee and therapist Joy Lieberthal Rho helps her clients wrestle with similar questions.
Rho founded the adoptee wellness platform, IAMAdoptee, and previously worked with an adoption agency.
“My day job was understanding the policy of adoption through the lens of policymakers, all of whom were white adoptive parents,” she recounted. As a second job, however, she would discuss her experience as an adoptee on various panels. “It almost felt like two different worlds,” she said, describing the gulf between adoption policy and adoptee experiences. “They don’t really intersect.”
While hearing the accounts of their adoptee clients, both Moslow and Rho say they are not just concerned about the immediate impact of ICE activity on adoptee communities, but the fallout that could extend long after. “There’s a level of hypervigilance now,” Moslow said. “Even if ICE were to leave every city today, there will still be lasting effects.”
