Foreign adoptees are living in legal limbo

Mark · Foreign adoptees are living in legal limbo

Foreign adoptees are living in legal limbo

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20081020-9999-1n20adopt.html

Excerpt:

Almost 17 years after Nick and Alice Zizzo adopted a brown-eyed, chubby-cheeked baby girl through San Diego County's child welfare system, she came home one day bubbling that her high school choir was going to Europe.

The Rancho San Diego couple helped their daughter, Stephanie, apply for a passport in fall 2006, then waited for it to arrive. What they received instead was a piece of stupefying news from the federal government: Stephanie wasn't a U.S. citizen. She wasn't even in the country legally.

County officials have acknowledged putting Stephanie Zizzo and at least four other adoptees born in other countries, including Mexico and Kenya, in legal limbo by not resolving their immigration status before adoption.

In the year and a half since the cases began to surface, the county has updated its policies to require that a child's legal residency be established before they leave the system. But no one knows how many children were adopted without it, or what they'll face trying to stay in the only country they've known.
...

“Any person who enters the U.S. as a child and does not have documents with which to reside here is in peril of being deported,” said Jan Bejar, an immigration attorney retained by the county to assist families who have filed claims over the issue. “The problem is, once a person is adopted, people think he is a citizen and can't be deported. The hell he can't.”