A woman adopted by an American war veteran, whom he found in an Iranian orphanage in the 1970s and raised as a Christian, is being threatened with deportation to Iran, a country notoriously dangerous for Christians and now on the brink of war with the United States.
She is one of thousands of people adopted from abroad who have never been granted citizenship because of a rift between adoption and immigration law.
The woman, whom The Associated Press is not naming because of her legal status, received a letter from the Department of Homeland Security earlier this month ordering her to appear before an immigration judge in California for removal proceedings.
He has no criminal record. The letter states that she is eligible for deportation because she overstayed her visa in March 1974 at the age of 4.
“I never thought it would get to where it is today,” the woman said. The woman believes that as a Christian and the daughter of a US Air Force officer, deportation to Iran could be a death sentence. “I always said to myself there’s no way this country could send someone to die in a country they left as an orphan. How could the United States do that?”
He said the already looming prospect of being deported to Iran has grown more rosy in recent days, as the Trump administration has begun gathering the largest force of U.S. warships and aircraft in the Middle East in decades, preparing for possible military action against Iran if talks over its nuclear program fail.
The Associated Press profiled the woman in 2024 as part of a story about how many international adoptees were left without citizenship because their American adoptive parents failed to naturalize them. The woman has tried to improve her legal status for years, so the Department of Homeland Security has known about her status since at least 2008. He estimates that his file on him is thousands of pages long. She doesn’t know why the threat of sudden removal was issued.
The Trump administration has been waging a massive deportation campaign, claiming it is removing the “worst” criminals. But many people with no criminal record have been removed. The only interaction with law enforcement the woman remembers is that she was pulled over for using a phone while driving 20 years ago. She works in corporate health care, pays taxes, and has a home in California.
The Department of Homeland Security wrote in a statement, “When the media refuse to provide names, it becomes impossible to provide details on specific cases or even verify that something happened or that people even existed. If you can’t do your job, we can’t do ours.” The AP did not tell him the woman’s name, but sent a detailed description of the letter she received, the reasons she was eligible for deportation and the date she was ordered to appear in court, March 4.
A judge postponed the hearing until the end of next month and agreed with her lawyer, Emily Howe, that the woman would not need to appear in person — a relief because she was worried that immigration officials would be waiting in court to take her away.
Adopted in Iran when she was 2 years old
The woman’s father was a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II, captured in 1943 and detained until the end of the war. When he retired from the Air Force, he worked as a government contractor in Iran, where he and his wife found and adopted him in an orphanage in 1972. She was 2 years old.
They returned to America in 1973, and the local newspaper ran a full-page story about the family and their new daughter. His adoption was completed in 1975. But at the time, parents had to naturalize children separately through the federal immigration agency. The woman’s parents have died.
It was not until she applied for a passport at age 38 that she learned she had not been naturalized. She still doesn’t know how this mistake happened. She searched her father’s papers and found a 1975 letter from an attorney stating that he was working with immigration authorities, “it appears that this matter is at an end,” and billed her father for his services.
He did not keep his position a secret. She spent years asking for help from everyone she could think of: the State Department, immigration officials, senators. She has contacted her congresswoman, Representative Young Kim, a Republican from California, but to no avail. Recently, Kim’s office responded to his petition regarding his pending removal, saying they are “not able to advise or intervene.”
“It astounds me that it’s okay to send me abroad because I could potentially die or go to jail because of a clerical error,” he said.
More modern adoptees do not face this legal hurdle: Congress passed a bill in 2000 aimed at rectifying this issue and granting automatic citizenship to all people legally adopted from abroad. But they did not make it retroactive, and when it took effect it only applied to those under 18; All people born before the arbitrary date of February 27, 1983 were excluded.
Coalition seeks to protect older adoptees
A bipartisan coalition — ranging from the Southern Baptist Convention to liberal immigration groups — is lobbying Congress to pass another bill to help older adoptees left behind by the law, but Congress has not acted. Some of those lobbyists now say the administration threatening to deport an adoptee is exactly the scenario they worked hard to avoid.
“I’m horrified. It’s rare for me to be shocked by a story these days. But this is an absolutely unbelievable situation,” said Hannah Daniel, who, as director of public policy for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the lobbying arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, has been pleading with legislators for years to address the issue.
Intercountry adoption has been a rare topic that has been supported by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Many Christian churches promote intercountry adoption as a Biblical call to adopt, a mirror of God welcoming believers into the family of faith.
Daniels, who recently joined World Relief, a Christian humanitarian organization, said that threatening to send a Christian adoptee to Iran represents a collision of two issues he and many other Christians care about deeply: international adoption and the persecution of Christians around the world.
“That’s what’s most troubling to me about this: We are a nation that prides itself on fighting for religious freedom here and abroad,” Daniel said. “And then to say that we’re going to send this person, who to me, is a sister in Christ, to face the death penalty, how contradictory that sounds.”
He called it “un-American and unconscionable.”
Those who convert to Christianity face intense discrimination in Iran
Ryan Brown, chief executive of Open Doors, a nonprofit that supports persecuted Christians around the world, said some people in Iran are Christians by birth and face widespread discrimination. But it is much worse for those who are considered converts to Christianity from Islam. He said he hoped the exiled adoptee would be viewed in the latter category – as a convert.
“It’s assumed that you’re an enemy of the state. It’s assumed that if you’re Christian, you’re affiliated with the West and you want to see the regime overthrown,” he said. “There is no benefit in raising suspicion.”
Christian converts are routinely arrested. Some are given the death penalty.
“Their prisons are world famous for their deplorable conditions,” Brown said.
There is no cleanliness. Access to food, water and health care is scarce. Iranian prisons are “notoriously harsh for women”, she said, and women regularly report sexual assault by their prisoners. Others have been forced into marriage.
Brown, himself an adoptive father, struggled to even imagine what a Christian woman, accustomed to the freedom of the United States, might experience if she had to step off a plane in Iran. She doesn’t know the language. She doesn’t know anything about its customs. He has lived a completely American life.
“I can’t even fathom it,” Brown said. “My prayers are with him.”
The woman believes Iran will view her with even more suspicion, given her father’s military service and work as a U.S. government contractor.
She grew up listening to her father’s war stories. She read the journal he kept in the prison camp, recounting how cold and hungry he was, and was proud of his sacrifice and his service to the country he believed had saved him.
She said, when she is sad or scared now, she looks at her favorite photo, the one of him in his military uniform, with rows of medals on his left shoulder, a light, confident smile on his face.
He said, “I’m proud of my father’s legacy. I’m part of his legacy. And what’s happening to me is wrong.” “And I know he was right here, it would break his heart to know I was on this path.”
