Adoptee Citizenship

“I have fought for the US. The US needs to fight for me,” said Leah, a Navy Reserve veteran who courageously shared her story of discovering her lack of U.S. citizenship just days before her deployment to Iraq. She was born in South Korea in 1982 and adopted by an American family in 1984. Because the U.S. is the only country she knows and because her parents were U.S. citizens, never once did it occur to her and her family that she could be anything but an American citizen until it was too late. Unfortunately, there are as many as 49,000 more such people suffering from the same crisis as Leah. Click here to read more on her story.

Led by the Korean American Grassroots Conference, Adoptee Rights Campaign, and Holt International, the National Alliance for Adoptee Equality is a consortium of community organizations, faith-based groups, adoptee advocates, and allies who came together to raise awareness of the inequality of citizenship among intercountry adoptees and to work towards materializing a permanent, legislative solution to end this crisis. NAAE officially launched in November, 2019 with the support of impacted adoptees, familes, and friends from across the United States, as well as members of Congress from both parties. Click here to see the current list of member organizations of NAAE. You can also follow NAAE on Facebook.