A woman adopted as a child by an American war veteran, whom she found in an Iranian orphanage in the 1970s and raised as a Christian, is facing deportation to Iran, a country notoriously dangerous to Christians and now on the brink of war with the United States.
She is one of thousands of foreign adoptees who were never granted citizenship because of a fracture at the intersection of 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 for removal proceedings before a California immigration judge. She has no criminal record. The letter says she is eligible for deportation because she overstayed her visa in March 1974 at the age of 4.
“I never imagined it would end up where it is today,” said the woman, who believes that as a Christian and the daughter of a US Air Force officer, deportation to Iran could be a death sentence. “I’ve always said to myself that there is no way this country would send someone to die in a country they left as an orphan. How could the United States do that?”
The already terrifying prospect of being deported to Iran has become more so in recent days, she said, as the Trump administration began amassing the largest force of US 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 featured 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 been trying to rectify her legal status for years, so the Department of Homeland Security has been aware of her situation since 2008. She estimates that their file on her is thousands of pages long. She doesn’t know what prompted the sudden threat of removal.
The Trump administration has been on a mass deportation campaign, claiming it is removing the “worst of the worst” criminals. But many without criminal records were swept away. The only interaction with law enforcement the woman remembers is being pulled over more than 20 years ago for using her phone while driving. He works in corporate healthcare, pays taxes and owns a home in California.
“When the media refuses to name names, it is impossible to provide details about specific cases or even verify that any of them happened or even that the people exist. If you can’t do your job, we can’t do ours,” the Department of Homeland Security wrote in a statement. The AP did not provide the woman’s name, but provided a detailed description of the letter she received, the stated reasons she is eligible for deportation and the date she was scheduled to appear in court, March 4.
A judge adjourned the hearing until the end of next month and agreed with her lawyer, Emily Howe, to specify that the woman need not appear in person – a relief as they feared immigration officers would wait at court to take her away.
She was 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 held 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 her in an orphanage in 1972 and adopted her. She was 2 years old.
They returned to the US in 1973, and the local newspaper ran a full-page story about the family and their new daughter. Her adoption was finalized in 1975. But at that time, the parents had to naturalize the children separately through the federal immigration agency. The woman’s parents have since died.
She didn’t find out she hadn’t been naturalized until she applied for a passport at age 38. She still does not know how negligence happened. She searched through her father’s papers and found a letter from a lawyer, dated 1975, that said he was working with immigration officials, “it appears this matter is closed,” and billed her father for his services.
She made no secret of her situation. For years, he’s been asking everyone he can think of for help: the State Department, immigration officials, senators. She contacted her congresswoman, Rep. Young Kim, a Republican from California, but to no avail. Most recently, Kim’s office responded to her request regarding her pending removal by saying they were “unable to advise or interfere.”
“It just baffles me that it’s okay to send me to a foreign country where I could die or be imprisoned because of a clerical error,” she said.
More modern adoptees don’t face this legal limbo: Congress passed a bill in 2000 to fix the problem and grant automatic citizenship to all those legally adopted from abroad. But they didn’t make it retroactive and it only applied to those younger than 18 when it went into effect; all those born before the arbitrary date of February 27, 1983 were not included.
The coalition seeks to protect older adoptees
A bipartisan coalition — from the Southern Baptist Convention to liberal immigration groups — has since lobbied Congress to pass another bill to help older adoptees left out of the law, but Congress has not acted. Some of those lobbyists now say the administration threatening to deport an adoptee is the exact 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 begged lawmakers for years to address the issue.
International adoption has been a topic rarely supported by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Many Christian churches preach international adoption as a biblical calling, a mirror of God welcoming believers into a family of faith.
Daniel, who recently joined World Relief, a Christian humanitarian organization, said the threat to send a Christian adoptee to Iran is a collision of two issues she and many other Christians care deeply about: international adoption and the persecution of Christians around the globe.
“That’s what concerns me most about this: We are a nation that prides itself on fighting for religious freedom both here and abroad,” Daniel said. “And it’s so antithetical to that to then say we’re going to send this person who, to me, is a sister in Christ, to face a death sentence.”
She called him “un-American and unconscionable.”
Converts to Christianity in Iran face intense discrimination
Ryan Brown, executive director of Open Doors, a nonprofit that supports persecuted Christians around the world, said some in Iran are Christians by birth and face widespread discrimination. But it is much worse for those considered converts to Christianity from Islam. He said he expects a deported adoptee to be viewed in this later category – as a convert.
“You’re supposed to be an enemy of the state. You’re supposed to be a Christian if you’re aligned with the West and want to see the regime overthrown,” he said. “There is no benefit of the extended doubt.”
Christian converts are routinely arrested. Some are sentenced to death.
“Their prisons are world famous for their deplorable conditions,” Brown said.
There is no sanitation. Food, water and access to healthcare are limited. Iranian prisons are “notoriously worse for women,” he said, and women routinely reported sexual assault by their captors. Others were forced into marriage.
Brown, an adoptive father himself, struggled to even contemplate what a Christian woman accustomed to the freedom of the United States might experience if she were to step off a plane to Iran. She doesn’t know the language. She knows nothing about her habits. She lived an all-American life.
“I can’t even fathom it,” Brown said. “My prayers are with her.”
The woman believes Iran will view her with even more suspicion given her father’s military service and work as a US government contractor.
She grew up listening to her father’s war stories. She read the diary he kept in the prison camp, how cold and hungry he had been, and she was proud of his sacrifice and his service to a country she believed she had saved.
When she’s sad or scared now, she said, she looks at her favorite photo of him in his military uniform, his medals lined up on his left shoulder, an easy, confident smile on his face.
“I’m proud of my father’s legacy. I’m part of his legacy. And what’s happening to me is wrong,” she said. “And I know he’s been here, it would break his heart to know I’m on this path.”