The first time I saw a photo of my adopted South American son Michael (not his real name), I fell in love with him. He had spiky jet-black hair and warm dark eyes. His lower face was shockingly mangled by a horrific venous malformation that occurred in utero. Nevertheless, in the photo he’s smiling and confident. He instantly melted my heart.
A year later, Michael, then 7, arrived at our local airport in my mid-size Midwestern town to move in with my family. He had the clothes on his back, a few special personal treasures in a small knapsack, and he was clutching a teddy bear. His future would be filled with playing with my seven other children and schoolmates — as well as undergoing a grueling series of surgeries to repair his face in hospitals in multiple large coastal cities, which were often followed by infections, one so severe he was convinced he was about to die.
“I love you,” he told me in his hospital bed once as he experienced a 104-degree fever. “You’re the best mom ever. Tell Dad I love him.”
A physician from my hometown who travels internationally to help children born with cleft palates had spotted Michael in a South American Catholic clinic, where he had been brought by his father. The doctor thought a specialist surgeon he knew of was the best hope to treat Michael’s daunting condition — but that would have to be in Boston, where the surgeon worked. He later switched to a New York hospital, where Michael has also traveled for operations.
We found out about Michael’s plight from one of my daughters. She has a soft spot for children from other countries because she was also adopted by us from another country. She learned at her school from a traveling clinic volunteer that the staff was searching for an American family who would open their home to Michael, help organize and travel with him to his medical appointments in the U.S., and stick by his side through what turned out to be some 20 surgeries.
A private foundation had agreed to cover most of the medical costs. However, Michael’s parents, who worked on a coffee plantation, couldn’t afford to travel, much less pay for their food and lodging during Michael’s years of treatment. Michael’s stay with us was far longer than anyone predicted because of further health complications that included frequent hemorrhages. After he had been living with us for eight years, both families agreed his adoption by us would be best for everyone.
Michael has always been reluctant to talk about his medical challenges. He has desperately yearned to simply fit in with a large American family in a big country he considers his home. During his first time in a U.S. hospital, he mostly stayed quiet, only using a handful of English words he knew, hoping he might “pass” as an American. The few times he opened up about the desire closest to his heart was when drugs began to make him woozy before surgeries.
“I just want to look like everyone else. I want to look like you,” he once told the medical staffers around his bed.
After years of enduring his grinding medical ordeal, my son’s biggest problem is now ICE. Today, at 28, Michael is athletic and handsome, even with the signs of his many facial surgeries. We’ve been working in vain to obtain U.S. citizenship for him since we adopted him at 15 in a bafflingly complicated and difficult process that began with missing documentation as we worked with the first of our five lawyers.
Now I’m terrified he’ll be snatched off the street by masked ICE thugs under Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants, which he vowed during his presidential campaign would target murderers and “filth.” Michael is neither.
I’m reluctant to confide my fears to anyone. It’s not that I don’t trust those I choose to tell, but I fear they may share the information with others who could trigger dire consequences for Michael.
I have been deeply moved by people’s warmth and sensitivity toward Michael, as well as stunned by the cruelty he has been forced to deal with — including the viciousness of our president.
People have boldly stared at Michael for a significant part of his life. He never met their eyes, instead looking away or over their heads. A parent once contacted the local health department to report that Michael had a bleeding episode at his elementary school. His sports team was once disqualified from the finals of an important event because he was bleeding. But his classmates and teammates were nothing but supportive. When people would stare at him at sports events when he was younger, his teammates would boldly challenge, “What are you looking at?”
My son isn’t the only one facing a potentially unimaginably bleak future. Michael is one of an estimated 45,000 adults adopted as children by American families who have yet to obtain U.S. citizenship, according to Adoptee Rights Campaign. Some advocates believe there are as many as 70,000 transnational adoptees in limbo. They’re often merely missing or unable to secure minor information to complete the incredibly complicated process, or their American parents assumed a legal adoption made their child a U.S. citizen and took no further action to make certain.
I think most Americans would be stunned to learn that international adoptees have not all been automatically granted the same status as their U.S. parents. Several grown adoptees have already been deported, including individuals who came to the United States as infants and know no one in their birth countries or the language spoken there.
Congress partially addressed this issue in 2000 by passing a law automatically granting U.S citizenship to transnational adoptees, but it only covers children adopted after the law went into effect in 2001, only those under the age of 18 that year, and only those with very specific documentation, some of which Michael’s home country would not provide. Michael and countless others adopted by U.S. families as children were left out in the cold by the law.
Michael eventually became a “Dreamer,” part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program introduced by Barack Obama in 2012 to help immigrants like him to become American citizens. The Dreamer program allowed Michael to work for several years, but a DUI charge after a wild night with his buddies two years ago bounced him from the program, and he can no longer be legally employed. He works off the grid when he can, sometimes for my husband and me, and lies low in his apartment much of the rest of the time. His health insurance ran out in August, and he won’t be able to replace it to help him keep up with ongoing medical issues related to his surgeries.
Michael currently has no visa. He has a passport from his home country. If he decided to leave the U.S. or was deported, he wouldn’t be able to return to the country where he has grown up and lived his entire adult life without first obtaining a visa.
I urged Michael earlier this year to self-deport, at least until the Trump administration is finished. I lie awake at night worried that he’ll be snatched off the street and taken to a nightmarish prison in some other country whose location no one will reveal to me, and I’ll never see him again.
Our new attorney is pushing an alternative: He’s pleading hardship for Michael and our family if he’s not allowed to stay in the U.S. The plastic surgeon who first spoke to me about him so many years ago has written a letter on his behalf in a fight to obtain a green card for him. But the process involves Michael leaving the U.S. for an interview in his home country. Who knows if the interview would be successful in the Trump era? Who knows how long it could take to be granted a green card or if it would even be acknowledged when Michael tries to return to the U.S.?
The way this nation of immigrants is treating immigrants is appalling. It’s especially searing when I recall the hopeful little boy I love so much who came here “armed” with nothing more than a teddy bear and a desperate desire simply to be just like everyone else in a country he loves. Our citizens have historically opened our hearts to people like Michael. We are losing our humanity and have forgotten that we coexist in one world.
What has happened to us?
Barbara Parker is a pseudonym used by the author of this essay. Her family and their many pets have been lifelong residents of the Midwest.
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