US Must Take Steps to Rectify Ongoing Injustices Faced by South Korean Adoptees

Emily Warnecke was just 3 months old in 1964, when she was adopted from South Korea by a Los Angeles-area military family. She has lived in the U.S. for 60 years, but today she faces a harsh reality: Despite paying into Medicare and Social Security for years, she is barred from accessing benefits. Worse, she’s at risk of deportation for nonviolent criminal charges — because, unbeknownst to her for much of her life, she is not a U.S. citizen.

Warnecke is in this situation because of a decades-old law that excluded thousands of adoptees from automatically receiving U.S. citizenship. Prior to the passage of the 2000 Child Citizenship Act (CCA), no child received automatic citizenship upon international adoption. Families had to proactively initiate naturalization; otherwise, their adoptive children never became citizens.

The CCA fixed this, but only for those under age 18 at the time of its implementation in February 2001. This left some 35,000 to 50,000 adoptees — including Warnecke — tragically out of luck.

Estimates for the number of adoptees left out of the CCA vary widely, partly because many don’t realize they lack citizenship until legal entanglements raise the issue. This was the case with Warnecke. She only learned of her immigration status upon interactions with the criminal legal system — events that must be understood within the traumatic conditions surrounding her adoption and young adulthood.

Warnecke entered an abusive marriage as a young adult. She and her son were hospitalized several times due to her husband’s beatings. One such beating was so severe that it caused significant hemorrhaging, and ultimately, miscarriage. Her unspeakable suffering led to mental health struggles, substance abuse and ultimately drug possession charges.

Certain crimes like drug possession can trigger deportation for noncitizens. Warnecke was issued a deportation order upon her release from prison. She remains in the U.S. only because South Korea refused her repatriation given that, as someone with no ongoing linguistic, familial or cultural ties to Korea, her survival there would be nearly impossible. As was the case with Phillip Clay, who tragically took his own life after being deported to South Korea, many adoptees forcibly sent “back” to their countries of origin face tragic fates.

After prison, Warnecke worked in aerospace and other industries for a decade, but at 48 she was diagnosed with a severe degenerative spinal disc disease, which makes full-time work impossible. Her citizenship status and past convictions prevent her from accessing disability benefits, leaving her in economic precarity.

Advocates with the organization Adoptees4Justice have called on California Gov. Gavin Newsom to grant Warnecke a gubernatorial pardon so she can access the public benefits she has paid into for decades. The campaign also seeks a pardon for Judy Van Arsdale, another Californian and adoptee without citizenship from Taiwan whose traumatic past and current legal struggles mirror Warnecke’s. The significance of such a pardon in each woman’s life cannot be understated. As Warnecke has stated, “A pardon from Governor Newsom will not only give me a voice and a vote, but also to secure my social security benefits that I paid taxes into and have rights given to any other American, that should have been given to me through my adoption.”

As a board member of the National Korean American Services & Education Consortium, I’m working to support both Warnecke and Van Arsdale’s cases through Adoptees4Justice’s “California Is Home” campaign. The campaign, which is the driving force behind the gubernatorial pardon, is gathering petition signatures, raising awareness about Judy and Emily’s troubling yet not unique stories, and providing legal support to both women in securing Certificates of Rehabilitation from the respective counties in which each woman resides.

Reckoning With Shameful Legacies

Scholars and adoptee-activists have long worked to expose the corruption, incompetence and profit-motivated actions behind what adoptee-scholar Kimberly McKee has called South Korea’s “transnational adoption industrial complex.” A new PBS documentary, South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning, builds on this long-standing work, exposing the rampant fraud and abuse that fueled South Korea’s postwar adoption boom. The documentary highlights the central role the United States government and private, U.S.-based agencies played in building a corrupt transnational adoption industry that has created devastating, lifelong consequences for some 200,000 children adopted from postwar South Korea, a large majority of whom went to U.S. families.

Aided and abetted by the South Korean and U.S. governments as well as U.S.-based private adoption agencies, South Korea became the “world’s largest baby exporter” after the Korean War. Transnational adoption helped boost postwar U.S.-Korean “intimate diplomacy,” provided a woefully inadequate substitute for South Korea’s weak social safety net and enriched private adoption agencies. In service of this system, adoptee birth records were often falsified and poor, single mothers were manipulated into giving up their children. Today, a South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission is investigating claims brought by hundreds of adoptees that their birth records were altered to facilitate adoption.

While U.S. adoptees without citizenship span 28 birth countries, the majority — over 18,000 — hail from South Korea. The 2024 Adoptee Citizenship Act, reintroduced in June, would close a loophole in U.S. immigration law that has compounded the struggles faced by tens of thousands of intercountry adoptees, including those from South Korea. Lawmakers must act quickly to right these historic wrongs.

If passed, the 2024 Adoptee Citizenship Act would close the age-restriction loophole embedded in the CCA by automatically granting U.S. citizenship to everyone internationally adopted before the age of 18, regardless of current age, prior interactions with law enforcement or deportation status.

Congress should act to address the consequences of these shameful legacies, and passing the 2024 Adoptee Citizenship Act is a crucial first step. Although the bipartisan proposal narrowly failed last year, it can and should pass now to provide relief to thousands of adoptees left in limbo.

Other crucial measures that would help assuage the effects of these myriad historic injustices might include legislation that would hold U.S.-based private and government adoption agencies to account for past and ongoing corruption, protect against coercion in the interest of boosting adoption numbers, and ensure that those agencies provide post-adoption services and support for adoptees throughout their lifetime.

In the U.S, South Korea, and beyond, supporting ongoing work to change cultural stigmas around single motherhood, and fortifying social safety nets so that single or lower-income parents can better support their children, are also vital next steps.