Sign The Petition To Support Equal Rights for All Adoptees — Support the Protect Adoptees and American Families (PAAF) Act!
Please sign this petition to support equal rights for ALL Adoptees!
https://secure.ngpvan.com/uXRfdcjBREm5uiMEZA6Ljw2
“For decades, more than 500,000 children have been adopted to the United States from abroad to form American families. While adoption systems were designed to create permanent families, gaps in implementation across governments and agencies resulted in some adoptees never receiving the citizenship their adoption promised.
The Child Citizenship Act of 2000 (“CCA”) addressed this issue for young and future adoptees, but its arbitrary cutoff date of February 27, 1983, left a population of adult adoptees without a clear pathway to citizenship. Adoptees without citizenship face many hardships, including not being able to vote, obtain jobs, access loans for education or housing, or receive public benefits, despite having contributed to these benefits through taxes. For some adoptees, the failure of agencies and the US government to secure their citizenship has meant deportation and separation from their families and the only home they've ever known.
The consequences of this gap are not only personal, but systemic. Without a uniform solution, adoptees, families, agencies, and government systems are left navigating complex, inconsistent, and expensive processes involving immigration filings, documentation challenges, and legal uncertainty. These processes are resource-intensive for all involved, including federal and state agencies, courts, nonprofit service providers, adoptive families, and adoptees themselves. Adoptees who do not have citizenship have come from countries including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Germany, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Iran, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Panama, the Philippines, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, and Vietnam. The United States is the only country in the world where citizenship was not automatically provided for adoptees.
The Protect Adoptees and American Families Act (“PAAF,” H.R. 5492 / S. 2923) is a bipartisan, bicameral bill that offers a common-sense solution that is streamlined and efficient. If passed, the bill would fix the technical loophole in the CCA and grant retroactive U.S. citizenship to all individuals internationally adopted into the U.S. before the age of 18.
Furthermore, the PAAF is morally right. It aligns citizenship recognition with the original intent of intercountry adoption: the creation of a full and final family that recognizes the adoptee as the legal child of their adoptive parents. The PAAF recognizes that all intercountry adoptees, as the children of U.S. citizen parents, are equal to and should have the same rights and protections as domestic adoptees and U.S. citizen parents' biological children.
A clear and uniform policy benefits:
Adoptees, by providing certainty and stability, and the rights that adoption promised;
American families, by legally recognizing adoptees as full members of American families, and ensuring that adoptees will not be ripped away from their loved ones and the lives they've built;
Adoption agencies and service providers, by reducing the need for complex post-adoption legal interventions and upholding the premise of adoption as creating full and final families;
Government systems, by avoiding costly, case-by-case determinations and litigation.
We support a practical, morally-right, forward-looking solution that strengthens the integrity of the intercountry adoption system and ensures equal treatment for all intercountry adoptees under United States law.
The undersigned…”
Please add your signature to the petition!