Articles about adoptees with past or present citizenship issues that are not believed to be currently facing deportation. However, minor illegal activity could cause any of these adopted people with unresolved citizenship to be detained by ICE.

Joao Herbert was born in Brazil and spent much of his early childhood as an orphan on the streets of Sao Paolo. He was adopted by an Ohio couple at the age of eight. When he was seventeen, his parents discovered that he had not automatically become a U.S. citizen upon his adoption, and submitted a naturalization application. However, Herbert turned eighteen before the processing of the application was complete. Soon after his eighteenth birthday, he pleaded guilty to attempting to sell marijuana and was sentenced to probation and participation in a drug treatment program. Despite the fact that he was a first-time offender who had served no jail time, he was placed in immigration detention for twenty months and then deported to Brazil as an “aggravated felon.” Herbert had no friends or family in Brazil and no longer spoke any Portuguese. Once in Brazil, he began teaching English and became known as "the English professor." His father, who is quadriplegic, was unable to travel to Brazil to visit him. In May of 2004, Herbert was shot and killed in the industrial city of Campinas, 60 miles northwest of Sao Paolo.

Status: Deported, and murdered

John Gaul III was born in Thailand and adopted by a Florida family as a toddler in 1979. He grew up in Tampa, Florida, attending a private high school where he played soccer, baseball and basketball. The Gauls did not realize until they applied for their son’s passport at age seventeen that he was not a U.S. citizen. They immediately filed an application to naturalize him, but Gaul turned eighteen before the process was completed. At age nineteen he was convicted of writing bad checks and stealing a car, and he served 20 months in prison. By the time he completed his sentence in late 1996, the law had changed and he was not eligible to apply for discretionary relief from deportation. An immigration judge ruled that the agency had taken too long to process Gaul’s citizenship application, but that the 1996 law allowed him no discretion to halt Gaul’s deportation. Gaul was placed in immigration detention upon his release from prison, and was subsequently deported to Thailand, where he knew no one. Gaul is barred for life from returning to the United States.

Status: Deported

20 year old Adam Carrigan faced deportation

Status: Unknown, believed to be in the USA

 

As a 3-month-old baby Kairi Abha Shepherd was adopted from India by a Utah woman, by the name of Erlene Shepherd, who died of breast cancer before she she could file citizenship papers, in 1991.

In 2003 Kairi got caught forging checks to pay for her meth habit and as a result now faces deportation to India due to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

Kairi suffers from Multiple Sclerosis and is currently detained by Homeland Security, sometimes allowed to take her MS medication, sometimes not.

Twice, immigration Judge William Nixon has dismissed the government's Notice to Appear against her - once because everyone involved in the case, including prosecutors, assumed Kairi's legal adoption would grant her citizenship, and a second time because her volunteer attorney Alan Smith argued the government could not refile its Notice to Appear to try to change Nixon's original ruling. Undeterred, local ICE prosecutors have appealed to the agency's Board of Immigration Appeals.

Meantime, Kairi has been charged with violating her probation for the original forgery charge. She didn't notify her probation officer she was being held all those months in jail by Immigration. A hearing is scheduled for Aug. 4.

Placement agency:  Americans for International Aid and Adoption (AIAA)

Status: In Dentention