Updated on 8/30/24 at 1:14 p.m.
Mike Davis sat in front of a blank wall in an apartment in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
“In 1978 we moved to Augusta, Georgia, bought our house, lived there.” he said. “I went to school there. Glen Hills High. I was on the tennis team, the soccer team.”
Davis was adopted from Ethiopia by an American military officer he met when he was 8 years old. He got a military ID card and eventually earned a driver’s license.
“I never thought I needed to apply for citizenship,” he said. “We thought I was already a U.S. citizen. Even my dad thought I was a U.S. citizen by adoption.”
Davis is one of tens of thousands of adults in the U.S. who did not receive automatic citizenship with adoption. He was deported nearly 20 years ago to his birth country of Ethiopia.
Congress is now trying to address the loophole in federal law that has left many adult adoptees in limbo.
Meredyth Yoon, an attorney with Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, said the organization has met many people who did not know they were not citizens until Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained them.
She is one of many advocates across the country working to pass legislation to fix the loophole.
“Prior to the Child Citizenship Act of 2000, it was harder for children to get citizenship when they were adopted by their U.S. citizen parents,” Yoon said. Back then, there was a separate process aside from adoption to get citizenship.
“In many cases, either because the parent didn’t know or maybe they didn’t get to it. A lot of times that step did not happen,” she said.
Congress rectified the separate adoption and citizenship processes in that 2000 law for minors and future adoptees, but did not retroactively grant citizenship to adoptees who were already adults by 2000.
Nick Greene is a California-based adoptee who advocates for citizenship for all adoptees with Adoptees For Justice and the Alliance for Adoptee Citizenship. He said sometimes, people find out they aren’t citizens only when they try to apply for Social Security or Medicare. Under the Child Citizenship Act, adoptees born before Feb. 27, 1983, are not able to obtain citizenship through their citizen parents.
“So that’s going to be like 40, 50, 60-somethings,” he said. “You grew up as an American. You lived as an American for 60-plus years. For some of them it’s been a decade they’ve been just doing this battle.”
Congress is considering two pieces of legislation that would retroactively grant citizenship to adoptees who did not automatically get it when they came to the U.S. The legislation also allows for people who were deported, like Mike Davis, to repatriate to the U.S.
Where he would be reunited with his family.
Davis’ wife, three sons and five grandkids live in the U.S., and almost everyone still lives in Augusta. Broderick, his oldest, owns a successful car wash and said he learned how to be a businessman from his dad.
Mike owned a pizza shop in downtown Augusta’s Broad Street. He grew his business, bought a house and started his own family.
“I was building my life. I was building a family,” he said. “Already we get separated from our biological parents, and we are okay with this. It’s not easy.”
Davis was flagged for deportation after a run-in with the police in 1993. He was charged with simple possession of marijuana and cocaine and did three months in a boot camp, then three years of probation. When he finished, his probation officer let him know immigration was looking into deporting him.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement came to Davis’ home in the middle of the night in July 2003. His wife and two youngest sons were asleep at the time. ICE detained him for two years while finalizing his deportation. He’s been in Ethiopia ever since.
Adam, his youngest son, pointed to a picture of two beaming little boys wrapped in their dad’s arms. After his dad was deported, his mom tried to move the two youngest boys to Addis Ababa so the family could be together.
“My mom bought a one way ticket there,” he said. “We didn’t plan on coming back.”
But they did come back, and without their dad.
Since then, Mike has had a hard time in Addis Ababa over the last 20 years. He had no family or community there. Work is hard to come by, and now that he is 61 years old, he’s faced some medical issues as well.
“I have five grandkids I have not met yet,” he said. “I’m dying to meet them. They send me some videos, but they grow. They’re grown up now.”
In the meantime Yoon, with Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, is working with Davis to get him back to Augusta. She said nationwide, there’s anywhere from 50 to 75,000 adult adoptees without citizenship, not counting those who were already deported.
Editor’s Note: This article was updated to add California adoptee Nick Greene’s affiliations with the organizations Adoptees For Justice and the Alliance for Adoptee Citizenship.
