"I may never see him again"

I'm A U.S. Citizen. I'm Terrified My Adopted Son Will Be Snatched By ICE Due To A Heartbreaking Loophole.  

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.

READ:  https://www.huffpost.com/entry/us-citizen-international-adoptee-ice-deportation_n_691b4af0e4b085766d7e35a1

November is Adoption Month or Adoption Awareness Month. Same thing. Same propaganda.

 

By Trace L Hentz (blog editor and adoptee)

Adoptee Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a psychologist who wrote Warming the Stone Child, said that those who have been “abandoned” and face it and work through it can become the strongest people on the face of the earth.

A few days ago I wrote a brand new blog post about an adoptee I am trying to help. She was born in Utah and now lives in another country.

Strange issues with google blogger are happening more often now. (It might be bugs, a.i. or just bots.)

Two hours I was writing this blog post then it vanished when I went to hit “publish.” Gone, Poof.

That leads me to this: we may lose this blog. It’s entirely possible. Strange bad things are happening on the internet. There are days we have no ethernet or internet connection at all. I live in western Massachusetts.

I do have a back-up blog: https://americanindianadoptees.blogspot.com/ that I updated in June 2023 with all the posts on this blog/website. I don’t want us to lose everything.

For safety I am going to make a third blog. Here is that link. [https://iapbabies.blogspot.com]

What writing did I lose? I wrote about “what do we need as adoptees.”

For example, this adoptee was told her adoption was private, but in order to create a birth certificate, they’d need a lawyer and a judge. So there had to be a hearing in Utah.

She was born in 1981 but her birth certificate is dated 2006. That’s strange: 25 years later?

There is nothing on it: which hospital, time of birth, her weight, etc., stuff that you normally see on a birth certificate. She may not be born in Utah.

It’s essentially blank with her adoptive parents listed as her birth parents.

The information she needs is not there.

I made a few suggestions:

Register with the Utah DHHS adoption registry. Of course there is a fee.

I also suggested she get a DNA test. At least she’d find a relative.

But that is the problem too. Native people are not keen on doing a DNA test and having their blood in a database.

DNA testing is helping and has helped many adoptees get past the barbaric system called “adoption” and sealed adoption files.

Or in her case, a private adoption that may have been done illegally. We don’t know. Her adoptive mother has passed and her adoptive parents divorced when she was two years old. Did they buy her? Where is her birthmother? What tribe is she from?

There are eight federally recognized tribes in Utah.

November is Adoption Month or Adoption Awareness Month. Same thing. Same propaganda.

More tomorrow. Part 2

Stop blogging about "YOUR" adoptees (rehoming)

Looming hot issue concerning "privacy" for minor adoptees

By Trace L. Hentz (Blogger- Adoptee) (repost from 2014)

I am an adoptee, well past the age of majority, and because of my closed adoption, I had to climb a mountain and claw my way up to discover any details about who my natural family was. Records were sealed in Wisconsin. Growing up, I had no medical history. I did not share my adoptive parents blood or ancestry. Mine, on paper, didn't exist.

Even recently I told a surgeon I am not sure about most of my birthmom Helen's medical history, though I do know she died from complications of diabetes.

I have not stopped thinking about the post I wrote on the LOST DAUGHTERS BLOG that APs need to stop blogging about adoptees. This is a looming hot issue concerning "privacy" for minor adoptees.  At the 2014 MIT adoption conference, I heard it loud and clear.  I'm sure many adoptive parents had not considered the ramifications of blogging about their children's lives, especially when adoptees are still minors. The dangers of sharing on social media and blogs are REAL yet being ignored.

APs are, in my opinion, in essence creating an "unsafe environment" for their child.* 

Blogging about any child is an invasion of their privacy!

A toddler cannot consent to having his or her life experiences documented on public spaces. (I predict some day some clever lawyer will take this on and attempt to sue an adoptive parent for publicizing and publishing an adoptee's early private experiences, albeit from the APs perspective.) (There might already be stalkings and kidnappings due to the increased use of social media. You can find anyone with the click of a mouse.) (There was already one lawyer in CA suing adoption agencies for damaged goods - when an adoptee is ungrateful or not what the APs expected. This is what lawyers do!)

If someone must blog, then private password-protected blogs, shared between family members, is the only way to protect any child. Parenting blogs are one thing; blogging about the children you adopt is another.

Many adoptees have told me and related on social media, much needs to be changed about "adoption" - ending the lack of access to our own adoption files, having a copy of our real birth certificate, knowing our ancestry, our medical history and so much more....including an understanding of birth trauma, anxiety and stress disorders in adoptees.

My goal as a writer/adoption author/adoptee is to advocate for adoptees too young to advocate for themselves. I will do whatever it takes to make this issue understood from the adoptee perspective.

In my foster care training in Oregon back in the 1990s, there was no mention of protecting a minor child's privacy but people were not blogging and tweeting and Facebooking back then!

Yet there was plenty to read about confidentiality for birthmoms - if they chose not to tell anyone and gave a baby up for adoption - adoption agencies like Catholic Charities assured them no one would ever have to find out. The child (like me) would have a new identity and the records were sealed permanently.

This created a fantasy I had to deal with and live with as an adult. Until I met my dad Earl, I had no medical history or ancestry.

So much needs to change about adoption. It's a complicated mess. For 20+ years, I've done research on adoption as a topic. I am not a lawyer. More and more is coming to light that "adoption" is not at all what we thought.  Much of what we read is/was created by the billion dollar adoption industry so it's their sale pitch, aka propaganda for adoptive parents (APs) and potential APs.

I am old enough now to advocate for those adoptees who can't.  And I will.

If I run into APs and lawyers who get upset with me (or my blog) for voicing my opinion, get in line.


**************************************************************

Here is a very revealing post from Jason on his blog concerning failed adoptions and the practice of advertising adopted children you no longer want: REHOMING:

Children For Sale: Get 'Em While They're Hot

His post

This comment by Jason Mihalko October 24, 2014 at 10:31 AM

Hi Anonymous, Thanks for taking the time to comment. You've raised an important issue: every child should have a safe and supportive home. Do you advocate that only adoptive children who are in homes with parents unable or unprepared to raise a child be taken away? Should parents of biological children who are unprepared, unwilling, or unable to raise their children be allowed to offer up their children to better homes?

As we consider posting pictures or information about the lives of children on the internet, we must also consider the impact on the children (you are considering only the needs of potential adoptive parents). Does the internet have a right or need to know any information about these children? How might the children be impacted in the future with their personal and private information being shared with any stranger that comes across it?

What baffles me--and endangers children--is when adults think of their needs and fail to reflect on what children need. In this case their is an enormous impact that you are failing to consider.

and:  Hi Anonymous, you've raised some important concerns about the foster care system, which is a different issue than what this post is about. I'm deeply concerned about what happens when the private and personal information about children is shared publicly. Children can have safe, secure, and supportive homes without their backgrounds being put up on the internet and shared with the world

I will end with Von's comment on Adoptive Parents blogging about adoptees:

The full exposure some adopters give to adoptees is seriously wrong and abusive. Some of you might remember the 'Potty Wars' and the 'Slant Eyes Fiasco' when adoptive mothers were adamant that their right to write whatever they wanted trumped the rights of children. Many claim they are not racist or abusive and that adult adoptees are over-sensitive and need to get a life, be prayed for or learn to be grateful. They pretend to pity us for our sad lives and state that their adoptees do not suffer and will not as we have. They know so little of the trauma of adoption and do so little to protect those they have adopted from further trauma. Anything posted is forever available and will undoubtedly be used by someone somewhere to bully, castigate, abuse etc because that sadly is the down side of our social media. Anyone who overlooks this is either naïve, stupid or deliberately abusive.

HEALTHLINE chose this blog as one to read in 2017

#AdopteeRightsAwareness

It's National, uh, #AdopteeRightsAwareness month. Make your it your own. "Adoptees are often _____. Rarely are they ______." pic.twitter.com/aGArqrnm3N

— Adoptee Rights Law (@adopteelaw) November 1, 2017

It's that time of year again #FliptheScript #AdoptionAwarenessMonth

By Trace (Split Feather, Author, Blogger)

I am not an orphan (I had two living parents) but I was adopted out to strangers. I lost my name, ancestry, family ties and medical history. All because of the unregulated adoption industry.

It's that time of year when the US adoption industry pulls out all the stops to boost its profits, making November "ADOPTION AWARENESS MONTH." They'll tear at your emotions using children they cleverly proclaim to be "orphans!"

Those who read this blog know we call this Adoption BE-wareness Month.

This is our month to make you aware (via blogs and tweets) that all the devious propaganda out there is nothing more than a sales pitch.

When you think of the profits --- billions of dollars each year --- the adoption industry has to keep potential adoptive parents (PAPS) in the mindset of "saving orphans" or they'll lose their income-stream.

What the adoption industry doesn't want is scrutiny!
They'd like you to believe there are orphans out there waiting to be adopted!


My job is to keep you educated! This month, all month, we are using the hashtag #flipthescript on Twitter! Join me and use the hashtag and share all the posts about the ongoing adoption industry propaganda! We can change the script - we are adoptees and we have a VOICE!

Latest Gazillion Voices article

Posted on October 9, 2014

Below is a preview of my latest essay just published in the online magazine, Gazillion Voices. I hope readers will find it useful as a way to think about our responsibility to fix, if not abolish, the broken adoption system.

Here’s the preview:
Another way of putting it is this: There is no “post-adoption” until we have ended adoption, once and for all. Just as the boarding school experiment for Native American children has been discredited as genocidal, just as the Indian Adoption Program has been disbanded… so too, I anticipate that the transracial and transnational adoption experiments will be replaced by a much more just and humane practice that is less about the business of selling children (and in the process, disrupting extended families of color), and more about ensuring justice and care for the most needy and vulnerable—namely, poor women of color and their children around the world…

Child removal: What problem are we solving?

The systematic and widespread removal of Indian children for placement off the reservations, whether in residential boarding schools or later, through foster care and adoption by non-Native families, is shown to be part of a continuum of ongoing strategies to rid settler nations of their “Indigenous problem.” Interestingly, Canada and Australia have issued public apologies for their nation’s genocidal treatment of Indigenous families. The USA has yet to do so.
Much can be learned from the organized resistance, led primarily by Native American women, which will be of particular interest to activists working in other struggles facing communities of color.  One of the most inspiring lessons from Jacobs’ book is seeing the ways that first/birthmothers empowered themselves by blending their roles as mothers, nurturers, healers, and keepers of the culture with efforts to become professionals themselves, or by working alongside pro-Indigenous educators, social workers, and researchers. Not only did they fend off sexist insults and racist attacks from professionals who degraded Native women’s ways of knowing and being, they also thwarted assaults from reform-minded white women whose racist thinking limited their ability to stand alongside Native women as sister-mothers in solidarity.
Jacobs’s brilliant contribution is towards re-humanizing the victims and survivors of well-meaning attempts to “rescue” needy children within a discourse that demonized Native women as unfit, immoral mothers. All of us touched by adoption would do well to develop a similarly humanistic view of the first mothers and fathers of adoptees of any race, and to reject simplistic notions of family dysfunction, immorality, and parental unfitness when it comes to the family origins of the adopted individuals we know and love.

Read more>>> http://gazillionvoices.com/seeking-justice-when-systems-fail-personal-responsibility-in-the-age-of-child-removal/#.VFavixb4KjJ

I'll be back with more this entire month!

Adoption Reality: Ireland 2012 #NAAM

Fresh scandal erupts over Irish children sold to America for adoption (Sept. 2012)

New investigative report reveals how Irish nuns profited from child adoption scheme

"...Irish nuns who sent and essentially sold orphans to America during the fifties and sixties benefited by up to $50 million in today’s money, a new investigative report and book has claimed.

The report published in The Sunday Business Post also stated that many of the parents chosen had been turned down by other adoption agents, and some children were sent directly to pedophiles.

The shocking new investigation was carried out by Mike Milotte, who has published his finding in a new book entitled Banished Babies.

Read more: http://www.irishcentral.com/news/New-scandal-erupts-over-Irish-children-sold-to-America-for-adoption-168588836.html#ixzz2AzJiGqub

Adoption Truth: NO Vember

 This list I totally agree with! Adoption Truth: "No" Vember

As part of Adoption Awareness Month, here is another blog ADOPTION TRUTH you must read. There are many amazing adoption-related blogs out there now in cyberspace!  Check out my favorites in the left column. Sign up for our blogs by email and RSS feeds. Please COMMENT, too! It really helps me and other bloggers when you share it on Twitter and Facebook - we LOVE you when you do this...
Thank you everyone for reading... Trace