Join the fight to win citizenship for all adoptees regardless of when they were adopted!
Please sign the petition below to express your support for the Adoptee Citizenship Act. By signing your name and/or your organization, we will add you to our list of supporters to be displayed on letters given to legislators. Organization names also will be listed on our website.
Please also indicate which other actions you are willing to take to move this bill forward and the Adoptee Rights Campaign will follow up with you shortly. Thank you!
Petition in Support of the Adoptee Citizenship Act
We, the undersigned individuals and organizations, urge the United States Congress to support the Adoptee Citizenship Act (ACA) of 2015, which is a bipartisan bill that provides citizenship to individuals who were legally adopted to the United States as a child but never obtained U.S. citizenship.
Since the 1940’s, an estimated 350,000 children have been internationally adopted by U.S. citizen parents. While children born to U.S. citizen parents are automatically citizens, their adopted children were not afforded this same right. As a result, thousands of adoptees do not have U.S. citizenship, barring them from government services, financial aid, home loans, and voting privileges, while also placing them at risk for deportation. The ACA will remedy this discriminatory situation as all children of American parents should be treated equally.
In October 2000, the U.S. Congress passed the Child Citizenship Act (CCA), through which foreign-born children adopted by U.S. citizen parents automatically acquire U.S. citizenship. Prior to the passage of the CCA, intercountry adoptees and their parents were required to go through a lengthy and costly naturalization process. Although the intent of the CCA was to ensure that all intercountry adopted children of U.S. citizen parents receive automatic U.S. citizenship, it failed to accomplish this goal as it left out the thousands of adoptees born before 1983.
The Adoptee Citizenship Act simply supports the original intent of the CCA by ensuring that all intercountry adoptees that were adopted by U.S. citizen parents have U.S. citizenship. We ask Congress to close the loophole left by the CCA immediately by passing the Adoptee Citizenship Act.
Sincerely,
[names and organizations]