Korean Adoptee faces deportation due to parents' paperwork negligence

An immigration judge last week gave a 40-year-old, Korean-born adoptee until mid-June to prove he should not be deported. Because the man’s adoptive parents never filed the paperwork to make him a U.S. citizen, officials say his criminal record may now make him ineligible for citizenship and also may lead to expulsion to South Korea.

An American couple adopted 3-year-old Adam Crapser and his older sister in 1975. Crapser told The New York Times his parents fought viciously, punished the children with a whip and forced them to sit in a dark basement. After six years, their parents abandoned them and the children were sent to foster care. State officials separated Crapser, who was 10 at the time, from his sister, with whom he was close. Another family adopted the girl and obtained her citizenship, while Crapser bounced through several foster and group homes. When he was 12, an Oregon couple, Thomas and Dolly Crapser, adopted him. They already had a biological son, two other adoptees and several foster children living in the home. But it wasn’t the loving environment Crapser hoped to find.

For the next four years, the couple choked, kicked, and hit him and the other children every day, slammed them against walls, set dogs to attack them, burned them with hot objects, and used racial epithets to address him, Crapser said.

“Everything I did was wrong,” he said. “As far as humiliation goes, I have been there.”

In 1991, Thomas and Dolly Crapser were arrested and charged with dozens of counts of “rape, sexual abuse, and criminal mistreatment of their adopted and foster children,” according to The Seattle Times. They denied the charges. The couple was convicted of several counts of criminal mistreatment and assault in 1992, but only Thomas served jail time for one count of sexual abuse: 90 days in prison.

Because students at his high school teased him about the abuse, Crapser said he dropped out in ninth grade. The Crapsers kicked him out of the house when he was 16, leaving him homeless. For the next several years, the teen tried to navigate life on his own, sleeping in shelters or the back of a car, working fast food jobs, and finishing his high school equivalency diploma at night. He also got into trouble with the law.

His first offense was breaking back into his parents’ home. He said he wanted to retrieve a Korean Bible and a pair of flip-flops—his only possessions from the orphanage. Police arrested Crapser after his parents reported him. He pleaded guilty to burglary and served 25 months in prison.

In the years following his release, Crapser was also convicted of unlawful firearm possession, a couple of misdemeanors, and an assault conviction after a fight with a roommate, according to The New York Times Magazine. In 2013, Crapser tried to telephone the son he had with an ex-girlfriend, violating a protective order the woman had against him.

Crapser said he takes full responsibility for his crimes, and insists he has “done his time” and changed his life. He is now married and lives in a small apartment in Vancouver, Wash., with his wife, who is pregnant with their third child. It’s been difficult for Crapser to hold down a job because when he was a child, none of the adults in his life bothered to file the immigration paperwork needed to grant him U.S. citizenship. He could not prove to potential employers he was in the U.S. legally.

In 2012, after a long battle to obtain his original adoption papers from his parents, Crapser applied for a green card. His criminal convictions brought his case to the attention of Homeland Security officials, who determined his record made him subject to deportation back to South Korea.

On April 2, Crapser spent his 40th birthday at an immigration hearing in Portland, Ore. His next hearing is scheduled for June 18.

“The state abandoned him when he was a child,” said his attorney, Lori Walls. “Now the U.S. is throwing him out.”

No matter what the judge ultimately decides, Crapser’s case could help lead to changes in the law that will ensure no other adoptee has to go through similar struggles.

In 2000, the Child Citizen Act made citizenship automatic for international adoptees 18 years old and younger, but it wasn’t retroactive. No one knows how many adoptees are in legal limbo. At least three dozen other international adoptees also have faced deportation charges or have been deported to their home countries, including Thailand, Brazil and South Korea, The New York Times Magazine reported.

A sweeping solution is now on the table: Reps. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., have proposed an automatic citizenship bill for all international adoptees like Crapser.

“It was not [Craper’s] responsibility to fill out that immigration paperwork,” Merkley said. “He knows no other country.”

A spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the agency didn’t know about Crapser’s childhood adoption history when it decided to pursue his deportation. Crapser cannot speak, read, or write Korean.

“America promised me a home,” he wrote in his court declaration. “I implore this country to keep its promise. If not for me then for my children, so they won’t have to grow up without a dad.”

The Associated Press contributed to this article.