Hyebin Schreiber will graduate from the University of Kansas next year. But it’s less a joyous occasion than a dreaded deadline. Unless federal law reforms in her favor, or a higher court reconsiders her case before the spring, Lt. Col. Patrick Schreiber and his wife, Soo Jin, will have to prepare for their daughter’s deportation to South Korea—as soon as her student visa runs out.
A federal court in Kansas ruled last week that Schreiber is ineligible for citizenship despite her legal adoption by American citizens at age 17. She will have to return to her native South Korea, the court declared, because the adoption was not finalized by age 16. The Schreibers had delayed her adoption until Patrick Scheiber returned from deployment in Afghanistan. Now retired and working for the Defense Department as a contractor, he was then serving his sixth tour in a 27-year career, as a chief intelligence officer.
TheSchreibers learned too late that the cutoff age for adopted immigrants seeking citizenship is 16. And by the time Patrick Schreiber came home and Hyebin’s adoption was finalized, her birthday had come and gone. The Schreibers and their adoption lawyer thought they had only to adopt Hyebin, who’d been living with them since 2012, by her 18th birthday.
Hyebin’s birth certificate bears the seal of the state of Kansas. The state of Kansas, its flagship university, and the Army all saw the Schreibers, officially, as a family. But federal immigration authorities declined her visa and citizenship applications because of the age cutoff.
So, Schreiber sued. In March he told the Kansas City Star he regrets delaying Hyebin’s adoption, saying, “I should have put my family ahead of the Army.” Because of he was deployed overseas for most of 2014, and because of their then-lawyer’s conflation of domestic rules with the stricter laws that govern international adoptions, Hyebin formally joined their family mere months too late for her to be eligible for citizenship under federal law.
The Schreibers first brought Hyebin home to Kansas when she was 15, because her life in South Korea had become unstable. Soo Jin is her biological aunt. It was only when they pursued citizenship for her, the natural next step after her adoption, that they learned of the discrepancy between domestic and international adoptions.
After months of anxious waiting, last week’s ruling confirmed what they’d feared. The law is the law—and the law “in question is not ambiguous,” ruled federal Judge Daniel Crabtree. Their current lawyer, Rekha Sharma-Crawford is one of Kansas City’s top immigration attorneys; she defended a client against deportation before the Supreme Court in 2015—and won.
Sharma-Crawford declined to comment on the case and the Scheibers’ current plans. She’d earlier told the Military Times, “It was disappointing, but we’ve always known this is not the end of the road.”
Soo Jin and Patrick Schreiber already decided they wouldn’t let Hyebin go back to South Korea alone. Their worst-case contingency plan—they told reporters back in March, when they first sued the feds for her citizenship—was to relocate to South Korea together.
“There are limited options available to individuals who ‘miss the window’ of having a finalized adoption and obtaining citizenship,” said Ryan Hanlon, of the National Council for Adoption which advocates for adoptees like Hyebin Schreiber. While missing the age window is not a leading cause ofadoptee deportations, this family’s ordeal isn’t unique. “Unfortunately the complex laws surrounding how internationally adopted individuals establish citizenship has led to other situations like this,” Hanlon added, “This family was given poor advice by their previous attorney, and made decisions accordingly.”
If an American company hires Hyebin, a work visa could theoretically buy them some time. So might an extension of her student visa, were she to choose grad school instead. But restarting her path to citizenship would be complex, even if Congress were on her side.
The Schreibers aren’t alone in lobbying against the age gap that tripped up Hyebin’s citizenship. A group of lawmakers earlier this year introduced a bill to close this very loophole. “These men and women were raised by American parents in the United States, and should have the same rights provided to other adoptees,” said Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, who sponsored the bill.
But her parents’ pursuit of a solution only seems to hit roadblock after legal roadblock, as the deportation deadline draws ever nearer. Hyebin’s father recently found, in yet another disappointing development, that the Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2018 wouldn’t actually apply in Hyebin’s case. In a cruel twist, it turned out that though she was too old to derive citizenship from her adoptive parents at 17, under the proposed law she’d have been too young.
