02/22/2026
Adopted in Iran when she was 2
The woman’s father was a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II, captured in 1943 and held until the end of the war. When he retired from the Air Force, he worked as a government contractor in Iran, where he and his wife found her in an orphanage in 1972 and adopted her. She was 2 years old.
They returned to the U.S. in 1973, and the local newspaper ran a full-page story about the family and their new daughter. Her adoption was completed in 1975. But at that time, parents had to separately naturalize the children through the federal immigration agency. The woman’s parents have since died.
She didn’t learn she hadn’t been naturalized until she applied for a passport at 38 years old. She still doesn’t know how the oversight happened. She searched her father’s papers and found a letter from a lawyer, dated 1975, that said he was working with immigration officials, “it appears this matter is concluded,” and billed her father for his services.
She did not keep her situation secret. She has for years asked everyone she could think of for help: the State Department, immigration officials, senators. She has contacted her congresswoman, Rep. Young Kim, a Republican from California, but to no avail. Most recently, Kim’s office responded to her plea about her pending removal by saying that they were “not able to advise or interfere.”
“It just baffles me that it’s OK to send me to a foreign country that I could potentially die or I could get imprisoned because of a clerical error,” she said.
A woman adopted as a toddler by an American war veteran, who he found in the 1970s in an Iranian orphanage and raised as a Christian, is being threatened with deportation to Iran, a country notoriously dangerous for Christians and on the brink of war with the United States.
