A federal immigration judge has granted asylum to a woman orphaned in Iran in the 1970s and adopted by an American war veteran, who immigration officials threatened earlier this year with deportation to the country with which the U.S. is now at war.
Judge Andrew Fishkin’s ruling likely ends a monthslong ordeal for the California woman, one of thousands adopted from abroad who were never granted citizenship because of bureaucratic loopholes between adoption and immigration law.
The woman has lived in the United States since she was adopted by American parents as a toddler and has no criminal record. The Associated Press is not naming her because she worries her legal situation remains tenuous as the administration has time to appeal. A federal judge has allowed her to use a pseudonym, “Ms. S,” in her challenge to the government’s determination of her immigration status.
The woman received a letter from the Department of Homeland Security in February that ordered her to appear for removal proceedings, saying she is eligible for deportation because she overstayed her visa in March 1974 at 4 years old.
The woman, 56, described what came next as a terrifying and humiliating few months.
She grew up in a Christian, military family on a farm in Wisconsin and was taught to be patriotic. But the documents she received from the government described her as an “alien;” some said she did not understand English, which is the only language she speaks.
Immigration officials told her she was being arrested, but released and tracked with an ankle monitor. She bought new pants to try to hide it and taught herself not to cross her legs in work meetings, terrified it would threaten the corporate job in healthcare she’s held for almost two decades.
They fingerprinted her and took her DNA. She said she was obviously weeping in the mug shot they snapped of her.
She prepared herself to be detained: she put her bills on autopay and gave her friends a key to her home.
Her lawyer, Emily Howe, said the government had the power to agree she is an American citizen.
“Instead they treated her like a terrorist, like she was the worst of the worst criminals,” Howe said. “It felt very Big Brother, very Orwellian.”
The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on the record on an individual case.
The Associated Press profiled the woman in 2024 as part of a story about how many international adoptees were left without citizenship because their American adoptive parents failed to naturalize them.
The woman’s parents were living in Iran, where her father was working for a U.S. government contractor, in the 1970s. He was retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel. He’d been held for years a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II.
The couple found the toddler at an orphanage and returned to the U.S. with her in 1973 and soon completed the adoption. At that time, parents had to separately naturalize adopted children. 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 filed a federal lawsuit earlier this month, trying to prohibit the government from removing her, and forcing it to grant her citizenship.
She has long believed she should be considered a U.S. citizen: she has a social security card, a driver’s license and has been legally allowed to work and pay taxes for decades. It’s only the immigration agency that denies she is a citizen. She suspects her paperwork was lost, likely when militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979.
Fishkin seemed to agree: he wrote in his ruling that documents from that embassy are not available to her or to the U.S. government. He declared her a refugee, entitled to work in the U.S. His ruling puts the woman on a pathway to being recognized as a citizen.
She’d felt hopeful, she said, when she learned her court date before Fishkin was scheduled for her late father’s birthday. She always felt like she needed to protect not only herself, but also her father’s legacy. He was a conscientious military official, she said, who would not have knowingly allowed such a glaring oversight that left his daughter in legal limbo.
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