A South Korean man flown to the US 37 years ago and adopted by a US couple at age three has been ordered deported back to a country that is completely alien to him.
“It is heartbreaking news,” said Dae Joong Yoon, executive director of the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium, who had been in contact with Adam Crapser.
Crapser remains confined in an immigration detention center in Tacoma, Washington, pending his deportation.
Crapser on Monday waived an appeal during the hearing because he is desperate to get out of detention, his Seattle attorney, Lori Walls, said on Wednesday.
“I’m sure he doesn’t have any idea what he can do in [South] Korea,” Yoon said in a telephone interview from his group’s offices in Annandale, Virgina.
Crapser’s plight mirrors those of thousands of others.
Yoon’s group says an estimated 35,000 intercountry adoptees lack US citizenship.
It is backing legislation in the US Congress to address that.
Seven years after Crapser and his elder sister were adopted, their parents abandoned them. The foster care system separated Crapser from his sister when he was 10.
He was housed at several foster and group homes. When Crapser was 12, he moved in with Thomas and Dolly Crapser, their biological son, two other adoptees and several foster children.
There, he was physically abused, Adam Crapser has said.
In 1991, the couple was arrested on charges of physical child abuse, sexual abuse and rape. They denied the charges. Thomas Crapser’s sentence included 90 days in jail, while Dolly Crasper’s included three years of probation.
Adam Crapser got into trouble with the law after he broke into his parents’ home — it was, he said, to retrieve the Korean-language Bible and rubber shoes that came with him from the orphanage — and later it was for stealing cars and assaulting a roommate.
Federal immigration officials say they became aware of Crapser after he applied for a green card. His criminal convictions made him deportable.
Becky Belcore, who was adopted at age one and brought to the US from South Korea, said she was with Adam Crapser in the courtroom, located inside the detention center.
She said the facility seems worse than jail, because visitors cannot touch or hug detainees and must talk to them on a telephone.
“He has been in detention for almost nine months,” Belcore said in a phone interview from her home in Chicago. “He’s been separated from his children. It is really hard for him.”
Walls said Adam Crapser is married and has four children.
Belcore said Adam Crapser was wearing what looked like hospital scrubs, the uniform for detainees, and that Immigration Judge John O’Dell appeared matter-of-fact as he announced his deportation verdict.
In an e-mail, Walls said Adam Crasper was eligible for a deportation reprieve called “cancelation of removal,” but the “judge decided he did not deserve this relief.”
“He will be deported as soon as immigration and customs enforcement makes the necessary arrangements,” Walls said. “Adam, his family, and advocates are heartbroken at the outcome.”
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