Pound Pup Legacy

Lowell and Bonnie Billings adopted Aaron from Korea when he was 3 years old. At that time, a misprinted birth certificate sent from the adoption agency led them to believe that Aaron’s alien status had been changed to that of a U.S. citizen, and so they never pursued the naturalization process for him as adoptive parents are required to do. But in April 2001, Aaron was picked up for selling marijuana, and the INS identified him as an illegal alien. Because of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which imposed harsh regulations on non-citizens who commit crimes, even misdemeanors, Billings ended up detained in San Diego and facing deportation.

After a two-year campaign of legal appeals, letters from prominent community members, coupled with the Korean Consulate's hesitation to issue papers, Billings was suddenly released without explanation recently. He is still under "order of supervision" which leaves him vulnerable to being deported

Home state: California

Country of origin: Republic of Korea (South Korea)

Status: pending

Alejandro Ebron was adopted from a family in Yokohama, Japan, by a Navy sailor and brought to the United States in 1959, when he was a year old. His adoptive parents filed citizenship papers for him and were granted a hearing in 1961. The day of the hearing, his father was at sea, so he and his mother went on their own. According to his court case, his mother was informed that her husband needed to be present, information that Ebron's attorney says was incorrect. Ebron's naturalization fell through the cracks after that. His father spent several years in Vietnam, and by the time he returned in 1970, Ebron's mother was seriously ill. But because his paperwork was filed, there is a chance Ebron could be considered a national of the United States, even if he isn't a citizen.

Home state:

Country of origin: Japan

Status: pending

Walter and Jean Clancy adopted Christopher in 1982 from Mexico.

Jean Clancy claims she took Christopher to the INS office in 1986 to fill out the paperwork making him a U.S. citizen. While completing the form, she says, a supervisor told them that Christopher was already a citizen.

Jean Clancy says the paperwork she had already filled out was kept at the office. The INS says it has no evidence of the visit.

In 2000 Christopher was convicted on three burglary charges and sentenced to five years.

The INS decided Christopher Clancy is not a U.S. citizen. So after he did his time, he was transferred to a federal detention center to await deportation.

Home state: Texas

Country of origin: Mexico

Status:

Daniel Heiskala was born in South Korea and adopted by a U.S. couple, joining their three biological children. According to his parents, he came to the United States as “a half-starved five-year-old boy.” The family lived on a farm in Michigan, and then later moved to North Carolina and eventually to Texas, where Heiskala attended West Lake Christian High School. He speaks no Korean and has had no contact with anyone in Korea since his adoption. In 1994, when Heiskala was in his early twenties, he was convicted of stealing a car and sentenced to seven to ten years in prison. He was paroled out after serving slightly more than two years, and has had no further convictions since that time. In 2003, he was put in deportation proceedings on the basis of the 1994 conviction. Because he was convicted after a trial rather than on a guilty plea, the government has taken the position that he is ineligible for discretionary relief even though his conviction predates the 1996 amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act.33 His case is currently on appeal.

Home state: Michigan

Country of origin: Republic of Korea (South Korea)

Status: pending

Jess Mustanich was adopted from a convent in El Salvador when he was six months old by a couple from the United States.They adopted him under Salvadoran law and brought him back to the United States, but divorced before completing the adoption process under U.S. law.

After a long legal battle, Mustanich’s father was awarded custody. By that point, Mustanich was five years old.

His father sought to resume the adoption process with the aim of obtaining citizenship for his son, but encountered difficulties because the agency that had helped the couple adopt was no longer operating. In the end, the adoption was never finalized.

At one point, the father took a completed citizenship application to an Immigration and Naturalization Service office, but the clerk refused to accept it and gave him a phone number to call; although the father called the number and left repeated messages, he never received a return call.

Meanwhile, Mustanich had begun to have disciplinary problems at school and was in and out of counseling. Soon afterwards, he was taken into custody by the state and began living in group homes.

His father repeatedly asked judges and social workers in the juvenile justice system to resolve the boy’s citizenship, but nothing was done. Shortly after Mustanich turned eighteen, his father came home one day and found that his house had been burglarized. Suspecting his son of being the culprit, he called the police in the hope that a brush with the law might set his son straight. He had no idea that he was putting in motion a process that would take his son away from him for good.

Mustanich was convicted of burglary in April 1997. While serving his sentence at San Quentin, he received an additional four-year sentence for possessing a homemade knife; Mustanich, who is five feet tall, maintained that he needed the weapon to protect himself from older, bigger inmates. He was ordered deported on the basis of his convictions, and was placed in immigration detention upon completion of his sentence in 2003. He was deported to El Salvador July 10, 2008.

Home state: California

Country of origin: El Salvador

Status: deported

Joao Herbert was born in Brazil and spent much of his early childhood as an orphan on the streets of Sao Paolo. He was adopted by an Ohio couple at the age of eight. When he was seventeen, his parents discovered that he had not automatically become a U.S. citizen upon his adoption, and submitted a naturalization application. However, Herbert turned eighteen before the processing of the application was complete. Soon after his eighteenth birthday, he pleaded guilty to attempting to sell marijuana and was sentenced to probation and participation in a drug treatment program. Despite the fact that he was a first-time offender who had served no jail time, he was placed in immigration detention for twenty months and then deported to Brazil as an “aggravated felon.” Herbert had no friends or family in Brazil and no longer spoke any Portuguese. Once in Brazil, he began teaching English and became known as "the English professor." His father, who is quadriplegic, was unable to travel to Brazil to visit him. In May of 2004, Herbert was shot and killed in the industrial city of Campinas, 60 miles northwest of Sao Paolo.

Home state: Ohio

Country of origin: Brazil

Status: deported

John Gaul III was born in Thailand and adopted by a Florida family as a toddler in 1979. He grew up in Tampa, Florida, attending a private high school where he played soccer, baseball and basketball. The Gauls did not realize until they applied for their son’s passport at age seventeen that he was not a U.S. citizen. They immediately filed an application to naturalize him, but Gaul turned eighteen before the process was completed. At age nineteen he was convicted of writing bad checks and stealing a car, and he served 20 months in prison. By the time he completed his sentence in late 1996, the law had changed and he was not eligible to apply for discretionary relief from deportation. An immigration judge ruled that the agency had taken too long to process Gaul’s citizenship application, but that the 1996 law allowed him no discretion to halt Gaul’s deportation. Gaul was placed in immigration detention upon his release from prison, and was subsequently deported to Thailand, where he knew no one. Gaul is barred for life from returning to the United States.

Home state: Florida

Country of origin: Thailand

Status: deported

As a 3-month-old baby Kairi Shepherd was adopted from India by a Utah woman, by the name of Erlene Shepherd, who died of breast cancer before she she could file citizenship papers, in 1991.

In 2003 Kairi

Kairi suffers from Multiple Sclerosis and is currently detained by

Home state: Utah

Country of origin: India

Status: pending

Samuel Jonathan Schultz, a legal resident of the United States, fears the worst if he is sent back to India, a country he left at age 3 when he was adopted by a West Valley City woman.

The 25-year-old knows little about the nation of his birth, speaks only English and believes he The lawyers, J. Christopher Keen and Edward Carter, say in court would have to live on the streets there, according to court documents. As a Christian in general, and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in particular, he believes he will be targeted for persecution.

Home state: Colorado

Country of origin: India

Status: pending

Mitrohina was born in 1978 in Russia with deformities on her hands and feet that she says her parents could not accept. After shuttling in and out of public institutions as a child, her parents put her up for adoption when she was 14.

She was adopted by a couple in Sonoma County, California, soon after, but did not have an easy transition to life in the United States. And although her parents applied for her to receive citizenship, a combination of bureaucratic delays and legal missteps left Mitrohina without it.

In 2005, the prenatal clinic where she’d been receiving care made house visits and diagnosed Mitrohina with postpartum depression and post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of her deeply troubled childhood.

She was arrested in June 2007 for abusing her son. Her child was temporarily put in foster care, and the Family Court in Sonoma County agreed that it would be in the child’s best interest to return home if Mitrohina completed a short jail sentence and six-month probation. The terms of her probation required that she enroll in parenting and anger-management classes, seek counseling and begin a course of medications to manage her depression.

Two days after Mitrohina’s sentencing, she found that ICE had put a hold on her record. She had been added to the long and steadily growing queue of non-citizens slated for deportation.

ICE detainer prohibits her from completing her probation to regain custody of her son and deportation is now a near certainty.

Home state: California

Country of origin: Russian Federation

Status: pending