A deportation story: When South Korea was forced to confront its adoption industry’s history of abuse

EXPLORING KOREA: Stories from Milwaukee to the DMZ and across a divided Peninsula. This special series explores historical sites and cultural traditions from across the Korean Peninsula, building a bridge back to the search for identity in Milwaukee. From the occupation of Korea at the end of World War II, to Korean War veterans in Milwaukee, veterans from Milwaukee who served in later years at the DMZ, adopted South Korean children who grew up in Milwaukee, different waves of the South Korean diaspora who moved to Milwaukee to raise their families, and even a defector from North Korea, their stories share generations of Korean and American experiences. https://mkeind.com/koreanstories

In 2023, a South Korean court made headlines by ordering Holt Children’s Services, the country’s largest adoption agency, to pay 100 million won, roughly $74,700, in damages to Adam Crapser, a 48-year-old Korean adoptee.

Crapser’s adoption story, marred by abuse, legal troubles, and eventual deportation, reflected the systemic failures and aggressive practices of South Korea’s adoption industry during the 1970s and 1980s.

The landmark case has brought to light the harsh realities faced by many adoptees from South Korea, and underscores the urgent need for justice and reform.

Adam Crapser’s journey began in 1979 when he was adopted by American parents at the age of three. His adoption was handled by Holt Children’s Services, a prominent agency known for its aggressive child-gathering activities during South Korea’s foreign adoption boom.

Crapser’s early years in the United States were marked by severe abuse and neglect by two different sets of adoptive parents. His ordeal included physical and emotional abuse, abandonment, and multiple run-ins with the law. The traumatic experiences culminated in his deportation in 2016, after a background check triggered by a green card application revealed his lack of U.S. citizenship.

In a civil case that lasted more than four years, Crapser sued both Holt and the South Korean government for mishandling his adoption and failing to protect his rights. While the court recognized Holt’s wrongdoing, it dismissed claims against the government, much to the disappointment of Crapser’s legal team.

“The (government) knew that children procured for adoptions were not being (properly) protected, that their human rights were being violated — they should have done something about it, but they didn’t. … It seems that the court simply saw the government as a monitoring institution, and not as an actor that directly committed illegal acts,” said Kim Soo-jung, one of Crapser’s lawyers.

Despite the ruling, Crapser’s case set a precedent and inspired more adoptees to seek justice for the wrongs they endured.

In a broader context, South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has taken significant steps to investigate the fraudulent practices surrounding international adoptions. In 2023, the commission expanded its inquiry to include 237 more cases of adoptees who suspect their origins were manipulated to facilitate adoptions to Europe and the United States.

The investigation represented the most extensive examination of South Korea’s adoption practices to date, involving adoptees from 11 countries, including Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the United States.

The commission’s investigation remains crucial in uncovering the truth behind the widespread falsification of records, where many adoptees were falsely registered as orphans or had their identities fabricated.

The mass exodus was largely driven by profit motives and facilitated by agencies with close ties to South Korea’s military dictatorships, which saw foreign adoptions as a means to manage population growth and improve economic growth.

In recent years, international awareness of the issues surrounding Korean adoptions has grown. Denmark and Sweden, for instance, have ceased facilitating adoptions from South Korea due to the revelations of falsified records and unethical practices.

Adam Crapser’s case was not an isolated incident. His story is part of a larger narrative involving thousands of Korean adoptees who have faced similar challenges. Approximately 200,000 South Koreans were adopted overseas over the past six decades, mostly to White families in the West.

Many of the adoptees, like Crapser, were subjected to abusive environments and legal vulnerabilities due to the negligence of both South Korean agencies and foreign adoptive parents.

The Child Citizenship Act of 2000 aimed to remedy some of the issues by granting automatic citizenship to adoptees under 18 at the time of the act’s passage. However, those adopted before 1983 were left in a precarious situation, vulnerable to deportation if they encountered legal troubles.

The issue of deportation has had devastating effects on many Korean adoptees. Prior to the Child Citizenship Act, adoptive parents were responsible for naturalizing their children before they turned 16. Many parents, unaware of the requirement, failed to do so, leaving their adopted children without legal citizenship.

The consequences of the oversight have been severe. Adoptees like Crapser, who found themselves entangled in the legal system, faced deportation despite having lived their entire lives in the United States. The case of Philip Clay, a Korean adoptee who was deported and later committed suicide in 2017, underscored the tragic outcomes of such deportations.

Adoptees deported to South Korea often struggle to adjust due to language barriers, lack of familial connections, and cultural dislocation. The Adoptee Rights Campaign estimates that 20% of adult Korean adoptees in the U.S. are at risk of deportation.

The Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2024 was introduced in the 118th Congress in June of 2024. If enacted, the legislation would grant U.S. citizenship to all individuals internationally adopted before the age of 18, regardless of current age, interactions with criminal legal systems, or deportation status.

Supporters of the bill, which has been proposed nearly every year since 2015, believe the legislation is crucial in preventing further injustices and ensuring that adoptees receive the protections they deserve.

The South Korean adoption scandals are not just a historical issue, but a present-day crisis that continues to impact the lives of many adoptees in America and around the world.

In September, a report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission finally revealed adoptions from the biggest facility for so-called vagrants, Brothers Home, which shipped children abroad as part of a huge, profit-seeking enterprise that exploited thousands of people trapped within the compound in the port city of Busan.

Thousands of children and adults — many of them grabbed off the streets — were enslaved in such facilities and often raped, beaten, or killed in the 1970s and 1980s.

The commission previously found the country’s past military governments responsible for atrocities committed at Brothers. Its latest report is focused on four similar facilities in the cities of Seoul and Daegu and the provinces of South Chungcheong and Gyeonggi. Like Brothers, these facilities were operated to accommodate government roundups aimed at beautifying the streets.

Ha Kum Chul, one of the commission’s investigators, said inmate records show at least 20 adoptions occurred from Daegu’s Huimangwon and South Chungcheong province’s Cheonseongwon in 1985 and 1986. South Korea sent more than 17,500 children abroad in those two years as its foreign adoption program peaked.

Ha said children taken from inmates at Huimangwon and Cheonseongwon were mostly newborns, who were transferred to two adoption agencies, Holt Children’s Services and Eastern Social Welfare Society, which placed them with families in the United States, Denmark, Norway and Australia. Most of the infants were transferred to the agencies on the day of their birth or the day after, Ha said, indicating that their adoptions were determined pre-birth.

While the facilities’ records say some of the women submitted memos expressing their consent to give away their children, other records indicate women were being pressured to do so, Ha said. A 1985 inmate record from Huimangwon flags a 42-year-old inmate with supposed mental health issues for “causing problems” by refusing to relinquish her child. Officials later note that she eventually did.

“It’s difficult to accurately determine how many more adopted children there might have been in other years,” Ha said, citing the commission’s limitations in staff. For Huimangwon, Ha said, the commission was only able to look through its inmate records from 1985 and 1986 and still found 14 adoptions. A further six adoptions were linked to inmates at Cheonseongwon.

At their peak, Huimangwon had about 1,400 inmates and Cheonseongwon 1,200. That was still smaller than the population at Brothers, which exceeded 3,000.

The commission has also been conducting a separate investigation into the cases of 367 Korean adoptees in Europe, the United States, and Australia, who suspect their biological origins were manipulated to facilitate their adoptions. It is expected to release an interim report on that later this year.

The commission also identified other human rights problems at the four facilities, which included Gaengsaengwon in Seoul and Seonghyewon in Gyeonggi province. The facilities’ death tolls were high — the 262 inmates who were reported as dead from Gaengsaengwon in 1980 accounted for more than 25% of the facility’s population that year, Ha said.

Nearly 120 bodies of Cheonseongwon inmates were provided to a local medical school for anatomy practice from 1982 to 1992, the commission said. Most of the bodies were transferred to the school on the day the inmates were declared dead or the day after, and there are no indications that the facility made efforts to transfer the bodies to relatives, according to the commission, which didn’t identify the school.

Huimangwon, Seonghyewon, and Cheonseongwon also regularly received inmates transferred from Brothers, suggesting a “revolving-door” labor-sharing scheme between facilities that likely increased profit and prolonged the inmates’ confinements, the commission said.

The population at South Korea’s vagrant facilities peaked in the 1980s as the then-military government intensified roundups to beautify streets ahead of the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Olympic Games held in Seoul. South Korea transitioned to a democracy in the late 1980s and has long stopped its practice of grabbing homeless people, the disabled and children off the streets and confining them.

Brothers closed in 1988, months after a prosecutor exposed its horrors. Seonghyewon now runs welfare programs for homeless people in the city of Hwaseong, while the three other facilities have changed their names and the services they provide. None of those facilities immediately released comments following the commission’s report.

“The four confinement facilities had been allowed to continue their operations without receiving any public investigations even after 1987,” when Brothers was exposed, said Lee Sang Hoon, one of the commission’s standing commissioners. “It’s significant that we have comprehensively revealed the details of the human rights violations at (other) vagrant facilities across the country that had been concealed for 37 years.”