Adoptee deported from US
‘FLAWED SYSTEM’: South Korean adopted at age 3 sent back home 40 years later
AMAN who was adopted from South Korea by Americans when he was 3 years old landed on Thursday in his native country — one that is completely unknown to him — after he was deported from the United States, an official and his lawyer said.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had ordered Adam Crapser deported because of criminal convictions, including assault and being a felon in possession of a weapon.
His lifestory highlights the failings of an adoption system that put him in the homes of one set of parents who abandoned him and another that abused him and other adopted children, his Seattle attorney, Lori Walls said
ICE spokesman Rose Richeson said Crapser, 41, arrived in Seoul, on Thursday aboard a commercial airline flight escorted by ICE deportation officers.
Richeson said Crapser was arrested by ICE on Feb 8 after serving a 60-day sentence for menacing constituting domestic violence and attempted coercion. He had been held in an immigration detention centre in Tacoma, Washington since then. A judge could have allowed Crapser to stay in the US but decided on deportation.
Crapser’s supporters said he South Korean adoptee last year. AP pic
waived an appeal because he could not stand to stay in the detention centre any longer.
Walls said she was astonished that Crapser “was adopted, abandoned and abused... carried relatively little weight in the decision that the Immigration court made.”
“The government facilitated the adoption out of Korea,” she said. “No one followed up to make sure he was safe. When that first family abandoned him to foster care he was not visible — there was no follow-up.”
No one ever sought US citizenship for him. He and his older sister were adopted by a family who lived in Michigan and who abandoned
in their home in Vancouver, Washington, them after they moved to Oregon, Walls said.
They were split up. Crapser was adopted by parents in Oregon who assaulted him and other children in their care. His adoptive parents were convicts.
Crapser left the home and was arrested after he broke in to retrieve some of his belongings from his orphanage in South Korea, Walls said.
Crapser later got into further trouble with the law. He came under the scrutiny of federal Immigration authorities after he applied for a Green Card and they saw his criminal record.
“I’m hopeful Adam figures out
due to the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck New Zealand, on Monday. AFP pic supplies to Kaikoura, which bore the brunt of the tremor.
A convoy of military vehicles also reached the town for the first time, travelling via a back road after huge landslides cut the main highway and rail lines.
About 1,000 tourists were evacuated from Kaikoura in the days after the quake but some 2,000 locals
how to make a life in that country, where he doesn’t speak the language read the language or know anything about the culture,” Walls said.
His birth mother in South Korea, who had put her son and daughter up for adoption because she couldn’t afford to keep him, is learning English so she can communicate with him when they’re reunited, The New York Times reported.
Walls said the mother was disabled, had a low income “and can’t be much help for him”. There might be legal remedies for Crapser to return to the US but that it would be “an uphill battle”. AP
face difficult conditions.
Authorities warned that rainswollen rivers had been blocked by quake debris, creating dangerous temporary dams.
“Landslide dams can break quickly, and release large volumes of water and sediment as a flood wave,” civil defence director Sarah StuartBlack said. AFP