India may help woman facing deportation in US

The Indian government may come to the aid of 30-year-old Kairi Shepherd, who faces deportation from the United States following a local court rejecting her claim for residency. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: May 21, 2012, 01:19:24 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Indian government may come to the aid of 30-year-old Kairi Shepherd, who faces deportation from the United States following a local court rejecting her claim for residency.

After Kairi's case was highlighted by Hindustan Times recently, the ministry of external affairs asked the Indian Embassy in Washington for more information. "We have sought additional information in the case," an external affairs ministry official said.

The Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA), mandated to look into all cases of inter-country adoption, has also sought the MEA's intervention. The authority said it can't do much because Kairi's adoption had taken place before its inception.

"It is sad that CARA has washed its hands of her case," said Anjali Pawar, director of Pune-based NGO Sakee, which has filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court against inter-country adoption.

Kairi is currently in hiding in the US, fearing deportation by Immigration agencies. She fears that if she is forcibly sent to India, there would be nobody to take care of her. Kairi suffers from multiple scolerisis.

She, however, hopes that the Indian government will help because she has turned into a "global orphan". While the US has refused to acknowledge her despite being a resident for almost 30 years, she has virtually nobody in India. "I have no documents to trace my Indian parents," Kairi told Pawar.

Kairi was just three months old when she adopted by Erlene Shepherd from an orphanage in India. The youngest of eight adopted kids, she was eight - and without US citizenship - when Erlene died. At 17, Kairi was convicted of forging cheques to finance her drug habit.

The US federal court recently upheld the government's right to deport Kairi because she had failed to qualify for citizenship by a few months under the Child Citizenship Act of 2000.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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