US: Adopted Indian faces deportation

30 yrs later, woman in US risks being sent back due to conviction in crime, immigration issues. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: May 13, 2012, 02:09:03 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Kairi Shepherd was just three months old when she was adopted by Erlene Shepherd from an Indian orphanage — the youngest of eight adopted children.

Erlene died when Kairi was eight years old, and she had not acquired US citizenship. At 17, Kairi was convicted of forging cheques to pay for her drug habit. Now, at 30, she is at risk of being deported back to India.

On Tuesday, a federal court in the US upheld the government’s right to deport Kairi as she had failed to qualify for citizenship by a few months under the Child Citizenship Act of 2000.

Until 2000, parents were required to file an application before the adopted child turned 21 to claim citizenship. Erlene had filled Kairi’s application, but failed to file it before her death.

After 2001, legal international adoptions automatically conferred citizenships on children adopted by US citizens.

Kairi, however, missed the deadline by turning 21 a few months before the new law came into force.

Kairi was unaware of her legal predicament till she was caught and convicted of forging cheques to fuel her drug habit. Erlene’s patchy record-keeping enabled government agencies to seek her deportation for the offence, as per US immigration laws.

Kairi’s appeals against the government decision were rejected on technical grounds. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, judge Scott Matheson of the 10th Circuit Court on Tuesday wrote that the court does not have jurisdiction over determining Shepherd's legal status. “Her last hope is the United States Supreme Court,” said Anjali Pawar, director of Pune-based NGO Sakhee, which has urged external affairs minister SM Krishna to fight for her cause.

The Tribune quoted Kairi as saying that she would not be able to leave Delhi airport if deported because her adoption records were stolen from her mother’s car before her death.

In 2008, Jennifer Haynes, 32, who was sexually abused by her adopted father, was deported after being caught with drugs.

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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