For the better part of A’s life, she never suspected anything was wrong.

She breezed through getting her driver’s license. She applied to college and filed her taxes year after year without any hiccups. That is, until she applied for her passport.

Suddenly, the document she always relied on — a delayed registration of birth, which is fairly common among adoptees — was no longer enough. She realized the papers that would prove she was a citizen were not just missing — they had never existed in the first place.no

" I just sensed there was something wrong and it seemed frightening," said A, who asked to be referred to by her last initial out of fear of deportation.

A later found out that her adoptive parents never completed her naturalization. It meant she was technically barred from accessing things that she took for granted all her life — like college financial aid. It also left A, who is now in her 40s, vulnerable to deportation to her native South Korea — a country she has never been to, where she doesn’t speak the language or know of any family.