Ok, so I care about politics for a lot of reasons. I think people should be opening and accepting of everyone, decisions should be made based off of science, I could keep going. But the real reason I care about politics are the two kiddos in that photo above. This memory popped up in my Google Nest last night and it almost made me cry.
Both of my children were adopted from other countries. They came to the United States in 2004 and 2005 as infants (we did not do a very good job with spacing them out, but that is for another blog post). At the time, we were told they were technically US citizens when they came into the country with me (my guy in New Jersey and my girl in Texas) but as an extra precaution to readopt them in the state we lived in. We followed all of the rules, filled out hundreds of documents and felt safe that they were solidly US citizens. Then came the election of 2016. By the summer of 2017, Trump’s new immigration plan was all the buzz, and we were told by international adoption professionals that we now needed to get a Certificate of Citizenship for both children since that is the only true way to prove you are a US citizen. It would now be needed for some job applications, college financial aid, etc.
I immediately went to work to get this paperwork for my kiddos. The only catch? All of our documentation was over a decade old and the biggest hurdle of all – I did not have one piece of paper that showed my children’s birth names and legal names were the same person. All the documentation from India said Tilak as a first name and all the documentation from Guatemala had Mariana as a first name. After looking through all of my paperwork, I reached out to my son’s adoption agency for help (the attorney we used for my daughter’s adoption had passed away). A super nice social worker at the agency went through all the hundreds of pages of documentation from 2004 (hello, she was an angel) and found ONE PIECE OF PAPER that contained both names. It was the form you filled out to apply to NC for re-adoption.
I put together applications for both children and included every single piece of documentation I had for each of them. I wrote 2 checks for $400 each (this fee was around $50 before 2016) and sent to the Department of Immigration. We waited weeks and weeks and finally got a letter in the mail saying their certificates were approved and they would need to appear at the local US Citizenship and Immigration office to be sworn in as US Citizens. My anxious child immediately asked if she had never been a citizen before now, to which I explained this was just a technicality, but an important one for the world we now lived in.
When the processor asked for their Green Cards and they produced ones with infant photos, she busted out laughing and said “now this is something I have never seen before. Baby pictures with adolescents standing in front of me.” They were sworn in that morning, and I said that this would be an interesting reason for an excused tardy to school.
Fast forward to the fall of 2024. Never in a million years did I think we would have another 4 years with Trump. But here we are. And I am forever grateful that I am good at doing hard things and got those Certificates of Citizenship for my kiddos. They are safe in the crazy fucking world that is our reality for the next 4 years. Bless all of our hearts, and I really mean that, not in the sarcastic southern way some people mean it.