PARENTING 06/20/2018 02:35 pm ET

Why Families With Adopted Children From Foreign Countries Are So Afraid

Will Immigration and Customs Enforcement one day come for our Chinese-, Korean- and Russian-born adopted children?

By Ann Brenoff

As the family separation policy unfolds on the United States’ borders and our news feeds fill with photos and recordings of anguished infants and toddlers crying out for their parents, there is a slice of the American public for whom the reaction goes beyond mere gut-gripping loathing: those of us whose children were born in other countries and became naturalized U.S. citizens when we adopted them.

We, for the most part, are freaking out.

We connect to this story on multiple levels: Some of us fear that our children’s countries of birth ― China, Korea, Russia ― will cross paths with President Donald Trump’s ire and he will smite them down, taking our children with them. We are acutely aware of how the United States rounded up its citizens of Japanese descent and put them in prison camps not so long ago. It was executive order 9066, and it remains a horrific reminder of what mass hysteria and prejudice can do.

Still others of us who parent once-orphaned children have seen firsthand what abandonment can do to a child. We watch how our own children suffer as they try to process what they experienced as infants and toddlers.