Earlier this month,
a 42-year-old named Philip Clay was found dead in Seoul, South Korea from an apparent suicide.
Clay was one of an unknown number of Korean adoptees
who were brought to the United States as children,
and then deported back to South Korea as adults.
Over the course of four months,
Jay Caspian Kang followed the story of one of them:
a Korean adoptee named Adam Crapser.
— In 1955, a farmer in Oregon named Harry Holt
adopted eight Korean children who had been displaced by the Korean War.
— He’s adopting eight tiny Koreans and taking four to other Americans...
— Holt and his wife set up an agency to deliver orphans from Korea to families in the States.
Since then, over 150,000 Korean children have been adopted by American families.
In 1979,
the Holt Agency brought over a 3-year-old named Shin Song-Hyuk
and placed him with a Christian family in the States.
As an adult, he learned that because of an oversight during the adoption process,
he wasn’t a U.S. citizen.
And at the age of 41, he found out that he was going to be deported back to Korea.
— What have you been doing to prepare for a life in what is essentially a foreign country to you?
— I have a little book.
It’s like a tourist book, kind-of.
I try to learn a little bit of some of the words and…
this is a pretty difficult situation to go through.
I know I've been separated from my family, I've been separated from the people I care about,
and the life that I know.
And I’m about to go somewhere that’s going to be completely foreign to me.
— When he first arrived in America,
Song-Hyuk’s new family changed his name to Adam,
but they didn’t fill out the H-3 document,
a routine form that grants citizenship to international adoptees.
Six years later,
Adam’s adopted parents decided they didn’t want him anymore and called an adoption agency.
The adoption agency called Jacque Fleming:
— I was told by the social worker that his welfare was seriously in danger.
So I dropped everything and went with her to pick him up.
And he was sitting on the curb, waiting for us to come get him.
He was 62 pounds.
Very quiet.
He didn’t seem to show a lot of emotion.
I could tell that he was very depressed, and...
just totally didn't know where he belonged.
— Are there any memories you have of those first days that you were with him?
— Well, he wasn't really responding too much to us at that time.
And as time grew on, we got closer to him.
At night, he would always…
At first, I had to coax him to come sit in the chair with me.
And then, later on, he would show up every night.
To sit in that chair with me.
So I took it upon myself,
I called Children’s Services and asked about Adam—
you know, “We’d like to be on the list to adopt him.”
They said, “We’ve already got a list of families in line.”
I wasn't allowed to see him anymore.
For 32 years, you know, we were thinking he was happy.
— After living with Jacque and her family for more than a year,
Adam was adopted by another family—
the Crapsers, who lived in Salem, Oregon.
The abuse started almost as soon as Adam moved in.
He was beat with a two-by-four, burned, and thrown in piles of dog feces.
The Crapsers had several adopted kids,
and none of them were spared.
Thomas and Dolly Crapser would ultimately be convicted on charges of physical and sexual abuse.
We reached out to the Craspers for comment,
but did not hear back.
— Do you have anything to say to the family that adopted you?
— Understand that children grow up to be adults,
and they carry around with them everything that you show them or do to them.
You affect them.
I don’t give them the power to know that they destroyed my life.
— When he was still a teenager,
Adam broke into the Crapser’s home to take back the only possessions he had brought with him from Korea:
a pair of rubber shoes and a Korean-language bible.
He was caught and sentenced to two years in prison.
— I guess, at the end of the day,
it’s not really so much what happens to you,
but... how you handle what happens to you.
And for the majority of my life,
I’ve handled everything wrong.
I’ve reacted when I shouldn’t have, I talked when I should have been quiet.
A lot of things.
And I’m learning a lot through this whole process.
— Adam’s troubles with the law didn’t stop there.
He got into a lot of fights and was convicted of assault, weapons charges, and domestic violence.
But he eventually settled down—
He had a barbershop, worked on cars, got married, and started a family.
By then, Adam realized that his immigration papers had never been filed,
and in 2012, he applied for a Green Card,
which triggered a background check by the Department of Homeland Security.
By law, Adam was an undocumented immigrant and a convicted felon.
ICE opened up deportation proceedings in 2015.
— I always considered myself American.
I just never could get my foot in the door,
and be this American I wanted to be wanted to be.
You know, adoption is a hard thing to deal with your whole life, usually.
And a lot of people carry around a lot of hard feelings.
A lot of people, like me...
don’t know what it’s like to grow up in stability,
or to have a family.
You know?
— Unfortunately, in cases like Adam’s,
where the immigrant has certain criminal convictions,
essentially what it means is mandatory deportation.
The judge has zero discretion.
That’s the system that Congress created,
and our fear is really that, under the new administration,
things are just gonna get worse.
— Why was the action taken when it was,
and not at any of the other times when he was arrested?
— So in the last 15 years, there’s essentially been
a huge uptick in immigration enforcement,
where we’ve seen immigration officials get more and more aggressive about going after people—
and particularly people like Adam, who have old criminal convictions.
— I'd be lying if I said I’m not terrified.
But it’s mixed with a little bit of excitement,
it’s mixed with a little bit of finality, you know, for me.
— Three weeks after Adam’s deportation, I met him in Seoul.
By law, when Adam returned to Korea,
his name reverted back to the one on his birth certificate.
He is now Shin Song-Hyuk again.
Adam lives in a tiny studio apartment:
— You had a haircut, I noticed.
— Yeah, I cut it when I got here.
I got the Korean little boy haircut that everybody has over here, with the bangs.
The lady didn’t speak any English, and I was trying to explain to her.
She didn't have any of the equipment I'm used to in America, so…
It’s basically the haircut I left here with, and it’s what I came back with.
Well, I got lost here one day.
I was about four blocks from here,
because I got dropped off by a cab,
Somebody asked me, “Is this where you live?”
And I look up, and it looked like it, so I said, “Yeah!”
And so I got out, and was walking and I was like,
“This is not the way.”
And I got lost, I just I felt handicapped.
I mean, I stayed in here all day yesterday.
I didn’t go anywhere.
— Why?
— I didn’t want to get lost.
I’d be screwed if I didn’t have any help right now.
I think about killing myself every single day that I’m here.
And it’s like...
I’m not really that guy.
But being here is like…
it’s a reality that’s really hard to deal with.
I spent 38 years of my life in the States,
and I killed myself for 20 of those years
just to be able to make a stable life for myself and have a family, and...
now I’m here, living out of a couple suitcases.
You know, there’s things here that...
I guess that I’m seeing right now, that are...
kinda comforting, in a way.
I’m just another Korean face in the crowd, you know?
I mean, they’re not looking me like, “Oh, you’re from America.”
They don’t know that right away.
— Adam needs to start making a living.
He’s hoping that he can open a barbershop, just like he did in the States.
Today, he’s going to scout locations in Itaewon,
the ex-pat neighborhood in Seoul that houses an American Army base.
— Hey, what’s up man?
I just came by to just check out your shop.
I just got deported from America, back here.
I was adopted to the States 38 years ago.
And so, I’m finding an area where maybe I might open up a shop.
I used to braid, and I had a black barbershop in America.
Yeah, somebody told me about it.
I just came by to check it out,
see what you guys had going on.
Alright man, Thank you.
— Once someone is deported from the United States,
it’s extremely difficult to come back.
There are a few things than can be done.
For example, they can try to get a pardon,
either from the governor of the state where they were convicted,
or from the president.
Unfortunately right now, a pardon is really a Hail Mary pass.
— Adam’s wife went to visit him in Seoul three months after he was deported.
He’s hoping that she and the kids will join him in Korea soon,
but no plans have been made and he’s still exploring legal options to come back home.
— I don't know if, one day, you know, I’ll get a call and...
they’ll say, “Oh, you can go back to United States.”
Or how I’ll feel about that.
My hope is that, somehow, we’ll all find our place.
Hi, baby.
You feeling better?
I love you.
— Before he was deported,
Adam submitted a statement to an immigration judge.
— Hi, baby!
He wrote,
“America promised me a home.”
“When I was sent to America, the possibility of being Korean was left behind—”
“the language, the culture, whatever family I might have had.”
“But my children do have a whole family, and their whole lifetimes in front of them.”
“I just want to do right by them.”
“I want to have a chance to watch them grow up healthy and happy.”
”I implore this country to keep its promise.”
“If not for me, then for my children,”
“so they won’t have to grow up without a dad.”