Relaunched commission inherited 2,100 unresolved adoption complaints
South Korea’s government-convened Truth and Reconciliation Commission has documented the government’s role in enabling private adoption agencies to “mass export” Korean children for sale abroad, sometimes without birth-family consent. Its March 2025 acknowledgment covered a system the source said had operated with government backing since the 1950s. More than 100,000 Korean-born adoptees in the United States now confront questions the source framed as: “Who am I, really? And how did I get here?” The Guardian described those uprooted by the system as grappling with false promises of a better life.
The commission spent three years examining evidence from 367 adoptions to 11 countries between 1964 and 1999. It found that young, mostly unmarried Korean mothers felt pressure to relinquish children because of stigma and poverty. The commission confirmed fraudulent practices in 56 cases in which children were adopted without valid parental consent or with falsified records claiming they were orphans despite having living relatives. Multiple agencies handled those cases, including Holt Children’s Services. A 2024 AP/PBS Frontline investigation went further, alleging that children were kidnapped off the street and from hospitals for adoption.
The commission acknowledged what it described as South Korea’s underhanded role in delivering newborns to Western couples’ doors. Months before a December announcement, President Lee Jae Myung offered a “heartfelt apology” to adoptees and birth parents for government complicity in an arrangement that dismantled generations of Korean families while enabling white families in the West to form new ones. South Korea then announced that international adoption of Korean children would end by 2029. Romania, Guatemala, Nepal, Ethiopia and China had already banned or limited foreign adoptions amid accusations of trafficking children through international adoption.
Susan Soonkeum Cox, vice-president of policy and external affairs at Holt International, which split from Holt Children’s Services in South Korea in the 1970s, acknowledged that some children were improperly separated from their families by Holt and sent on fraudulent documents. She told The Guardian there was “not evil intent” and denied that children were “trafficked.”
Cox said: “Holt is very concerned about [the Guardian’s reporting] and takes it very seriously.” She said Holt felt strongly that every adoptee had the right to their own story and that each adoptee’s interpretation belonged to them. Holt respected people who came forward with negative experiences and was “deeply saddened by it.”
Cox, a Korean-born adoptee brought to the United States in 1956, said mistakes were made in Holt’s early years but that the organization had been determined to provide ethical, professional services. She called Holt a strong proponent of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, established in 1993, because global standards were needed. Holt Children’s Services in South Korea did not respond to a request for comment.
Government findings and the adoption system
The Guardian traced the Korean adoption program to 1955, when it described evangelical Oregon couple Bertha and Harry Holt as having been “led by God” to “save” thousands of mixed-race babies fathered by U.S. soldiers during the Korean War and left on streets in economically devastated, conservative South Korea. The couple adopted eight children themselves and founded Holt Children’s Services to help other Americans do the same. A photograph dated 17 December 1956 shows Harry Holt checking the identification of a Korean child arriving in San Francisco.
Arissa Oh, a historian of Asian American immigration at Boston College, said Red Scare-era thinking, an inclination toward white saviourism and promotion by churches drew customers to the agency’s services. She said: “People who had little interest in adopting brown babies in America went abroad to ‘rescue orphans’ from communism.”
The original Korean War cohort had run out by around the 1960s, Oh said. “Orphan fever” had spread across the United States and Europe, while women’s increasing access to welfare, contraception and abortion produced shortages of infants available for domestic adoption. “That’s when market mechanisms come in,” Oh said. She authored To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption. With the South Korean government’s blessing, Oh said, “competing agencies sprang up to keep the pipeline going.”
According to Oh, the adoption boom became a source of wealth, welfare savings and soft power for South Korea, which the source described as the world’s 15th-largest economy. Its blueprint was replicated by Russia, China, Guatemala and Ethiopia, among others, with those countries claiming that poverty, medical needs or policies such as China’s one-child rule made it difficult to rehome children domestically.
U.S. political figures also championed the framework. President Dwight Eisenhower was lobbied by the Holts in the 1950s. Senator John McCain adopted from a Bangladesh orphanage in 1993. Hillary Clinton called international adoption “an important matter of foreign policy” in 2012. International adoption to the United States peaked in 2004, when 23,000 children arrived, and adopters now pay an estimated $30,000 to $60,000 for each foreign child.
The Guardian said the American story of international adoption had often been presented as a “holy trinity”: a woman struggling in a poor country, a newborn needing a better life and a Western couple with love and resources in abundance. Celebrities including Mia Farrow and Angelina Jolie popularized foreign adoption. Katherine Heigl, whose older sister was adopted from South Korea, adopted her daughter Naleigh from South Korea in 2009. Heigl wrote on Naleigh’s 11th birthday: “It is this gorgeous girl … born of a young woman who could not raise her but could give her the gift of life … that made me a mother.”
Diverging accounts of adoption and family separation
The Guardian characterized Jacquelyn Wells and Lauren White-Gydas as international, transracial adoptees in their 30s in the United States. Both were born in South Korea to unwed mothers in the 1980s and sent as newborns to white families. Neither knew many other Asians in the towns where she grew up: Wells in Westford, Massachusetts, and White-Gydas in Salem, Oregon.
Wells, 39, lives in southern Maine with her infant son and wedding photographs from her recent marriage to her first-generation Asian American spouse. A 2022 wedding photograph shows Wells in a white gown beside her adoptive mother, who wore a gold dress, and her Korean birth mother, who wore a flowing hanbok. A photograph taken before she left Korea in 1987 shows her being held by a carer.
Wells contacted her adoption agency and reunited in Seoul in 2018, at 31, with her biological parents, who were now married, and two full brothers. She met her birth mother first. Her birth mother had voluntarily relinquished Wells during a temporary breakup with Wells’s biological father and said, “I was so afraid you were going to be so angry with me.”
The singer-songwriter had a concert booked in Seoul the next day. Before taking the stage, Wells received a text: “I’m your brother. I’m on the high speed train, we are coming to your show.” She saw all four relatives walk into the concert dressed in black, like her. Wells later collaborated on a track with one brother, singing in English as he rapped in Korean. “We became best friends,” she said.
The Guardian described positive reunion accounts that often circulate widely online as “reunion porn,” saying they can ignore the complexity of international, transracial adoption. Wells, co-president of Boston Korean Adoptees, was reluctant to publicize her own reunion for that reason. She said, “I feel guilty that I won the adoption Lotto, because I learned the stories of hundreds of fellow adoptees where the outcomes were nothing of the sort.”
White-Gydas, 37, was born in Korea in 1989 and adopted at five months through Holt Korea by a white couple from Salem, Oregon. She now lives in Arlee, Montana, where she viewed an album of childhood photographs while speaking to The Guardian. White-Gydas said she did not match the “girly Asian” image her adoptive mother wanted. “I was a very explosive, angry child,” she said.
White-Gydas’s therapist believes she was suffering from relinquishment trauma, a term increasingly used to describe anxiety, emotional dysregulation, anger and depression experienced by many adoptees after separation from their birth mothers. White-Gydas said there was “a lot of physical and emotional abuse, constantly screaming at me.” She also said she screamed back and that her adoptive parents were not prepared for how much trauma she had. By the time she was seven, she said, she had been “completely stripped of everything” and could not have friends, go out or leave her room except for school. She had some happy memories of playing with her adoptive father but felt she had to earn her adoptive mother’s love.
In 1999, just after her 10th birthday, her American adopters, seeking a placement for her after failed adoptions, put her on a plane to Hope House in Nampa, Idaho, and eventually terminated their parental rights. White-Gydas said: “Being possibly abandoned by my biological parents and then abandoned by my adoptive parents pretty much told me … there’s something wrong with me.” She also described her wedding photograph with her adoptive parents as “sugary frosting, hiding rot,” noting that she had no child in her arms.
Katie Bozek, 45, a Korean-born adoptee and couples therapist in Grand Rapids, Michigan, said learning about South Korea’s adoption industry felt like being deprogrammed. She compared the experience to entering the multiverse in the film Everything Everywhere All at Once and becoming aware of the infinite parallel lives she might have lived.
Bozek said: “Thousands of adoptees are popping their heads out of the water, seeing [allegations such as] ‘kidnapping’, ‘trafficked’, and going, ‘where am I?’” She said: “I don’t know how to explain to people that phrases like ‘I just found out my friend was kidnapped,’ ‘I may have been stolen’ or ‘my file is a lie’ are not extreme hypotheticals.”
Bozek’s adoption file claimed she had been found near a police station in Korea in 1981. A white Michigan family adopted her in 1982, and Bozek said she loved that family. Outside the home, she endured racist bullying and yearned to be blond.
The Guardian reported that international adoptees were frequently the only person of color in mostly white families. Agency advice to “not see race,” it said, left some families unprepared for questions such as “where did they get you?” or “why didn’t your real parents want you?” In earlier decades, white adopters were more likely to downplay racist comments or ignore adoptees’ racial and ethnic backgrounds, which could promote whiteness as “normal” or “better.” Some Asian adoptees also experienced isolation among Asian people, who could perceive them as “too white to be Asian and too Asian to be white,” the source described as a double rejection.
Growing up, Bozek had few Korean role models to teach her about her birth culture. She said the dominant adoption narrative told adoptees: “You went to the best country in the world! You should be grateful we saved you.” Bozek described “an ambiguous loss of something” that she could sense, smell and taste while in Korea.
Bozek began searching for her biological parents at 13 and had not found them. In 2019 and 2021, she found two first cousins through 23andMe DNA testing. They were also U.S. adoptees and half siblings. The discovery raised further questions about whether agencies had been plucking multiple children off the streets at the same time.
Bozek became executive director of Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network in 2018, making her the organization’s first leader who was an adoptee rather than an adopter. Since the commission’s report, the group has welcomed members processing anger, guilt and loss. A photograph shows Bozek looking at missing posters that adoptees put up at the Omma Poom memorial park in Paju, Korea.
Records, identity and family searches
Thousands of adoptees, including some in their 60s and 70s, were awaiting hearings before the commission. Many were searching for adoption paperwork in Korea. Despite widespread fraud, The Guardian said those files still contained scraps of evidence that could provide clues about origins, identity and family.
Oh Myo Kim, 46, an adoption psychologist in Brookline, Massachusetts, was on a Fulbright scholarship in Seoul when the commission’s report was announced. “Just off the top of my head, I know four Korean adoptees who found out they were stolen,” she said.
Kim, who was adopted by a white New Jersey family in 1981 and is a mother of two, became an accidental activist when she co-founded Emergency Action for Records Storage, or EARS, with other adoptees. The group formed after plans emerged for the Korean government to centralize adoption files in inadequate storage, potentially delaying access for years and damaging or destroying fragile paperwork.
Between school runs and work at Boston College, Kim used vacation days to fly 7,000 miles to lobby the Korean government to better care for documents and the identities of thousands of strangers. She joked that she still spoke Korean “like a child.”
Kim said, “I feel like adoptees chase fiction. They chase ghosts.” She said her paperwork stated that her parents were married and gave her up as their fourth daughter, but it contained no parental signatures, and she asked, “Do I have sisters?”
The commission’s findings surprised many adoptees, even though activists had raised alarms since the 1970s. The first adult adoptees from Korea were then finding their birth families and learning the truth of their adoptions. Commercial DNA testing in the 2010s accelerated reunions and also supported lawsuits filed by two birth mothers against the Korean government.
One of those mothers, Han Tae-soon, said her four-year-old daughter, Kyung-Ha, disappeared while playing outside in 1975. Han and her daughter reunited in 2019 after Han registered with the Korean DNA database 325Kamra and matched with Kyung-Ha, now Laurie Bender, a middle-aged nurse in California.
Bender took the test because her U.S.-born daughter wanted to learn about her Korean roots. Bender discovered that Han had been walking the streets for 44 years, until all 10 of her toenails had fallen off. “It’s like you’ve been living a fake life,” Bender told the AP.
Han sued the Korean government for $445,000, alleging that it failed to prevent Bender’s adoption through a children’s home that said she was an orphan despite Han’s missing-person report with local police. A government spokesperson told the BBC in 2025 that it “deeply sympathises with the emotional pain of individuals and families who could not find each other for a long time” and would act based on the trial’s outcome.
Another reunion documented by The Guardian involved Nicole Motta and her birth father, Jang Dae-chang, at the Eastern Social Welfare Society in Seoul on May 31, 2024. Motta said she did not need DNA results because she knew he was her father. Jang said, “I am a sinner for not finding you,” and Motta told him, “I think I have your nose.”
Hope House and institutional treatment
Hope House opened in 1976 by Donna Velvick-Lowry, now in her 80s, as a Christian home and school for children from disrupted U.S. and international adoptions. Many of its residents had severe mental-health conditions and were labeled “incorrigible.” White-Gydas joined abandoned adoptees from Russia, Romania, Ukraine, Haiti, Mongolia, Brazil and China.
White-Gydas alleges that some staff at Hope House were physically abusive, “slamming” children to the ground, locking them in solitary confinement and keeping them “doped up” by a visiting psychiatrist. By age 12, she says, she had been prescribed, among many medications, birth control to suppress her cycles. Medical records showed that her weight reached 200 pounds, or 90 kilograms, and she developed type 2 diabetes.
White-Gydas said Velvick-Lowry wanted her to remain at Hope House beyond 18 as her adopted daughter and belittled her to make her feel like an eternal child.
White-Gydas experienced painful periods and intense mood swings. She says Velvick-Lowry began pressuring her for a hysterectomy at 12 and took her to doctors by 16. “She said if I didn’t, my hormones would make it so I ended up in jail,” White-Gydas said. After she turned 18 in 2008, she alleges that Velvick-Lowry and the visiting psychiatrist pressured her to sign consent paperwork.
The obstetrician who performed the surgery noted on the intake paperwork that the psychiatrist named on the referral had diagnosed White-Gydas with “severe premenstrual disorder with anger and violent behavior.” The paperwork said White-Gydas was “absolutely certain that she does not desire any children.” It also listed Seroquel, an antipsychotic used to treat schizophrenia that sedates patients and causes drowsiness.
Medical notes confirm that White-Gydas underwent a total hysterectomy with bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy in February 2008, removing her uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries. The procedure caused menopause when she was 18 years and five months old. “As they wheeled me in, it was the only time Donna wasn’t there,” White-Gydas said. “I told the nurse: ‘I don’t want to do this.’ She looked sad and said: ‘Sorry.’” She added: “Donna knew the one thing I wanted was a family who loved me, and she took that from me.”
Five adults who lived at Hope House as children in the 1990s and 2000s alongside White-Gydas alleged physical and emotional abuse by Velvick-Lowry and former staff, as well as medication that made them feel like “zombies.” Two former staff members, who began working there after White-Gydas’s operation, said knowledge of her hysterectomy was “widespread” among staff and students but said they had no personal knowledge about whether she had been pressured. The former residents and staff requested anonymity to protect their privacy.
Cleve Cushing, chair of Hope House’s board of directors, said in a written statement to The Guardian that for 50 years the organization had provided a home for children in need and given them “love and care, a quality education, and a real opportunity to succeed.”
Cushing said: “Hope House takes any concern about the welfare of a child extremely seriously. We are, however, bound by state and federal confidentiality obligations and by our duty to protect the privacy of the children and families we have served. For that reason, we do not discuss any current or former resident or the details of their care. Anyone with a concern about the care of a child at Hope House, past or present, is encouraged to contact the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare or law enforcement.”
Cushing said the nonprofit remained subject to Idaho licensing standards and oversight and would cooperate with any official review.
Velvick-Lowry no longer operates Hope House, which is now in Marsing, and former staff and students said she was understood to live on the property. She confirmed that she had been White-Gydas’s legal guardian but declined to answer questions about the alleged abuse or sterilization. She said she was consulting a lawyer but did not provide the lawyer’s contact information. She said, “I remember loving [Gydas-White] very much and offering her a full time position after she left.”
White-Gydas left Hope House at 22, moved to Montana and began trauma therapy after being diagnosed with complex PTSD. She invited her former adopters to her 2014 wedding, hoping to salvage the only parental relationship she remembered. That relationship broke down again after they refused to accept how their actions had damaged her. She now works with disabled adults and co-owns an animal rescue, but still struggles with infertility.
White-Gydas said: “We’re supposed to be grateful we got this ‘better life’ in America … A lot of us didn’t have a better life.”
The Guardian characterized transracial, international adoption in the United States as underdiscussed and underreported until the previous decade. It said generations of children were funneled for profit into largely white families ill-equipped to support minority children, often in monoracial, segregated or racist communities. Even in loving placements, the source said many adoptees had an increased likelihood of attachment problems, depression and rage. Some were overmedicated, abused or illegally “rehomed.”
The Guardian cited an AP investigation that found that, due in part to overdiagnosis of a rare condition called reactive attachment disorder, adoptees of all backgrounds account for an estimated 25% to 40% of institutionalized U.S. children even though they are just 2% of all children. A 2026 Winston-Salem State University report found that adoptees were 35 times more likely than non-adoptees to attempt suicide.
Citizenship and continuing litigation
An estimated 35,000 U.S. adoptees lack citizenship, more than half of them Korean-born. Gregory Luce, a Minnesota lawyer and founder of the pro bono Adoptee Rights Law Center, said a vast majority of Korean adoptees arrived on visas requiring U.S. adopters to apply for citizenship on their behalf. Luce is also a domestic adoptee.
Some adopters did not apply, and some adoptees did not learn about the requirement until applying for a passport, applying to college or even reaching retirement. “Some [Korean] adoptees were essentially smuggled into the country,” Luce said.
In 2016, U.S. adoptee Adam Crapser was deported to South Korea after a green-card application uncovered old criminal charges, separating him from his children. He became the first Korean adoptee to sue the Korean government and Holt International for not telling his adopters to apply for his citizenship.
A Seoul high court awarded Crapser $68,600 in damages in 2023 after dismissing the claims against the Korean government but finding Holt responsible. The result was thrown out on appeal. Holt and the government successfully cited a 1976 law that sped up foreign adoptions, in part by absolving agencies of responsibilities such as ensuring citizenship for adoptees abroad. Crapser now lives in Mexico.
In September 2025, the Protect Adoptees and American Families Act, or PAAF, reached U.S. House committee stage. Intended to close citizenship gaps through which adoptees fall, the proposal was at least the sixth attempt since 2015. Amid surging immigration arrests at U.S. airports, international adoptees and groups including Luce’s urged one another not to fly, even domestically, without a U.S. passport.
Denmark and the Netherlands, facing scandals over fraudulent adoption paperwork and government complicity in trafficking adoptees, made moves to end their participation in international adoption. The United Kingdom maintains an updated list of adoption restrictions on sending countries facing allegations of trafficking and fraud.
The source reported no comparable developments in the United States, where Luce said the likelihood of a ban remained low because international adoption was “simply too popular.” International adoption to the United States has fallen 94% since 2004, and some adopters have publicly expressed regret for the role they played in funding its continuation.
U.S. families receive a $17,000 federal tax break for each international or domestic adoptee. The Guardian said positive international-adoption stories permeated social media and pop culture, including portrayals in Grey’s Anatomy, Modern Family, Sex and the City and Sesame Street. Kim remembered people in the 1980s telling her white adoptive mother, “God bless you,” as though the woman were a saint for adopting Kim. “Adoption as this force for good is very strong in American culture,” Kim said.
Even politicians who support PAAF, Senator Amy Klobuchar and Representative Adam Smith, were “super pro-adoption,” Luce said. “If you criticize adoption as a politician, you’re seen as way outside the norm.”
A Chinese-born adoptee received $30 million in damages from a New Hampshire judge in 2024 after her adopted parents pleaded guilty to criminal charges for keeping her tied up in their basement until she escaped in 2018 at age 15.
That summer, former Kentucky governor Matt Bevin and his former wife, Glenna Bevin, faced abuse and neglect allegations from their Ethiopian-born adopted son Jonah Bevin. Jonah described being used as a “political puppet” for campaigns and said he was sent away to abusive facilities in the United States and Jamaica. Matt Bevin called the claims “false,” while Glenna Bevin testified that Jonah was “aggressive” toward his siblings as a teenager. The matter remains in state family court, where Jonah is seeking retroactive child-support payments.
Complaints, reparations and historical arguments
South Korea’s commission relaunched in February, inheriting 2,100 unresolved complaints from the previous commission while accepting hundreds of new submissions from adoptees and, for the first time, birth parents.
One new case involved Lee Aeri Rana, whose daughter, Park Mi-ae, was taken from a South Korean hospital at birth in 1993 and sent to the United States on allegedly fraudulent documents. Park became homeless and estranged from her adoptive family before dying by suicide in 2023 at age 30, one day after legally restoring her Korean surname. Her mother, who had been told her daughter died as a newborn, said: “This is a death produced by illegal adoption.”
Some activists have called for reparations from the Korean government, including restored citizenship, compensation for travel to South Korea and assistance with family searches. Adoptees have also said that people cannot relive a life they have lost. Some are reframing U.S. support for international adoption as part of its longer legacy of forced family separation.
Dr. Kimberly McKee, a Korean adoptee and critical adoption scholar at Grand Valley State University, said, “Adoption is an amazing analytic … to look at settler colonialism, white supremacy [and] anti-Black violence.” Her Instagram handle is @adopteekilljoy. Academics like McKee argue that the international slave trade, which split African families for sale to white people, established a framework for state-sanctioned separation that disproportionately affects Black and brown U.S. families today.
In the 19th and into the 20th century, thousands of Native American children were sent to Indian boarding schools, sterilized, or forcibly adopted by white families. McKee said international adoption is “a violent institution” that continues that pattern.
McKee married another Korean adoptee, reunited with her birth family in 2013 and has taken her son to celebrate Chuseok, a major Korean holiday, with them. She told adoptee activist Haley Radke on the Adoptees On podcast that eating with her appa, or father, felt like a “glimmer” of the life she might have led. A photograph dated 6 October 2026 shows McKee in a park near her home in Plainfield, Illinois.
McKee said being unable to communicate with her birth father left her feeling a “living grief,” or han, a Korean word for sorrow and rage resulting from injustice. “I can order food … get directions … [but] I can’t have that sustained deep conversation,” McKee said. “Even though I am in reunion … there is a grief there and it’s palpable.”
Historian Arissa Oh saw what she called a type of han enter her Boston College classrooms as adoptee descendants took her adoption course and searched for answers about why their family line was cut and “who wielded the knife.” Oh said she wonders whether people will someday discuss international adoption the way they discuss slavery: “a historical phenomena, with a beginning and an end, thought to be firmly in the past.”
For years, Wells suffered crushing depression that was misdiagnosed as bipolar disorder when she was 13. The resulting medication caused suicidal thoughts, she said. Her birth mother took 10 years before agreeing to meet her or tell her biological father and brothers about her.
Wells was pregnant with her second child when she spoke to The Guardian. She was not a stolen baby, but adoption affected her, her birth family and her children, another generation removed from Korea. “I feel truly lucky because of the rare hand I was dealt, but I had to fight like hell for my life,” she said.
White-Gydas described trying to absorb the commission’s initial findings as “very draining, the feeling that I don’t know who I am.” Growing up, she said, she wanted to ask other Asian people where they came from because she knew so little, and she would not consider herself Korean. The one link she retained to her origins was the name in her file, Jung Hee June.
White-Gydas said: “I have done DNA tests and found nothing. I don’t know whether I truly was given up or I was stolen. Do I have a mom in Korea who loved me? How did I get here?”