Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Main is one of six senators to introduce a bill seeking to guarantee citizenship for certain adults who were legally adopted as children from overseas.
The Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2021 seeks to close a loophole in some previous legislation called the Child Citizenship Act, or CCA, which passed in 2000. The CCA allowed most international adoptees to become citizens, but only if that person was a child under the age of 18 at the time the law took effect in Feb. 2001.
Collins says it's "not right" that adults who had been brought to the country as children in years prior were denied citizenship simply because they were older than 18 when the earlier bill passed.
The new bill seeks to make citizenship automatic for legal international adoptees, regardless of how old they were when CCA took effect.
Collins is one of three Republicans and three Democrats to introduce the legislation.
