This statement was originally published on our Instagram in November 2025.
November 9 marks World Adoption Day with the goals “to celebrate families, raise awareness for adoption, and raise funds to support families in the adoption journey.”
The authors of this statement are transracial and transnational adoptees, and as anti-imperialist members of MAC, it’s important for us to acknowledge how this day highlights the connections between white saviorism, family separation, and immigrant rights. More importantly, this statement highlights how World Adoption Day disguises the insidious consequences of US imperialism.
Transracial adoption in its earliest forms in the US stemmed from the federal government forcing Native American tribes to relinquish their youth and to send them to boarding schools for the purported betterment of the children’s future. Between 1958 – 1967, the Indian Adoption Project forcibly removed nearly 400 Native American children from their families and culture and were instead placed with white families. In response to the disproportionate removal of Native American children by state agencies, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) passed in 1978 to give Native tribes jurisdiction and actively keep families together.
Similarly, the National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) critiqued the rise of Black children being adopted to white families. They passed a resolution in 1972, stating “that transracial adoption was, in essence, a form of race and cultural genocide”.
These forms of transracial adoptions are harmful, and are prominent in other settler colonial countries such as Canada or Australia.
Within the US, the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) was designed to promote the adoption of children in foster care. While the Act purportedly prioritizes child safety, the Act attempts to legally terminate parental rights to expedite adoptions. States may also offer incentives for adoptive parents, such as monthly maintenance payments. It’s not a coincidence that children are removed from their families and placed in foster care due to poverty-related circumstances.
If the federal government truly prioritized child safety, we would see an increase of funding in social services, education, gun safety, and reproductive rights. Instead, the “Big Beautiful Bill” cuts food benefits to SNAP, the country’s largest anti-hunger program, while the US military and ICE received a budget increase totaling $250 billion dollars.
Despite retaliation against domestic transracial adoptions in the 1950s, Holt International pioneered an ever-larger scale and more profit-driven form of the practice: international transracial adoptions. Exploiting the poverty and war-stricken country of South Korea, Holt started as an Evangelical-led agency, but it was clear their mission was rooted in ulterior motives.
Amongst the accusations were ones that even dubbed their practices as “trafficking”. According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a South Korean government body, they conducted a report which “claimed that 375 individuals adopted to 11 countries including Denmark, the United States, and Sweden during the 1960s to 1990s were adopted without the consent of their biological parents and that their documents were falsified to show them as orphans.” 170 of these adoptions were facilitated through Holt.
Even back during the 1988 Olympics, South Korea was heavily criticized for being able to host such an event of grandeur while essentially exporting their babies abroad for money.
Most recently, The Truth and Reconciliation Commission for South Korea has confirmed that “in 56 cases, adoption agencies falsified or obscured documents in a process facilitated by the government”. Since Holt’s creation, transracial adoptions facilitated by Holt or other predatory organizations ballooned in more countries also targeted by colonization and imperialism: China, Ethiopia, and Guatemala with similar horrifying stories of trafficking and exploitation.
The US military occupation in Korea dates back to 1945 when the US imposed a partition and occupied the southern half of the Korean Peninsula. US occupation continues to this day with nearly 28,500 US troops stationed in South Korea across 62 US military bases; it is one of the most heavily occupied countries in the world.
The US soldiers stationed in Korea are not protecting Koreans; they are inflicting violence against the Korean people and causing immense environmental destruction to their land and water sources.
But the Korean people are fighting back. Nodutdol is a US-based organization comprised of members of the Korean diaspora, pushing for an end to US intervention in Korea as well as the ultimate reunification of the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea into a single, liberated state.
We stand with organizations like Nodutdol and demand the US out of Korea!
Whether adoption has taken place domestically or internationally, the system of adoption has always been rooted in US imperialism.
Transracial adoptions have always been systematically oppressive since their inception. From ripping Indigenous children away from their homes to uprooting non-white babies from their motherlands across the oceans, it is imperative to take a stand against The Transnational Adoption Industrial Complex and recognize it as another form of imperialism. It commodifies human children for profit and is a clear example of white saviorism cloaked as goodwill. Children’s lives should never be for profit, and especially not on a systemic level.
The Trump administration has pledged to carry out the largest deportation raids in the country’s history. CNN reported that nearly 232,000 people were deported by ICE and the CBP in the first seven months of Trump’s second presidency. Immigrant rights and anti-war movements must work together to fight back against Trump’s racist and reactionary agenda.
We know that the US has a long history of destabilizing countries economically, politically, and militarily, in order to maintain control and exert its dominance. For example, in recent weeks, the Trump administration has attacked Venezuela on accusations of drug trafficking (without evidence), and publicly admitted to the authorization of covert CIA operations to carry out deadly military strikes in the Caribbean. Since September, the US has murdered more than two dozen people.
Families are being separated, destroyed, or killed by US imperialism. The same US imperialism that destabilizes Colombia and the rest of Latin America and displaces people also cages and terrorizes families at home.
On World Adoption Day, MAC reaffirms our stance: End the US War Machine! U.S. out of Everywhere!