Uncle Sam gave 3-year-old Bryana Al-Ololla a present this week that the child might otherwise have been waiting on for more than a year.
Thanks in part to a law that took effect Tuesday, Bryana, the adopted daughter of Tammy and Abdul Al-Ololla of Mooresville, will travel to Saudi Arabia in April to visit her grandparents.
“She’s going to see her papa and her nana,” Tammy said, using the names by which her daughter calls her grandparents. “She’s excited about it.”
The law that plays a role in the trip is the Child Citizenship Act passed by Congress last fall. The law grants automatic citizenship to most children born abroad who are adopted.
The only stipulations are that the child be under 18 and one parent or legal guardian be a U.S. citizen.
Across the United States, about 75,000 adopted children became U.S. citizens Tuesday morning simply by waking up.
Tammy said that without the law, it probably would have taken another year for Bryana to get her citizenship. Tammy said that without that citizenship, it would have been almost impossible for her and her husband to get Bryana a passport for the trip to Saudi Arabia where Abdul’s parents live.
“It would have been very difficult,” Tammy said. “It would definitely have messed up a lot of things.”
As it was, getting the child a passport Tuesday was a snap. Tammy took Bryana to the Rowan County Courthouse in downtown Salisbury where in a matter of minutes the document was secured.
For the occasion, Tammy dressed Bryana in a jumper bearing an American flag.
“I don’t think that at 3 (years old) she comprehends what it’s all about,” Tammy said. “We keep a scrapbook for her, though, and one day she’ll look back on this as a big deal.”
Tammy said she and her husband adopted Bryana, who is a native of Guatemala, when the child was about 7 months old. She said a number of delays have hindered them from getting the child her citizenship.
One delay, Tammy said, centered around the difficulty the family had securing Bryana’s birth certificate from Guatemala.
Tammy said she finally quit trying to arrange an interview with Immigration and Naturalization Service officials after learning that Bryana would automatically become a citizen when the Child Citizenship Act took effect.
According to immigration officials, there are approximately 20,000 adoptions such as Bryana’s every year and the average wait for INS citizenship processing has been two years.
That will no longer be the case.
The new law removes a bureaucratic and psychological hurdle for parents, many of whom have waited years and paid up to $25,000 for international adoptions.
The INS citizenship application has typically included everything from FBI checks to state and local checks. Other requirements included paperwork on parents and children, including birth and marriage certificates, photo identifications, alien registration cards and certified English translations of documents written in other languages.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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