Passport and Permanent Resident Card

First off, if your daughter is a Permanent Resident and not a U.S. citizen, she cannot get a U.S. passport. U.S. passports are granted only to citizens. I gather that your daughter came home before the passage of the Child Citizenship Act of 2000, which meant that you would have had to naturalize her to make her a citizen, but failed to do so. All is not lost, however. If your daughter was not yet 18as of February 2001, when the Child Citizenship Act officially took effect, she did become a citizen automatically. However, you have no proof of that. Remember that a birth certificate is not proof of citizenship for a foreign born person, as it does not show whether the person ever was naturalized, and an adoption decree does not have anything to do with citizenship. Technically, because the Passport Agency is a branch of the U.S. State Department, it is allowed to "adjudicate status" -- that is, to determine who is and who is not a citizen by looking at documents like birth certificates, adoption decrees, and so on. They could, legally, determine that your child came to the U.S. on an adoption visa and was under 18 at the time the Child Citizenship Act took effect, so she is legally a citizen and eligible for a passport. HOWEVER, since all the focus on terrorism started, some Passport Agency offices seem to be refusing to adjudicate status, and simply insisting on proof of citizenship, in the form of a certificate of citizenship. If you run into that situation, you could be unable to travel soon. To get a certificate of citizenship, you would have to file the N-600 form with the USCIS, which costs $420. And some offices of the USCIS have taken as long as a year to process certificates, though I would hope that most do not take quite that long. As to the issue of the birthdates, there would have to be a legal change of birthdate in order to make the U.S. date valid, just as there had to be a legal change of name to make her American name valid. Most people do a legal name change during the readoption process, and I assume you did so. The adoption decree probably reads something like "The child, formerly known as X, is now to be known as Y." Did you also do a legal birthdate change at the time of readoption? It would have been mentioned in the decree or in a separate court order. It seems as if you must have, because the U.S. birth certificate was changed, but you will have to prove the legal change of birthdate to the Passport Agency, with some piece of paper such as a court decree. You may want to call the attorney who handled your readoption and see how he/she went about changing the date, if, indeed, he did so. Sharon