Her greatest fear, dormant for decades, came rushing back in an instant: had she adopted and raised a kidnapped child?
Peg Reif’s daughter, adopted from South Korea in the 1980s, had sent her a link to a documentary detailing how the system that made their family was rife with fraud: documents falsified, babies switched, children snatched off the street and sent abroad.
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Chung Ick-Joong, the president of the National Center for the Rights of the Child, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Dec. 24 2024. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
Chung Ick-Joong, the president of the National Center for the Rights of the Child, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Dec. 24 2024. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
Chung Ick-Joong, the president of the National Center for the Rights of the Child, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Dec. 24 2024. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
Peg Reif holds pictures of her children adopted from South Korea in the 1980s in her home Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024 in Platteville, Wis. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
Peg Reif holds pictures of her children adopted from South Korea in the 1980s in her home Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024 in Platteville, Wis. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
Peg Reif holds pictures of her children adopted from South Korea in the 1980s in her home Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024 in Platteville, Wis. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
Reif wept.
She was among more than 120 who contacted The Associated Press this fall, after a series of stories and a documentary made with Frontline exposed how Korea created a baby pipeline, designed to ship children abroad as quickly as possible to meet Western demand. The reporting shook adoption communities around the world with details about how agencies competed for babies — pressuring mothers, bribing hospitals, fabricating documents. Most who wrote were adoptees, but some were adoptive parents like Reif, horrified to learn they had supported this system.
“I can’t stand the thought that somebody lost their child,” Reif said. “I can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t know how to make it right. I don’t know if I can.”
Forty years ago, she was struggling with infertility. She and her husband pinned their dreams for a family on adopting a baby from Mexico, paid an agency thousands of dollars and waited for months. Then the agency’s directors were arrested, and they learned that those Mexican babies had been taken from their families against their will. Reif was heartbroken, but recalls even now looking at her husband and saying: “thank God we don’t have a child who was stolen.”
But now she isn’t sure of that. Because then they adopted two Korean children, and brought them to their home in rural Wisconsin, first a son and then a daughter. The two were not biological siblings, but both arrived with strangely similar stories in their files: their young unmarried mothers worked in factories with fathers who disappeared after they got pregnant.
Back then, Reif still believed the common narrative about foreign adoption: it saved children who might otherwise live the rest of their lives in an orphanage, die or be damned to poverty.
“I don’t believe that anymore,” Reif said. “I don’t know what to believe.”
Cameron Lee Small, a therapist in Minneapolis whose practice caters to adoptees and their families, said many are feeling an intense sense of betrayal. Individual adoptees had long shared stories of falsified identities. But the revelations this year pointed to systemwide practices that routinely changed babies’ origin stories to process adoptions quickly, including listing them as “abandoned” even when they had known parents.
Small, who was also adopted from Korea in the 1980s, summarized what he’s been hearing from adoptees: “I’m kind of back to nothing. What do I believe now? Who can I believe?”
Reif’s daughter, Jenn Hamilton, spent her life thinking she was unwanted, often quipping: “that’s what happens when you’re found in a dumpster as a baby.”
It has taken a toll on her all her life: She’s been happily married for 9 years, she said, but she has this insatiable insecurity: “I constantly find myself asking my husband, ‘are you mad at me? Did I do something wrong?’ Do you want to leave me?’”
She has no idea anymore if abandonment was ever really her story, with revelations of abuses so systemic that even the Korean government likened it to “trafficking.”
“You can’t make that many mistakes. It has to be intentional. It was this huge tree of deception,” she said. “I feel disgusted.”
Holt International, the US-based agency that pioneered adoptions from Korea, did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.
Reform is sweeping across Europe — countries have launched investigations, halted foreign adoptions and apologized to adoptees for failing to protect them. But the United States, which has taken in the most adopted children by far, has not done a review of its own history or culpability.
The U.S. State Department told AP this summer that it would work with its historian to piece together its history, and detailed initial findings that some documents might have been falsified. But it said there was no evidence that U.S. officials were aware of it. The State Department has since said that it has “been unable to identify any records that could provide insight into the U.S. government role in adoptions from South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s.”
Korea’s National Police Agency confirmed an increase in adoptees registering their DNA for family searches — both at domestic police stations and diplomatic offices across North America and Europe — in the weeks following the release of the AP stories and documentary in September. More than 120 adoptees registered their DNA in October and November, compared to an average of less than 30 a month from January to August.
Korea’s government has maintained that adoptions were a necessary tool to care for needy children, including babies of unwed mothers or other children deemed as abandoned. However, Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare acknowledged to AP that the adoption boom in the 1970s and 80s was possibly fueled by a desire to reduce welfare costs.
Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been investigating government accountability over foreign adoption problems since 2022, prompted by complaints filed by hundreds of adoptees, and is expected to release an interim report in February. The Commission has posted the AP stories on its website.
A law passed in 2023 mandates that all adoption records be transferred from private agencies to a government department called the National Center for the Rights of the Child by July, to centralize the handling of family search requests. The center has confirmed that private agencies hold about 170,000 adoption files, but director Chung Ick-Joong doubts it will acquire a space to store and manage all these records in time, due to financial constraints and other challenges. The agency expects family search requests to increase dramatically – “possibly by 10-fold,” according to Chung — yet has funding to add only five staff members to its team of six searchers.
Chung acknowledged that flaws in adoption laws had persisted for decades, and Korea only required adoptions to go through courts and birth records to be preserved after 2012.
“It’s difficult to determine who was responsible for the inaccuracies in records before then,” he said. “The adoption agency might have been at fault, the biological parents may have lied, or something might have gone wrong at the orphanage…..no one truly knows what the truth is.”
Korean adoption agencies have mostly declined AP’s requests for comment in recent months, often citing privacy concerns.
Advocates insist that most adoptive families thrive, with both the parents and children happily living their lives without questioning the industry as Reif and Hamilton have.
Hamilton grew up in a rural, almost exclusively white community in Wisconsin, and back then all she wanted was to be accepted. But having children of her own changed that. When her first child was born, she looked at him, and it took her breath away.
“It can’t explain it, like this is the first person I know in my life that I’m biologically related to,” she said.
She wanted to learn her own history, so her children could know theirs. She wrote a letter to her adoption agency, which within weeks connected her with a woman they said was her mother. It was emotional, shocking.
But soon she felt like she had more questions than answers. The woman’s name didn’t match the one listed on paperwork, and the name she gave for the father was also different. Birthdates didn’t match, the birthplace didn’t either. They had not met in a factory, she said, they had been pen pals.
Hamilton asked the woman to take a DNA test, but she said she didn’t know how to access one. Hamilton came to believe this woman was not her birth mother.
The AP’s reporting found numerous cases where agencies connected adoptees with supposed birth families, only for them to later discover after emotional meetings that they weren’t related at all.
Hamilton has been trying to untangle the DNA results on her father’s side, contacting people distantly related, cousins once removed, half great aunts.
“It becomes an obsession,” Hamilton said. “It’s like a puzzle that you start, and you have to find the missing pieces.”
Lynelle Long, the founder of InterCountry Adoptee Voices, the largest organization of adoptees in the world, said governments at the very least need to legally mandate that agencies provide adoptees with their full and unredacted documents, without the payment now often required.
Long said parents like Reif have an important role, because in Western countries, laws always favored the desires of adoptive parents — designed to make adoptions quicker and easier. Many clung to the narrative that they saved needy orphans who should be grateful, she said, especially in the U.S., where the reckoning rocking Europe has not taken hold.
“We really need adoptive parents in the United States, if they have any inkling of guilt or shame or loss, to step up, take responsibility and demand that legislation be put in place to criminalize these practices and prevent it from ever happening again,” Long said.
Hamilton is close to her parents; she just renovated the basement to accommodate their visits. She’s sad for herself, she said, but she’s sadder for her mother, who is desperate to learn if her children actually had parents somewhere, searching for them.
“And I’m like, ’why, so you can send us back?” Hamilton said. “I don’t want to be a victim.”
She said she’s glad she was adopted, and does not long for that different, alternative life in Korea.
Reif loves her children profoundly, she said. But she doesn’t think she would adopt from abroad again, if she’d known then what she knows now.
“I’d rather be childless than think I have somebody else’s child that didn’t want to give them up,” she said. “I think of somebody taking my child. Those poor families, I just can’t imagine it.”
This story has been updated to correct that Long said governments should mandate agencies provide adoptees with unredacted documents.
Chung Ick-Joong, the president of the National Center for the Rights of the Child, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Dec. 24 2024. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
Chung Ick-Joong, the president of the National Center for the Rights of the Child, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Dec. 24 2024. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
Chung Ick-Joong, the president of the National Center for the Rights of the Child, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Dec. 24 2024. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
Peg Reif holds pictures of her children adopted from South Korea in the 1980s in her home Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024 in Platteville, Wis. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
Peg Reif holds pictures of her children adopted from South Korea in the 1980s in her home Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024 in Platteville, Wis. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
Peg Reif holds pictures of her children adopted from South Korea in the 1980s in her home Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024 in Platteville, Wis. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The Army veteran who drove a pickup truck into a crowd of New Year’s revelers in New Orleans acted alone, the FBI said Thursday, reversing its position from a day earlier that he likely worked with others in the deadly attack that officials said was inspired by the Islamic State group.
The FBI also revealed that the driver, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, an American citizen from Texas, posted five videos on his Facebook account in the hours before the attack in which he proclaimed his support for the militant group and previewed the violence that he would soon unleash in the famed French Quarter district.
“This was an act of terrorism. It was premeditated and an evil act,” said Christopher Raia, the deputy assistant director of the FBI's counterterrorism division, calling Jabbar “100% inspired” by the Islamic State.
The attack along Bourbon Street killed 14 revelers, along with Jabbar, who was fatally shot in a firefight with police after steering his speeding truck around a barricade and plowing into the crowd.
It was the deadliest IS-inspired assault on U.S. soil in years, laying bare what federal officials have warned is a resurgent international terrorism threat. It also comes as the FBI and other agencies brace for dramatic leadership upheaval — and likely policy changes — after President-elect Donald Trump's administration takes office.
Seeking to assuage concerns about any broader plots, Raia stressed that there was no indication of a connection between the New Orleans attack and the explosion Wednesday of a Tesla Cybertruck filled with explosives outside Trump’s Las Vegas hotel. The person inside that truck, a decorated U.S. Army Green Beret, sustained a gunshot wound to the head before the explosion, and a handgun was found at his feet inside the charred vehicle, authorities said.
The FBI continued to hunt for clues about the 42-year-old Jabbar, but said that a day into its investigation, it was now confident he was not aided by anyone else in the attack, which killed an 18-year-old aspiring nurse, a single mother, a father of two and a former Princeton University football star, among others.
The attack plans also included the placement of crude bombs in the neighborhood in an apparent attempt to cause more carnage, officials said. Two improvised explosive devices left in coolers several blocks apart were rendered safe at the scene. Other devices were determined to be nonfunctional.
Officials examined the possibility that individuals seen in surveillance video standing near one of the coolers may have been somehow involved in the attack. But authorities concluded that they were not connected “in any way,” though investigators still want to speak with them as witnesses, Raia said.
Investigators were also trying to understand more about Jabbar's path to radicalization, which they say culminated with him picking up a rented truck in Houston on Dec. 30 and driving it to New Orleans the following night.
The FBI recovered a black Islamic State flag from his rented pickup and reviewed five videos posted to Facebook, including one in which he said he originally planned to harm his family and friends, but he was concerned that news headlines would not focus on the “war between the believers and the disbelievers,” Raia said. He also left a last will and testament, the FBI said.
Jabbar joined the Army in 2007, serving on active duty in human resources and information technology and deploying to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010, the service said. He transferred to the Army Reserve in 2015 and left in 2020 with the rank of staff sergeant.
A U.S. government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly, said Jabbar traveled to Egypt in 2023, staying in Cairo for a week, before returning to the U.S. and then traveling to Toronto for three days. It was not immediately clear what he did during those travels.
Abdur-Rahim Jabbar, Jabbar's younger brother, told The Associated Press on Thursday that it “doesn’t feel real” that his brother could have done this.
“I never would have thought it’d be him,” he said. “It’s completely unlike him.”
He said that his brother had been isolated in the last few years, but that he had also been in touch with him recently and did not see any signs of radicalization.
“It’s completely contradictory to who he was and how his family and his friends know him,” he said.
Chris Pousson, 42, of Beaumont, Texas, said he became friends with Shamsud-Din Jabbar in middle school, describing him as someone who was quiet and reserved and did not get into trouble.
After high school, he said, they reconnected on Facebook around 2008 or 2009 and would message back and forth throughout the next decade.
“If any red flags would have popped off, I would have caught them, and I would have contacted the proper authorities,” he said. “But he didn’t give anything to me that would have suggested that he is capable of doing what happened.”
In New Orleans on Thursday, a still-reeling city inched back toward normal operations.
Authorities finished processing the scene early in the morning, removing the last of the bodies, and Bourbon Street — famous worldwide for music, open-air drinking and festive vibes — reopened for business by early afternoon.
The Sugar Bowl college football game between Notre Dame and Georgia, initially set for Wednesday night and postponed by a day in the interest of national security, was still on for Thursday. The city also planned to host the Super Bowl next month.
New Orleans "is not only ready for game day today, but we’re ready to continue to host large-scale events in our city because we are built to host at every single turn,” New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said.
Tucker reported from Washington, and Mustian reported from Black Mountain, North Carolina. Associated Press reporters Stephen Smith, Chevel Johnson and Brett Martel in New Orleans; Jeff Martin in Atlanta; Rebecca Santana, Alanna Durkin Richer, Tara Copp and Zeke Miller in Washington; Kristie Rieken in Beaumont, Texas; Darlene Superville in New Castle, Delaware; Colleen Long in West Palm Beach, Florida; and Michael R. Sisak in New York contributed to this report.
Fans pass through security check points as they enter the Caesars Superdome fan zone ahead of the Sugar Bowl NCAA College Football Playoff game, Thursday, Jan. 2, 2025, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)
Local SWAT teams patrol outside the Caesars Superdome ahead of the Sugar Bowl NCAA College Football Playoff game, Thursday, Jan. 2, 2025, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)
Local SWAT teams patrol outside the Caesars Superdome ahead of the Sugar Bowl NCAA College Football Playoff game, Thursday, Jan. 2, 2025, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)
Cory Hunter throws a coin in the air on Bourbon Street, Thursday, Jan. 2, 2025 in New Orleans. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Military personnel walk down Bourbon street, Thursday, Jan. 2, 2025 in New Orleans. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Flowers are seen near where a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans' Canal and Bourbon streets, Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
A man uses a power washer on Toulouse street a day after a vehicle was driven into a crowd on New Orleans' Canal and Bourbon streets, Thursday, Jan. 2, 2025. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Security with bomb sniffing dogs patrol the area around the Superdome ahead of the Sugar Bowl NCAA College Football Playoff game, Thursday, Jan. 2, 2025, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)
Military personnel walk down Bourbon street, Thursday, Jan. 2, 2025 in New Orleans. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
People react at the intersection of Bourbon Street and Canal Street during the investigation after a pickup truck rammed into a crowd of revelers early on New Year's Day, Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2025, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton)
Police officers stand near the scene where a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans' Canal and Bourbon streets, Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Matthias Hauswirth of New Orleans prays on the street near the scene where a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans' Canal and Bourbon streets, Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
This undated passport photo provided by the FBI on Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2025, shows Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar. (FBI via AP)
Emergency services attend the scene after a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans' Canal and Bourbon Street, Wednesday Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
The FBI investigates the area on Orleans St and Bourbon Street by St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter where a suspicious package was detonated after a person drove a truck into a crowd earlier on Bourbon Street on Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton)
The FBI investigates the area on Orleans St and Bourbon Street by St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter where a suspicious package was detonated after a person drove a truck into a crowd earlier on Bourbon Street on Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton)
A New Orleans police officer searches the area near a crime scene after a vehicle drove into a crowd on Canal and Bourbon Street earlier, Wednesday Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Jack Brook)
EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT - Emergency personnel work the scene on Bourbon Street after a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans' Canal and Bourbon Street, Wednesday Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Investigators work the scene after a person drove a vehicle into a crowd killing several, earlier on Canal and Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
New Orleans mayor LaToya Cantrell makes a statement after a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans' Canal and Bourbon Street, Wednesday Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
A mounted police officer arrives on Canal Street after a vehicle drove into a crowd earlier in New Orleans, Wednesday Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Kevin McGill)
A police barricade near the scene after a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans' Canal and Bourbon Street, Wednesday Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Emergency services attend the scene after a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans' Canal and Bourbon Street, Wednesday Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
The scene after a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans' Canal and Bourbon Street, Wednesday Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Emergency services attend the scene on Bourbon Street after a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans' Canal and Bourbon Street, Wednesday Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
The St. Louis Cathedral is seen on Orleans St is seen in the French Quarter where a suspicious package was detonated after a person drove a truck into a crowd earlier on Bourbon Street on Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton)
Emergency services attend the scene on Bourbon Street after a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans' Canal and Bourbon Street, Wednesday Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Investigators work the scene after a person drove a vehicle into a crowd earlier on Canal and Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Trevant Hayes, 20, sits in the French Quarter after the death of his friend, Nikyra Dedeaux, 18, after a pickup truck crashed into pedestrians on Bourbon Street followed by a shooting in the French Quarter in New Orleans, Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton)
A black flag with white lettering lies on the ground rolled up behind a pickup truck that a man drove into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing and injuring a number of people, early Wednesday morning, Jan. 1, 2025. The FBI said they recovered an Islamic State group flag, which is black with white lettering, from the vehicle. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Emergency services attend the scene after a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans' Canal and Bourbon Street, Wednesday Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Security personnel gather at the scene on Bourbon Street after a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans' Canal and Bourbon Street, Wednesday Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
EDS NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT - Security personnel investigate the scene on Bourbon Street after a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans' Canal and Bourbon Street, Wednesday Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
The FBI investigates the area on Orleans St and Bourbon Street by St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter where a suspicious package was detonated after a person drove a truck into a crowd earlier on Bourbon Street on Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton)
Edward Bruski, center, gets emotional at the scene where a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans' Canal and Bourbon Street, Wednesday Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
FBI members examine the scene on Bourbon Street during the investigation of a truck fatally crashing into pedestrians on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter in New Orleans, Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton)
Emergency service vehicles form a security barrier to keep other vehicles out of the French Quarter after a vehicle drove into a crowd on New Orleans' Canal and Bourbon Street, Wednesday Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Members of the FBI walk around Bourbon Street during the investigation of a truck fatally crashing into pedestrians on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter in New Orleans, Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Matthew Hinton)
