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A Kansas federal judge ruled that a teenager born in South Korea, adopted by his aunt and uncle in Kansas, will have to leave the country after graduating from college due to a disparity between laws from the moment of their adoption.

Hyebin Schreiber was brought to the United States in 2012 at the age of 15 by a retiree
Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Schreiber of Lansing, Kansas, and his wife, Soo Jin, who met in South Korea in 1995, according to the Kansas City Star.

Schreiber delayed the formal adoption, largely because the 27-year-old veteran of the military spent much of 2013 and 2014 in Afghanistan, where he served as an intelligence officer.

He told the Star that he had been told by his lawyer that he could wait to finalize the adoption until Hyebin was 17 years old. However, this rule only applies to the adoption of native-born Americans.

Under the federal law on immigration, children born abroad must be adopted before the age of 16 to obtain US citizenship. In the eyes of the federal government, the birth certificate issued by Kansas was essentially null and void.

Bottom line: Hyebin will have to leave the country after graduating from Kansas University, where she is studying biochemistry.

US District Judge Daniel Crabtree said in condemning the family that the federal immigration law was "unambiguous" and that the US Citizenship and Immigration Services "interpreted the statue in accordance with its clear sense ".

In March, Senator Roy Blunt, R-Mo., Introduced a bill that, if passed, would eliminate the disparity by extending US citizenship to foreign-born children adopted before the age of 18 .

Before the decision, the family told KCTV that she was considering moving the entire family to South Korea if Hyebin was to be deported.

"I will also go back to Korea. I can not leave her, said Soo-Jinn Schreiber.

A long-term possibility: a US company might be willing to give it a work visa.

In an interview with The Star in March, the father blamed himself for not having fully considered the rules relating to the adoption of immigrants.

In hindsight, he regretted not to proceed with the adoption until the end of the allotted time. "I should have put my family before the army," he said.

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