Two of our friends from synagogue are among the 80 or so “pipeline” families, all of whom had been in the process of adopting orphans from Nepal, when the US government changed policy and left them in limbo, forbidding them to come back home with their newly adopted children.
As the friend of one such family explained, these Nepalese adoptions had been “already pre-approved by the State Department pending Embassy investigation. However, at this time, it doesn’t appear that this investigation is any more than paper pushing from one bureau to another. It seems very cruel to approve these families and then leave them abandoned in a foreign and unstable country with no options except to stay 22 months to obtain an Immediate Family visa.”
Here’s the email our friends Teresa and Mark sent out to all of us last week, which I got permission to share with you:
Namaste!
I would like to give you a briefing on our latest adventures and blessing received.
We are writing you from Asia-Pacific, from the country of Nepal, in the city of Kathmandu, where the promise of G-d to our family (given last summer) that our tents will be enlarged and that He will give us a child has become a reality. Mark and I have lived an incredible journey of faith for the last 9 months where we have experienced Hashem’s intervention in every step of the process. He has green-lighted all doors to the tremendous obstacles and barriers that were clearly impossible to overcome by human means. We would love to give testimony of this when we come back.
Mark and I are the proud parents of baby Trishna (pronounced TREESNA), a beautiful 3-year old baby girl. We first received her picture while in Spain on August 4th the day of my father’s funeral. Mark arrived in Nepal at the end of August and I joined him later from Rome. Trishna bonded with us from the first day and has been living with us in Nepal for about one month. The adoption is complete (signed the final adoption decree in early October).
The US DOS and US embassy is however denying visas to adopted children from Nepal since August, through new policies, and this has created a parents’ refugee crisis in Nepal. There are about 80 US families stranded with their legally adopted children in the same situation with us, unable to go home. Mark has been in unpaid leave since August and is risking his job.
All the evidences that parents usually provide with their visa applications including birth certificates, policy records declaring orphan status, and newspaper advertisement of the children according to Nepali laws are no longer sufficient. USCIS is making unreasonable demands of the adoptive parents for evidences of abandonment which are impossible to confirm, which include finding the birth mother of their children. (These orphan children were abandoned when they were only few months old and have been living in orphanages all their life, 2-3 years, with no one to claim them.) It is confirmed by high-level sources that this was just a political move to put pressure on Nepal.
“The Nepal situation is unimaginable… In the end, the actions taken harm not only American families but… orphan children in need of permanent families.” We trust Hashem will open the doors.
I am sending you the link to a petition to Congress asking USCIS to grant visas to legally adopted children of these 80 US families. So far more than 17,000 letters and e-mails have been received, but more signatures are needed. Mark and I could use your help.
Missing you all and hoping to be home soon.
Thanks a lot,
Teresa, Mark, and Trishna
Jenni, another of the new mothers, even started a blog to tell her story. In her introductory post, she confirms how desperately these adoptions are needed:
On the ground in Kathmandu it was so obvious that these children needed homes… Nepal is one of the 10 poorest countries in the world and these kids don’t have any kind of future. Without a family or an education there is no hope for them to do much of anything with their lives except pick up trash. It’s sad and bleak and would break your heart if you were here. The poverty is shocking…
(I highly recommend you read her story. It will wrench your heart.)
Most of the “pipeline” cases which have been reviewed the US authorities have refused to approve and have sent to India for further investigation and further delays. I understand that a few recent cases have been approved, but that there’s nothing different about those cases that would justify approving them while leaving all the others in limbo, making it seem like a political move of some sort. (But maybe we just need a lot more political moves of that sort.) All of these cases are substantively similar; if any one of them is that clearly approvable, most or all of them should be as well.
The US Department of State has even resorted to rationalizing its torment of these families, under the guise of fighting human trafficking. But as is pointed out in another important petition, there is not even a hint of human trafficking in these “pipeline” cases. The human trafficking concerns are real, and they are serious, but they apply to a completely different set of circumstances. Moves like that by the State Department make it seem even more like they’re in a political battle with the Nepali government, and these families are getting caught in the middle.
So please remember these families in your thoughts and prayers. Many of them really can’t afford to take an extended leave in Nepal, and are risking jobs and livelihoods, all to preserve family bonds.
-TimK
Those children need to stay in there own country, with there culture & traditions. we have plenty of our own children who need homes, come home & adopt one. These people will change there names & tell them nothing about Nepal, the facts speak for them self. I see Chines girls all the time who know nothing about being Chines.
That sounds like a morally repugnant comment if I ever read one, one borne of racism and a complete ignorance of adoptions and of the adoption process. It never ceases to amaze me that people from the US could hold such views, although I do encounter them all too often. Maybe you’re right that these children would be better off growing up somewhere other than here: I see Americans all the time who know nothing about being American. Although if there is a better place, I can’t believe that place is an orphanage in Kathmandu.
Once again good old fashion U.S. arrogance, “I want there for I shall have”. Do chose your words with thought when trying to tell some-one about being a U.S. citizen. it’s with great pleasure than I & others keep watch of people like you, I still have the thought of the 10 Haitian children that where being taken right after the earth quake. by the way Canada, & the U.K. are just as good if not better, they have stronger adoption laws. human trafficking is a issue we should all be concerned about, & make an effort to prevent. U.S. children NEED HOMES !
The DOS has warned for many years that Nepal’s adoption program was not stable. It is those who chose to ignore this who created this problem to begin with. If you choose to ignore the information that has been given to you by the DOS, then you can’t expect our govt to come running to save you when you find out they were right. You can’t have it both ways. The children have a right to know they were not trafficked and the adoptive parents have a right to know if their children have birth parents who love them and were misled. Period. It isn’t the responsiblity of the US Govt, however, to do the research for you. It isn’t the job of the US Govt. to protect your American sense of entitlement to have what you want and who you want THIS MINUTE, and the laws of our country against trafficking be damned.
Well, I guess that’s a nice, cold sentiment, not to pray for these families and these children because it’s their fault. (Does that actually make sense? Do you refuse to pray for someone just because his own mistakes caused his predicament? I regularly pray for friends and family who are deep in the mire of their own making–no matter how noble their motives–as well as those who have ended up there only by bad luck.)
But that sentiment doesn’t help the children, once abandoned by their birth mothers, now under threat of forced-abandonment by their adoptive parents. In fact, both the Nepali government and the US DOS have recognized these adoptions as official and final. If the new parents were now to abandon these children, they could be prosecuted, and rightfully so. Because if the children lost their parents, now doubly so, it could cause significant psychological trauma. Every other country has granted visas to their pipeline adoptions from Nepal. Only the US refuses to do so.
There are 30 million people in Nepal. most children are never adopted. You care about the ones you are adopting but what about those left behind? the adoptive families all talk about the horrible orphanages, but once they get that one special little child, who they call “theirs”, the others are abandoned (most too told to be adopted out).
I stand by my case. International adoption in a country like Nepal, or Vietnam or Guatemala or Cambodia is nothing short of baby selling, where the baby is the commodity. This has nothing to do with praying for the families. I most certainly pray this wil have a good outcome for them and that it will be proven without a doubt these children have no biological parents who unknowingly gave up their child for adoption (by cooercion). But until that is done, these are not “their” children.
http://www.brandeis.edu/investigate/gender/adoption/expertsrespond_vietnam_Ethica.html
“Nothing short of baby selling” is silly. All I have to do to prove that wrong is to find one, single, solitary case that contradicts it, and that’s easy. Even if “baby selling” applied to these cases, how does denying the children visas help those children, or hurt the perpetrators? The adoptions have already gone through; they’re finalized. Denying the children visas only hurts them. That extreme attitude only responds to a perceived crime by perpetuating an even greater crime.