The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce Read Free Book Online

earthquake, ferrying them to the US embassy uninvited in the hopes that arriving with a busload of carsick children and CNN reporters would force the embassy’s hand, a staffer justified it by saying, “The children do not want to go back to the orphanage. They want to go to America.” They eventually ended up flying 110 orphans out of the country, including one for adoption by the agency’s president, Kim Harmon. H.I.S. Home for Children, another evangelical organization, flew 67 to Miami and 50 to Orlando on military cargo planes.
    Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota who has made common cause with conservatives like Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) and former Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) on adoption legislation, spoke atMedefind’s Christian Alliance for Orphans Summit later in 2010, boasting that her office had helped bring thirty-nine Haitian orphans to Minnesota despite the complications thrown in the works from “the Idaho people.” Klobuchar later told me how, as part of the first senatorial group on the ground in Haiti, she had urged Haitian President René Préval to request that Minnesota’s humanitarian parole cases be expedited and to revise the country’s adoption and parental rights policies as part of reconstruction so as to clear the obstacles that were impeding more adoptions.
    People began to speak in counterfactual terms of “repatriating” Haitian children to the United States or “reunifying” them with adoptive parents, despite the reality that none of the children were being returned to their home countries or families in any way except in the minds of prospective adoptive parents, who had already come to think of the children as their own. Others used the emotional language of a hostage situation. A Salt Lake City TV station reported that Stephen Studdert, a former Mormon mission president and Republican adviser to Presidents George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Gerald Ford, had used his connections in Washington and “negotiated the release” of at least sixty-six orphans bound for Salt Lake City.
    Although Haiti had taken the advice of UNICEF and Save the Children to close its doors to new adoptions temporarily, allowing only humanitarian parole cases to proceed, demand remained strong. When a rumor started in Indiana that three hundred Haitian child refugees would be brought to the state, Safe Families for Children, a Christian foster care alternative organization, aided by a local six thousand–member megachurch, recruited hundreds of volunteers to adopt them, even though no Haitian children were actually coming. Some adoption agencies continued to sign up applicants for Haitian adoptions or put people on “waiting lists.” Others used the outpouring of interest to divert prospective adopters to other countries where they worked.
    The US humanitarian parole program in Haiti allowed expedited adoptions for only two categories of children: those whose adoptions were all but completed before the earthquake and those who had recently been matched with prospective adoptive parents but who needed to be evacuated for their safety. But in practice, in the latter category the standard of proof was so low—such as children who had had any level of contact with a family in the United States—that other children ended up being transported under official US jurisdiction as well, including children from orphanages that were largely unaffected by the earthquake or those who had not been cleared for adoption at all. Two siblings whose adoption hadpreviously been denied after their father objected—he had initially thought adoption was a chance for the children to go to school—were rushed out of Haiti on humanitarian parole after the earthquake, and their adoption was approved in a US court that didn’t hear the Haitian family’s arguments. “God got done in 10 days something human beings couldn’t do in years,” the adoptive father told the New York Times.
    But perhaps the most