Alabama families reach out for government’s help with stalled adoptions in Africa

Families around the country are pleading with their elected officials to pressure the U.S. State Department to get involved in the international adoption process, which has been shut down in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) since last September.

The Bridgers family of Birmingham, who are working to adopt twins from the DRC, have been going through the process for the last three years. They have been in limbo since September of 2013 when the Congolese government quit allowing international adoptions indefinitely.

The decision by the DRC is believed to be at least in part due to a Reuters story released last year that said some adoptive parents in the United States were “re-homing” children. In short, some parents were deciding they could not handle their new adopted children for whatever reason, and were giving them to other families, often without the involvement of a social worker.

Here’s an excerpt from the Reuters’s investigative report by Megan Twohey:

Reuters analyzed 5,029 posts from a five-year period on one Internet message board, a Yahoo group. On average, a child was advertised for re-homing there once a week. Most of the children ranged in age from 6 to 14 and had been adopted from abroad – from countries such as Russia and China, Ethiopia and Ukraine. The youngest was 10 months old.

After learning what Reuters found, Yahoo acted swiftly. Within hours, it began shutting down Adopting-from-Disruption, the six-year-old bulletin board. A spokeswoman said the activity in the group violated the company’s terms-of-service agreement. The company subsequently took down five other groups that Reuters brought to its attention.

A similar forum on Facebook, Way Stations of Love, remains active. A Facebook spokeswoman says the page shows “that the Internet is a reflection of society, and people are using it for all kinds of communications and to tackle all sorts of problems, including very complicated issues such as this one.”

The Reuters investigation found that some children who were adopted and later re-homed have endured severe abuse.

But as bizarre and horrifying as those stories are, the overwhelming majority of adoptive parents provide a loving home for their children. And many of them, like the Bridgers and others in Alabama, are asking for help in bringing their adopted kids home to the U.S.

“I think the Congolese government is trying to do the right thing,” Stephen Bridgers told Yellowhammer. “They’re putting in certain protective measures for these kids. But the process has been stopped completely to allow children legally adopted to come home. We’re asking for the State Department to encourage the DRC to open the process back up and help us bring our kids home.”

Bridgers said that there are about 100-150 children who have gone through the entire adoption process and are only waiting for a final “exit letter” from the Congolese government to leave. There are between 400-500 children in the DRC who have already taken the last name of their new parents in the U.S., but are no longer being allowed to work their way through the process.

“We eagerly await the day our whole family will be united,” Bridgers said. They already have biological twins, Fitz and Chloe who are about to turn 4-years-old, and are working to bring home their adopted twins, Oliver and Hughes, from the DRC.

“There just hasn’t been a lot going on,” Bridgers continued. “I just don’t think the State Department has been as involved as they could be.”

Apparently other parents around the country agree.

A petition asking federal elected officials to “help resolve the pending adoptions from Democratic Republic of Congo” has over 100,000 signatures.

Here’s an excerpt from the petition, which you can sign HERE:

Hundreds of children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that were in the process of being adopted by American families are now stuck without any resolution in sight. Many of these children have been legally adopted by US families through the DRC courts and have US visas issued by the US Embassy in Kinshasa. Yet the DRC has suspended the issuance of exit letters, an immigration document required for these children to leave the country. As a result, there is no way for the adoptive parents to be united with their children short of relocating to DRC indefinitely.

These children are stuck because DRC declared a moratorium on exit letters for all adoptions that had not been approved by September 25, 2013. Yet even for families whose cases were approved by that date, exit letters have been withheld.

I wish I could tell you exactly how many families are directly impacted by this problem. I cannot because even six months into this crisis, the U.S. Department of State and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have not even bothered to cross-reference their lists of families in the process of adoption to create a complete listing of the pipeline families that are now stuck. Even more disappointingly, there has been little diplomatic effort with the DRC government to resolve this issue.

Every day that passes, these waiting children are being damaged. They need a solution now!

To this point, Bridgers hasn’t been able to get any Alabama elected officials to engage. Currently, there is a letter from Sen. Mary Landrieu’s, D-LA, office to the President and Prime Minister of the DRC to request a resolution to the suspension. The letter seeks as many congressional signatures as possible by tomorrow, April 9.

(UPDATE: Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-AL04, has signed on to the letter)

“I’ve left messages with our Congressmen,” he said. “There are about 60 members on the Congressional Coalition on Adoption, but none from Alabama right now. We have a great Congressional delegation, and I know that if we can get this in front of them, they will do what they can to help.”

Follow Cliff on Twitter @Cliff_Sims