Good information about Vietnam Adoptions

Hello again!

I haven't posted in a while, because there just hasn't been much to tell. And what information there has been really was not so great. I do want to share the following information (even though it's not so great!). It's from a new website: www.bringourchildrenhome.org. It's pretty long and wordy, but it does give a very good description about problems that are occurring with Vietnam adoptions (I'm personally feeling pretty worried right about now). You can get more information by visiting the website, and there are also sample letters to use for writing your elected officials. I plan on doing this soon. Maybe it will help!

Here's the basic problem (I've made a few comments in bold below):

- Adoption of Vietnamese children by Americans requires approval from the US government. Immigration (USCIS) makes sure that the child is an orphan as defined by US law. Department of State (DOS) issues the visa for the child to travel to the US.

- Last October, at least 20 visa denials (NOIDs) were issued to families who had already become the parents of Vietnamese children under Vietnamese law. The majority of these have been overturned, but many of these children still wait in foster care in Vietnam to come home (meaning....parents who had adopted and bonded with their new children for three weeks were not allowed to bring them in to the US).

- Last November, USCIS and DOS initiated a program they call “Orphans First,” pursuant to which Vietnamese children are classified as orphans prior to the time their adoptive parents travel to Vietnam (In theory, this is good...it will keep the situation above from happening again).

- Before this program was instituted, visa approvals for Vietnamese adoptive children took 1-2 weeks. Approvals are now exceeding two months, in addition to the multiple months needed for an orphan's paperwork to be processed after referral.

- Adoption agencies report a very small percentage of visa applications having been approved under the new program (e.g., one agency has submitted over 75 I-600 applications since the first week of December, with only 7 having been completed as of 2/26/08). I believe our agency has only had 3 approved.

- USCIS and DOS in Vietnam have not provided waiting families and adoption agencies with the status of their applications following delivery of their applications.

- Because of this “Orphans First” program, some Vietnamese orphanages are at capacity, unable to admit additional Vietnamese children in need of care, which could have serious repercussions on the health and well-being of the abandoned and relinquished children in Vietnam. So sad and really ridiculus.

- Without these essential US government approvals, timely adoptions in Vietnam by Americans cannot proceed, and orphanages are struggling to provide heat, nourishment and adequate medical care for the orphans.

- Orphans who were to be adopted by Americans have died from pneumonia. Nine orphans recently died in northern Vietnam, and six more have been hospitalized (Vietnam News, 2/21/08).

Since the initiation of the “Orphans First” program, several hundred visa applications have piled up in Vietnam, resulting in a back-log of cases that the limited staff of our government has not been able to review and complete in the time frame they themselves proposed. Because of this, hundreds of orphans in Vietnam, all of whom have families in the United States waiting to welcome them home, are spending many extra months in an institution (this is really bad). Every day a child spends in an institution creates a greater risk that the child will develop reactive attachment disorder. Furthermore, many of these children either have special needs or have medical needs that are not currently severe, but require care to prevent them from becoming severe. Orphans should come first. It is time for the “Orphans First” program to start living up to its name by eliminating the red tape that is jeopardizing the health and well being of Vietnamese orphans awaiting loving homes in the United States.