Technicalities

I was thinking the other day that maybe I haven't explained the technicalities of our adoption situation very well her on our blog. Really, I just thought I'd bore you to tears :). I also thought that it may be nice for other people who find our blog because they are thinking about Burundi adoption and they freak out because of how crazy our process is - maybe it would help them not be so freaked out because they will be able to see that they shouldn't end up in the same situation that we are in.

Here's what has happened (here's where I throw a bunch of form numbers at you and talk USCIS and DOS jargon). When we started the process to adopt in Burundi, we filed a form I-600A with the US Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS). At that time (2007) that was the way that you started an international adoption process. This was before the US signed the Hague Convention (an international agreement to safeguard intercountry adoption ). On April 1, 2008 the US signed the Hague and began its implementation. From that time on, if you begin an adoption from another country that has signed the Hague (Brurundi is a signatory to the Hague) you have to fill out a form I-800A to start the process instead of an I-600A. If you started the process before April 1, 2008 then your case is considered by the US to be a “grandfathered” case and they treat it as they would have pre-Hague.

The difference between the process with an I-600 case and an I-800 case is this: with an I-600 we would go through the adoption process in Burundi, they would give us the adoption decree, we would travel to Burundi, the US Embassy would do an orphan investigation, they would declare the child eligible for a visa if the child meets the US criteria for an orphan and off you go. The trouble with this process and one of the reasons for the Hague is that many times a family would get an adoption decree from a country and then the US would do the orphan investigation and find that the child did not meet the criteria to be considered an orphan. So you would have a family who had legally adopted a child in a country but they could not immigrate with the child to the US. This is a big, big problem. With the I-800 process, a child is identified for a family and then a preliminary orphan investigation is done by the US Embassy to determine that the child does indeed meet the criteria for an orphan and will be eligible for a US visa. The Embassy then sends a letter called an “Article 5” letter to the Central Authority of the adoptive country telling them that when the adoption is finalized the child will be able to immigrate. Once the Central Authority has that, they proceed with the adoption and grant a final adoption decree (this is a very simplistic explanation, there are many more details but for these purposes, we’ll leave those out). With this process in place, families are less likely to end up in a really messy situation where they can not bring their child home. The Hague, in a lot of ways is a good thing.

Here’s where we’re hitting resistance: Our case was started before April 1, 2008. We are a pre-Hague, grandfathered case. That is how the US Department of State and the USCIS sees us. There was no I-800 for us to fill out when we began this process years ago and there were no adoption agencies that were approved to work as NGO’s in Burundi. The Central Authority in Burundi (they have our file) continues to ask for a letter from our Central Authority (that’s the Department of State). They want an Article 5 letter. We can’t get an Article 5 letter without filing an I-800. Changing over to an I-800 process is essentially starting all over – simple as it might sound to just file a new form, it’s not. The DOS has written us two letters now. They have delivered them to the guy who can sign off on our case. He says they don’t say what he wants them to say. Currently, this has the attention of the US Ambassador in Burundi, and many, many people at the DOS. They are trying to work something out and trying to come up with a letter that will satisfy whatever it is that this guy wants without us having to jump into a totally new process with an I-800. We may have to re-file, but we will wait to see if the ambassador can make progress on our behalf.