No exception made

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next: International adoptions denied.

A federal travel ban aimed at strengthening national security is keeping some American families from bringing home children they’ve been working years to adopt.

The order restricts or outright bans travel to the United States from nearly 40 countries.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: The restrictions apply to countries with demonstrated, severe, and persistent problems in vetting and information sharing. Unlike other bans, though, this one pointedly makes no exception for international adoptions.

WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has more.

JOSH SCHUMACHER: Kristin Trostel and her husband have spent the last seven years trying to adopt a child. During that process, they were matched with a seven-year-old boy named Keny. Late last year, the Alabama couple thought they were close to finally bringing Keny home.

TROSTEL: We’ve had a very, very hard adoption. We’ve just had a lot of hurdles.

Keny lives in Burundi, and he has a leg deformity that’s left him essentially, extremely knock-kneed. That, plus his age, makes him statistically less likely to be adopted.

TROSTEL: Really there's a drop off; once kids hit five, really a lot of people don't adopt after five. And then knowing his situation with his legs, like we just really are like... he's just in a space where it'd be really easy to age out and then what do you do from there?

Burundi is one of the countries named in President Trump’s travel ban. The President banned travel to the United States for individuals from Burundi and other countries because of a lack of record-keeping and high levels of document fraud. 

High levels of extremism, which can lead to poor record-keeping, was also noted for some countries. The bans are country-specific to encourage cooperation with the U.S. according to each nation’s circumstances.

Trostel and her family found out about the ban while planning a trip to Africa to pick up Keny and finally bring him home for good. They’re just one of an estimated 300 families affected by the December travel ban.

TROSTEL: And we're thinking about airlines and strategies and work, and you know, how are we going to do it? And then two days later, we get an email from our agency of like, 'hey, like, we're figuring this out, but Burundi is impacted,' and the specific visa we need is impacted. And I just thought, 'oh, my gosh. Like, I didn't think this process could get harder.'

Adopting a child through a Hague Convention-approved process requires working through a substantial amount of paperwork. It can take years. It also takes a lot of money.

Tifany Markee is an immigration and family formation lawyer.

MARKEE: I mean, you know, we always laugh that if if people had to go through what these families went through to have a child biologically, our world would be far less populated.

She says families looking to adopt can spend anywhere from 25 to 50 thousand dollars just getting through the process. 

MARKEE: They have to go through extreme vetting of home studies, health screening, home screening, financial screening, criminal screening, child abuse registries.

And it isn’t just the parents who are undergoing vetting. The government of the child’s country must also provide proof that the child is legitimately adoptable. The Trostels say that’s all been done for Keny, and they have the documents to prove it: his birth certificate, his mother’s death certificate, and a letter from his father giving him to a shelter.

TROSTEL: We also know that his father left the country. We have a letter from the orphanage director showing, like, yes, he is here, here he is, we have pictures. That is also official. We've had an official from the Burundi government go and visit the shelter. So like a government official laid eyes on the child, made sure it all aligned, talked to the shelter director.

Which leaves them here: in a waiting period where any blood relative of Keny’s has the right to challenge the adoption.

Since President Trump’s travel ban, Trostel has gone to visit lawmakers at the U.S. Capitol. But she says for her and her family, adopting Keny isn’t a political issue. It’s a personal one.

TROSTEL: It's like, this is a little kid, you know what I mean? Help us just get this kid home. Like, we're not asking for any government help with this child. It'd be like if we just had our own child. We just felt like, gosh, this little boy is here. He didn't ask to be born, and he's in a pretty bad circumstance--and bad's like an understatement--and like, we think we can help him.

The President’s order does permit Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in consultation with other officials, to allow certain individuals into the country if he determines it to be in the interest of the United States.

The U.S. State Department told WORLD this week that the Trostels and other families like them could apply for that exception. But the Department also said that it expected Rubio would only rarely be handing out those exceptions.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

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