A bureaucratic roadblock for adoptive families

Kate Searfoorce went on plenty of mission trips during her teens and 20s. She often worked with orphanages that cared for children without families, including some kids who had been trafficked or abused.

“That need for a family and that family dynamic—working with those kids, it just spoke to me. So I feel like I’ve always known that I’ve wanted to adopt at some point,” Searfoorce said. “When I met my husband, David, and he was adopted … it just felt like, ‘OK … that’s something we’re going to do.’”

Since 2022, the Searfoorces, who live in New Jersey, have been trying to adopt a child. They were eventually matched with a 6-year-old boy, King, who lives in the small African country of Burundi. He was abandoned at 2 months old. Their Hague-approved adoption process has cost thousands of dollars and involved countless hours of paperwork, doctors’ visits, court hearings, and vetting on both sides of the Atlantic.

But last month, the Searfoorces’ dreams of bringing King home to the United States were put on indefinite hold. President Donald Trump issued a presidential proclamation on Dec. 16 banning or restricting travel to the United States from nearly 40 countries, including Burundi. It did not include any exception for adoptions.

That leaves families like the Searfoorces in the lurch. The National Council for Adoption estimates that the ban affects roughly 300 American families who are in the process of adopting internationally.

“As happy as maybe Christmas was for our family, it is incredibly sad to know and feel that you’re missing a piece of your family,” Searfoorce said.

The December ban updated and expanded a previous declaration, issued in June, banning travel from 19 countries to the United States. But whereas the previous travel ban permitted children to come to the United States through international adoptions approved through the Hague Convention, the December proclamation does not. It does say that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in coordination with three other administration officials, could issue specific exceptions to certain individuals to let them come to the United States if he deemed it in the national interest.

Tifany Markee, an attorney specializing in immigration and family formation law, believes the lack of an adoption exception was likely an oversight. During the crafting of the December proclamation, she explained, the administration eliminated a list of exceptions to its June travel ban that would have permitted some forms of chain migration. In the process, officials may have failed to notice that international adoptions by U.S. citizens were on that same list.

The White House and the U.S. Department of State did not respond to WORLD’s requests for comment.

The presidential proclamations from both June and December explain that the Trump administration is restricting travel from the dozens of countries affected by the orders because of their high levels of document fraud and their governments’ lack of reliable record-keeping. The Trump administration argued that the listed countries are not able to reliably verify that any of their citizens traveling to the United States aren’t doing so with nefarious intent. Along with Burundi, affected countries include Haiti, Iran, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Cuba, and Togo, among others.

Kristin Trostel and her husband, who live in Alabama, have been trying to adopt a child for seven years. They’ve been matched with a 7-year-old boy from Burundi named Keny who has valgus leg syndrome. The condition causes his knees to cave in toward each other and his feet to spread. Trostel said he needs medical attention as soon as possible.

“Really, a lot of people don’t adopt after 5. … He’s just in a space where it’d be really easy to age out,” Trostel said. She and her husband want to give Keny “all the tools to do whatever he wants to do with his life that you probably wouldn’t get in a very poor country in an orphanage in Africa.”

Adoptions out of Burundi must follow Hague Convention guidelines. That means extensive vetting for both the family and the orphanage that ensures the child isn’t being either trafficked or placed in an unsafe home in the United States.

Tifany Markee explained that the Hague Convention requires families adopting internationally to work with an adoption agency that is accredited by the Hague Convention and the governments in both the family’s and the child’s countries. The family also has to go through a rigorous vetting process.

“Home studies, health screening, home screening, financial screening, criminal screening, child abuse registries,” Markee said. “We always laugh that if people had to go through what these families went through to have a child biologically, our world would be far less populated.”

Adoptive families often pay for and complete one step and then have to repeat it later, Kate Searfoorce said, especially during long adoptions when earlier paperwork expires. “I’ve been fingerprinted so many times,” she said.

Trostel said the family has extensive documentation for Keny, including photos and his birth certificate. “We have his mother’s death certificate—she died when he was 2. So that’s an official Burundi document. We have the letter from his father that gave him up to the shelter,” Trostel said. “We also know that his father left the country. We have a letter from the orphanage director showing, ‘Yes, he is here.’ … We’ve had an official from the Burundi government go and visit the shelter. So, a government official laid eyes on the child, made sure it all aligned, talked to the shelter director.”

Markee said the families often experience six months to two years of screening and vetting. And then there’s the cost.

“These families are spending $25,000 to $50,000 sometimes on their adoptions,” Markee said. “They’re in good financial positions to be able to support and provide for the resources of their children. And I think that’s really one of the key factors here is that these children are not going to become burdens on our society.”

Trostel, Searfoorce, and other adoptive families have echoed that message: On trips to the U.S. Capitol since the December travel ban was issued, the Trostels, Searfoorces, and other affected families have met with lawmakers and urged government officials to help them bring their children to the United States.

“We are just families that have children that are not currently with us,” Searfoorce said. “And we are just wanting to bring them home. … I don’t necessarily think everyone has thought through how deep this will impact adoption as a whole.”

Searfoorce and Trostel both believe the lack of an exception for adoption in the December travel ban was an unintentional error. Trostel stressed that the adoptive families aren’t asking for government aid, just an exception to the travel ban. “We just need somebody or some way for God to help move us just out of this broader umbrella that I think is meant for other things,” she said.

While talking to legislators, they’ve tried to avoid getting embroiled in the political controversies surrounding immigration. Instead, they said, they’ve sought to emphasize the humaneness of their request.

“This is a little kid,” Trostel said. “Help us just get this kid home.”