wfn.org | Presbyterian pastors' baby "held hostage" in Vietnam

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Note #7011 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

10-January-2002
02021

Presbyterian pastors' baby "held hostage" in Vietnam

U.S. officials claim adoption was illegal, won't issue visa for infant

by John Filiatreau

LOUISVILLE - A husband-and-wife team of Presbyterian pastors who adopted a Vietnamese baby last month can't bring her home, because U.S. immigration officials won't issue a visa for the three-month-old child.

The Rev. J. Wayne Hanrattie, pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Pleasant Valley, NY, and the Rev. Sharon Williams, pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Wappingers Falls, NY, both near Poughkeepsie, journeyed to Vietnam on Dec. 9 to adopt an orphan child they have since named Kaelin Rose Tuyet Hanrattie. 

Nearly five weeks later, Williams is still in Vietnam, living in the Evergreen Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, which is now home to a community of eight frustrated, anxious American families with a total of nine adoptive children that they can't take out of the country.

"We are all people of faith, Christian or Jewish," Williams said, referring to herself and her fellow "hostages" at the Evergreen Hotel. "We meet together every day. I don't know how anybody could stand this if they didn't believe in a greater power, a greater good, a greater love."

Apart from the financial drain and occasional "moments of emotional breakdown," Williams said in a Jan. 9 interview with the Presbyterian News Service, she and the others are holding up well: 
"We're depending on God's grace, God's love, and the prayers of people all over the world."

In their common "nightmare," she added, the adoptive parents have taken great comfort from Psalm 27:

	The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?
	The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
	... For he will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble;
	He will conceal me under the cover of his tent.

The chief U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officer in Vietnam denied the families' visa applications because of suspicions that the children are not orphans. "It can be  baby selling," an INS officer in Washington told the Poughkeepsie Journal. "That's where our concern is."

The INS has increased its scrutiny of adoptions in Southeast Asia recently because of reports of illegal baby trafficking in Vietnam and Cambodia. 
Since the United States normalized relations with Vietnam, the number of immigrant visas issued for Vietnamese orphans has increased from just two in 1995 to more than 600 in 2000, according to the U.S. State Department.

According to Williams, INS officials in Vietnam were unaccountably rude: "They told us to accept the worst, to just leave our babies back at the orphanage and go home."

The good news, she said, is that "our baby is wonderful; she's happy and beautiful, and she's legally adopted, and legally ours."

Part of the bad news, she added, is that her 350-member congregation has been without a pastor for more than a month.

Church secretary Kathy Sorce said the congregation has been relying on pulpit supply ministers and lay leadership to fill the breach. "We're getting along all right," she said. "She (Williams) is very well loved within the congregation. We're concerned, and we want her home." 

Hanrattie, 61, and Williams, 39, were married in 1999 and have been involved in the adoption process since he fall of 2000. They put themselves in the hands of a New York City adoption agency, Spence-Chapin, which works with International Mission of Hope (IMH), a facilitator of international adoptions in Vietnam and elsewhere.

Hanrattie and Williams met their child, Hoang Thi Thuyet Lan, at the Cao Giay Center, an orphanage in Hanoi, on Dec. 9. Four days later, they officially took custody of the child in a "giving and receiving" ceremony in Hanoi; the Vietnamese government issued a passport for the child on Dec. 14. All that remained was the matter of getting a visa from the U.S. government. That proved to be a bigger hurdle than they had been led to expect.

The INS charges include a claim that the Cau Giay orphanage is not a government facility but is privately owned; that the "giving and receiving" ceremonies were conducted in the wrong provinces and that IMH "collected" infants for delivery to specific foreign parents and benefited financially from the practice.

According to documents filed by INS, IMH provides all financial support for the orphanage and has a contract by which the local People's Committee agrees that "only those families approved by IMH can adopt children from this Center." It says IMH charges each adopting family a "total per-case fee" of $9,500.

The INS document concludes that the visa must be denied because "the adoption in this case has not been conducted in accordance with the laws of the foreign sending country (Vietnam)," as required by (U.S.) federal regulations.

Williams said the parents at the Evergreen Hotel "followed established adoption procedures identical to those completed for years by families who were all able to get their children's visas and allowed to take them home."

In its notice of denial of the visa application, the INS said it had received "numerous indications" that adoptions facilitated by IMH have been in violation of both Vietnamese and U.S. laws.

"INS and the American Embassy have received letters from Vietnamese women claiming that agents of IMH and Cau Giay Center purchased their babies," wrote an INS official.

In an SOS email message sent worldwide, Williams wrote on behalf of the parents, "Since the issues of concern are clearly between the Immigration and Naturalization Service and International Mission of Hope, and have very little to do with our specific children, we're asking that we be allowed to bring our children home through Humanitarian Parole while the case is being processed."

A spokeswoman for Spence-Chapin, the New York adoption agency, said her agency has processed about 70 adoptions in Vietnam in the past few years without any problems. She said some families have experienced delays in getting visas in recent months, but none has received a notice of intent to deny, as Williams and Hanrattie have.

"We had families at Thanksgiving who went through this process and got their visas," said Alex Miller, coordinator of the agency's Vietnam program. "There's nothing substantively different about these cases being denied now."

Spokespeople for IMH have denied that the agency has violated the law. IMH officials have begun gathering documentation to refute the INS charges.
Hanrattie returned to the United States a week ago to hire immigration lawyers and lobby public officials and others to intervene in the case. He said he hated to leave his wife and child overseas.

"Tons of tears have been shed. It's really hard for me to go to sleep at night," said Hanrattie, noting that he and Williams have had ample time to become deeply attached to Kaelin. "The biggest toll is just thinking what could happen to our daughter if the worst happens - a total denial. ... And 95 percent of the issues involved in the INS case has nothing whatsoever to do with our child."

Williams said she doesn't fear losing Kaelin, hasn't even entertained that possibility, and feels "confident that these charges will prove to be false." But she added that she and the other parents have been getting together "contact information for foster care."

Irene Recio, an associate with Baker & McKenzie, the Washington firm Hanrattie and Williams have retained, said the INS has not substantiated its charges that Vietnamese children have been sold to Americans - which is a "clear, rampant violation" of their due-process rights.

"You've got two U.S. citizens who are on the hook," Recio said. "They are legally responsible in Vietnam for that child, (and) you've got the U.S. government saying they can't bring that child in. It's an unbearable predicament to put a U.S. citizen in."

The situation is also putting the parents in a financial bind. Williams says staying in Vietnam is costing at least $60 a day per person, and that's money that they didn't anticipate spending. Not counting the expense of legal representation in both Vietnam and the United States.

One of the parents in that "unbearable predicament" is an Army reservist recently activated to take part in the war on terrorism. 
Williams says she thinks that case is even more bizarre than her own: "He's serving in the armed forces while his government is refusing his children entry to the country he's defending."  
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