Judges Steal Babies from Detained Immigrant Mothers

"Ok, Dave," you may be thinking, "you've finally jumped the shark.  You can't possibly justify that headline, and you're going to have to walk it back in disgrace in a couple of days."

Well, read this article and decide for yourself what it describes.  The adoptive parents in the article probably believe they are providing a better life for "their" child, and maybe they are right.

But that logic didn't justify the baby-trafficking racket that Guatemala became famous for in recent years, where adoption agencies would buy babies or coerce poor mothers into turning them over, then provide them to American parents for a tidy sum.  American adoptive parents assumed they were doing the right thing by rescuing brown babies from squalor; many either didn't know what was happening or didn't bother to look too closely.  The Guatemalan government may also have been involved.  International adoptions are processed jointly through the State Department and USCIS, so the U.S. government also bears responsibility for facilitating this massive trafficking operation.

The practice may not have been universal, but was common enough to get the State Department to finally suspend new adoptions from Guatemala earlier this year.

The prospect of a more comfortable life doesn't justify taking a child from its mother in Guatemala and it doesn't justify it here in the U.S., either.  But thieving babies from poor Guatemalan women in Guatemala is apparently no longer enough for baby-hungry Americans--with an ample supply of Guatemalan mothers already here in the U.S. and family court judges who believe undocumented women are inherently unfit mothers, we have streamlined the process so prospective parents don't even have to travel abroad to pick up the baby.

Here's a guide to getting your own Guatemalan baby without leaving the U.S.:

1. Raid your local factory or meat processing plant, where there are sure to be some Guatemalan women with infant U.S.-born children.
2. Charge the mothers under harsh identity theft statutes never intended to be used in immigration cases, so they are forced to spend time in prison before being deported.
3. Institute adoption proceedings for any infant children the mother has left behind.  Make sure the family court judge holds innate contempt for foreigners.
4. Deprive the detained mother of adequate legal representation, so she can't get out of jail and can't participate in the family court proceedings which will give custody of her child to someone who can afford a good attorney.  Don't bother to ascertain whether the mother receives any of the adoption court papers.  Make sure they're not translated into Spanish for her benefit.
5. Pick up your new Guatemalan U.S. citizen baby.  Thank the family court judge on your way out.  Make sure to send ICE a card.

That's more or less what happened in the case of Encarnación Bail Romero and her now-two-year-old son, Carlos.

In 2007, Bail was swept up in a workplace raid at a poultry processing plant in Missouri and dropped into the immigration detention gulag.  Her son was adopted by a local couple without her consent.  Now she wants him back.

She's not the only one to find herself in this situation.  I hope I'm not the only one to believe that something went badly wrong somewhere along the way.