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By JEANNE MALMGREN, Times Staff Writer
On the wall hangs a framed sampler: There Are Angels Among Us. Well, not yet. The angels -- three of them, a girl, a boy and their infant brother -- were supposed to arrive at the Davis Islands home of Abby and Art James in December, fresh off a plane from the other side of the world, ready to start a new life in the United States. Instant family. Instead, they're still in an orphanage in Cambodia, held up by an Immigration and Naturalization Service investigation that, however well intentioned, has angered hundreds of would-be adoptive parents.
Art James, 51, stood next to his wife, the disappointment plain on his face. Like several other Tampa Bay area families caught in the same situation, the Jameses already consider themselves parents. They spent thousands of dollars on adoption fees, untold hours filling out paperwork. They have pictures and medical reports of the children. They've picked out names, decorated nurseries, bought clothes and toys, scheduled maternity leaves and that first appointment with the pediatrician. Everything's in place, except the children. Just before Christmas, INS suspended the processing of orphan visa petitions from Cambodia. That meant that any child adopted there would not be allowed to immigrate to the United States. Suddenly the flow of adoptions from Cambodia to the U.S. dried up. INS said it took the unprecedented measure -- the agency had never before suspended orphan petitions in a foreign country -- because it suspected babies were being stolen or bought from their Cambodian birth parents. Birth certificates and abandonment documents were being falsified, the agency said. "INS' responsibility to determine that a child is truly an orphan must never be tainted by any action that results in the exploitation of innocent children by separating them from their biological families as a result of fraud, trafficking in human beings or other criminal activity," said INS commissioner James Ziglar, in a prepared statement. The agency sent investigators to Cambodia, but for several weeks there was no news. To the waiting parents, it seemed like an eternity. The situation in Cambodia underscores the high-stakes nature of international adoption. Some countries -- Cambodia last year, Romania this year -- shut their doors to foreign adoptions without warning when they see corruption they want to correct. Other countries, such as China and Guatemala, adopt strict procedures that stretch the adoption waiting period to more than a year. Then there are the cultural gaps between nations and the difficulty of applying the laws and customs of one to another. In Cambodia, an impoverished country hobbled by decades of civil war and genocide, the average yearly income is $240. Malnutrition and disease are epidemic. Rural people commonly give up one or more of their children simply because they cannot feed them or buy medicine. Enter Western families (mostly Americans and Europeans) with disposable income and deep yearnings to have children, and the potential for abuse flowers. INS investigators charge that adoption facilitators and orphanages in Cambodia persuade desperate women to part with their children for as little as $40 or $50. Then they bribe officials to create forged paperwork for the children. On the other hand, Cambodia has plenty of genuine orphans -- children who lost both parents to malaria or land mines or AIDS. Children who never knew their father, whose mother died in childbirth. They live on the streets, begging, sniffing glue, prostituting themselves. The lucky ones make it into an orphanage. In September, the Jameses of Tampa received photos of three orphans, a 4-year-old boy, a girl, 3, and a 2-month-old infant. The children's mother had died giving birth to the baby. An aunt took them to an orphanage three days later. There was no information about the father. The fees for adopting the three children would add up to about $26,000. Abby James, an administrator in child support enforcement for the Florida Department of Revenue, was delighted. "I'd get all my children at once," she said.
In Plant City, Kathy and Bill Torres were feeling similar joy. One week before their 22nd wedding anniversary, they received word that an infant girl, born in Cambodia nearly three months earlier, was to be their daughter. They took one look at the fuzzy e-mailed photo -- a baby with a big grin -- and Kathy Torres knew: "She was ours."
Now, in September, they had the photo of Kalliyan and a translated Cambodian document explaining that the newborn was abandoned in front of someone's house and then brought to a nearby orphanage. The name of the woman who found the baby is on the document. "We don't think there's a chance in hell that Kalli was bought or sold," said Kathy Torres, bluntly. The couple purchased a crib, a stroller, a high chair, a changing table. Kathy Torres' employees at Alternative Resources, a staffing agency in Tampa, threw her a baby shower. The couple got passports and hepatitis shots. They were packing their suitcases when they got the bad news: The U.S. embassy was refusing to give visa appointments to some adoptive parents. There were rumors that 12 families were marooned in Cambodia, unable to get their children out because the State Department told them the documents for their babies were suspect. It looked like the system was beginning to unravel. Bill Torres, a devout Catholic, went outside and shook his fist at the sky.
"I was really mad. I screamed to God, "Why are you doing this to Kathy? Why are you doing this to the baby?' " ABC's news magazine 20/20 aired a piece on the 12 stuck families, with mournful violin music and heart-rending scenes of some of the parents, finally out of money, sobbing as they left their children in foster care and returned to the United States without them. They said they felt betrayed by their own government. It was a public-relations nightmare for INS, and the agency's response was swift. It offered the 12 families "humanitarian parole." They would be allowed to bring their children into the United States if they agreed to readopt them here and to return them to Cambodia if birth parents came forward to claim them. In her Plant City dining room, Kathy Torres started calling and e-mailing U.S. senators and representatives who belong to the Congressional Coalition on Adoption. She faxed INS commissioner Ziglar, Secretary of State Colin Powell, President Bush. She helped organize efforts to send packages and money to the orphanage where Kalliyan lives. The couple got more bad news: Kalli's blood test was positive for syphilis. Probably contracted at birth. They were told the child was being treated, but they worried. Meanwhile the photos kept coming, and in each one their daughter looked a little older. "All the stages we're missing. Things we wanted to experience," lamented Kathy Torres. "I cried when I saw she was sitting up by herself, in one picture." By Thanksgiving, dozens of families all over the United States were in the same boat as the Torreses and the Jameses. Many already had their children's final adoption decrees from the Cambodian government. Others had just started the process of adopting. None could get a visa for their children. They began flooding government officials with complaints. "We've been getting inundated with calls from parents in every step of the process," said INS spokesman Bill Strassberger. "It's been a challenge, trying to return all the calls." The Friday before Christmas, the agency made it official and announced it was suspending the process of granting orphan visas. Anxiety surged through Internet bulletin boards where parents adopting Cambodian children share news and concerns. An online petition asking the INS to reconsider collected more than 11,000 signatures in one week. There was a day of fasting and prayer. Many talked of hiring a lawyer to file a class-action suit. Some parents left for Cambodia to visit their children.
Deborah Burke of St. Petersburg had one of those cases. A single woman, Burke is 50. She recently finished medical school and her residency and started practicing neurology in Largo. For several years she thought about adopting a child, probably a toddler. "Then I kind of got hooked on the idea of a baby," she said. Her adoption agency sent a photo of an infant girl 4 months old. Burke fell in love. She chose a name: Rachel Joy, with her Cambodian name, Kerya, as a third name. Now, like the other families, Burke's dreams are stalled. "I just want to be a mom," she said. "I want to be with my child. I want to hold her." Beth Burgess of Lutz feels the same way. "I don't want anything to do with baby trafficking. A stolen child is a horrible travesty," she said. "But my plea to INS is: Bring the known orphans home. Investigate. Just do it."
"It gets harder every day," Burgess said. "We look at that empty crib, and it hurts." For Beth and Mick Murschell of Bradenton, the wait ended abruptly two weeks ago, when they got a call from their adoption agency. The two Cambodian children they planned to adopt, a brother and sister 5 and 6 years old, had been reclaimed by their birth mother, who changed her mind six months after placing them in an orphanage. "I felt pretty safe, through all the talk about trafficking, because these kids were older, not babies," said Beth Murschell. That is precisely INS' problem, said Strassberger. Any adoption case could involve children whose birth parents regret the decision to give them up -- and maybe were pressured or paid to do it. "We're not the mean, heartless agency everyone thinks we are," Strassberger said. "We have a responsibility to fulfill. We have to make certain that the documentation is accurate, that it truly represents who a child is." Deborah Porter, who lives on Long Island, adopted two Cambodian-born sisters and now is trying to adopt their brother. She advises other adoptive families and moderates an Internet list of 1,200 members, the largest of several focusing on Cambodian adoptions. Last month, Porter visited Cambodia and made the rounds of orphanages, checking on children at the request of their waiting parents. "We put two kids in the hospital, one a boy with malaria, the other a 6-month-old girl with respiratory problems." Several other children, according to Porter, will soon lose the chance to be adopted because they're about to turn 8, the age at which Cambodian law cuts off foreign adoptions. "INS is obliged to give due protection to Cambodian children and birth parents, absolutely. We support that," said Porter. "But they also owe due process to American citizens." "This (wait) is destroying people emotionally, destroying their trust in the U.S. government. What they need to hear from their government is that they understand." On Valentine's Day, they heard that message. About 40 frustrated parents picketed in front of INS headquarters in Washington, D.C. Abby James flew up from Tampa to join them. She held a sign with a picture of her three kids. As it happened, the Congressional Coalition on Adoption had recently sent a letter to Ziglar at the INS. "We are very troubled by the moratorium you have placed on orphan visas for children adopted from Cambodia," it began. "The lack of outreach by the INS gives adoptive parents and the community-at-large the impression that INS' actions in this matter have been arbitrary and based on general suspicions rather than substantive evidence." It was signed by 24 members of Congress, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, and Rep. Mike Bilirakis, R-Tarpon Springs. At the protest, Ziglar invited the group inside to talk. The discussion went on for nearly two hours. Ziglar was sympathetic and concerned, according to James. At one point, while listening to parents' stories, he cried. Ziglar announced that a task force was leaving for Cambodia on Feb. 17 to begin talks with government ministers on how to reform adoption procedures in Cambodia. "Pipeline" cases would be examined one by one, he promised. Some -- and he emphasized the word "some" -- might qualify for processing. Those children would get the long-awaited visas. Their new parents would be free to bring them to the United States. Abby James hopes she is one of the lucky ones. She stands in a little girl's pink room and looks around. All the toys are new, the bed unrumpled. It's perfect. Too perfect. "I just can't wait for it to get all messed up," she says. * * * Times staff writer Jeanne Malmgren and her husband are the adoptive parents of one Cambodian child and are trying to adopt two more.
 © St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved. 
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