Department of State Update

A Bethany worker (who use to live and work at GLA) recently went to GLA for a visit and was updated on many different areas of the Haitian adoption process. The following was her experience with the US Consulate/Embassy. It helps explain some of the delays we are currently experiencing.

US Department of State
We met with Donald Moore (Consular General) and Garry Pierrot (Adoptions Unit Officer) at the new US Consulate/Embassy. Mr. Moore led our meeting for the most part. He is extremely enthusiastic about his position, and in working alongside families with adoptions. He mentioned “we want to give good news …” Transparency is very important to Mr. Moore, and wants services to be as transparent as possible. If there are problems, he wants to be able to have this communicated. One of the issues that the Consulate has been dealing with is not having sufficient staff. He is expecting that by November, they will be full staffed, which should result in speeding up processing time. DOS is currently processing 7-8 adoption cases a week.

Mr. Moore and Mr. Pierrot indicated that they are mandated to prevent fraud. They mentioned that fraudulent documents are statistically quite common in Haiti visa applications, often unbeknownst to orphanages that are submitting them. Orphanages believe that they have obtained the documents legitimately; however, it turns out that these documents are not always as they appear. As a result, Mr. Pierrot’s job is to ensure that no child leaves Haiti and enters the U.S. with fraudulent documents. Mr. Pierrot indicated that adoptions have priority with the Fraud Unit at DOS, and fraud investigations for adoption cases are normally completed before other fraud investigations. This is good news that adoptions are seen as important, and that DOS does recognize their urgency. However, after this discussion, we could better understand why the visa process has been taking longer lately. I expressed some concerns with these two regarding some recent frustrations Dixie has been having in correspondence with DOS (when emailing/phoning about orphan investigations, specific case questions, etc). Mr. Moore was very apologetic. He indicated that they have been short-staffed, and are hoping that correspondence issues will be resolved with more staff. We also presented the idea of JCICS developing Standards of Practice for Haiti, and they were very supportive of this. They indicated that if, in the future, training would be required, they would be more than willing to assist with the training if they could.