The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption Read Online Free

moved into place, not just as part of a rescue mission but also in accordance with “Operation Vigilant Sentry,” an anti-immigration military and US Department of Homeland Security strategy developed in 2003, to ensure that Haitian citizens didn’t try to flee the destroyed capital by boat. Overhead an Air Force transport plane broadcast a statement in Creole from Haitian Ambassador to the United States Raymond Joseph, warning would-be refugees to stay away. “If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case,” Joseph’s recorded message repeated. “They will intercept you right on the water, and send you back home where you came from.” From an Air Force base in Florida, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano added, “Pleasedo not have us divert our necessary rescue and relief efforts that are going into Haiti by trying to leave at this point.”
    “The message ‘Don’t come here, don’t come here,’ was being blared to adults,” said Karen Dubinsky, a professor of global development studies at Queen’s University in Canada and author of Babies without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas , “at the same time that this counter narrative is building about how we’ll take the children.”
    In the United States some of the scores of adoption agencies with ties to Haitian orphanages, evangelical Christians newly mobilized around adoption, and sympathetic politicians led the charge for expedited adoptions of the country’s alleged pre-earthquake population of four hundred thousand or more orphans. This figure was widely reported, despite a clarification from UNICEF—the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the UN’s humanitarian arms—that likely there had been only fifty thousand orphans, in the widely understood sense of the word. Others had lost only one parent or lived with extended family. Identifying which children fit which category was a matter of painstaking investigation nearly impossible in the aftermath of the disaster. Nevertheless, adoption advocates soon embellished the already bloated numbers, stating that as many as one million children in Haiti—a full ninth of the country’s total population—were now orphaned.
    Long-standing religious relief organizations joined with upstart Haiti orphan missions to call for a reenactment of the 1960s anti-Communist “Operation Pedro (or Peter) Pan” that had spirited more than fourteen thousand children out of Castro’s Cuba and into mostly Catholic homes in the United States. * The revival Catholic groups proposed for Haiti, “Operation Pierre Pan,” was enveloped in the language of emergency, with impassioned calls to “get the children out,” as if they were boarding the last plane off the island. It was language that recalled another mission, the 1975 “Operation Babylift” evacuation of thirty-three hundred Vietnamese children to North America and Europe just before the Fall of Saigon. Evangelical activists suggested that any aid planes delivering supplies to Haiti should return to the United States “load[ed] up with orphans.”
    But rather than saving children from Communism or an impending military attack, this time the urgency seemed to center on saving children from Haiti itself. “Haiti cannot feed its children,” one US orphanage director, Harold Nungester of H.I.S. Home for Children, argued in the Wall Street Journal. “The best way to service them is to get them out.”
    Again and again Haitian children were characterized as prisoners in a backward nation, their ambiguous orphanhood overshadowed by their status as victims. Few asked where these children came from, if they had surviving family and friends in Haiti who were looking for them, or if they wanted to leave their country. As it would turn out, many were not actually orphans.
    On some adoptive parent forums, noted the website Racialicious, which covers racial politics in the United