ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – The Carroll family has long looked forward to the day they welcome their son Seth into their Anchorage home. And for years, that special day has been pushed back.
Now, with this month’s news of China closing its intercountry adoption program, the family fears that day may never come.
“If for some reason, the end of the road is this, and we don’t get to get united with our Seth, that’s something that we will grieve all of our life,” father Jonathan Carroll said.
The Anchorage family says the closure is the latest hurdle they’ve faced to welcome Seth home since adopting him four years ago.
In 2019, Jonathan and Deborah Carroll were matched with Holt International, an adoption agency that works in multiple foreign countries, including China, Korea, Hong Kong and Mongolia.
The following year, the family was in the final phase of adoption. But before they could travel to China to pick up Seth, the pandemic hit, and everything was put on hold.
“We sincerely believe that China was doing their best to protect the kiddos and so that’s kind of how everything shut down,” Jonathan said. “Since that process, we’ve been told just to keep waiting until the pandemic is over and we have done that.”
The ending of China’s intercountry adoption program is “terrible news” for thousands of American families like the Carrolls, according to Margaret Stock, an immigration attorney with Cascadia Cross Border Law Group.
“When China perceives the United States as some kind of enemy, they don’t see any reason to release children, Chinese children, to the United States,” Stock said. “That’s part of the picture right now that there’s just increasing polarization and tensions between the two countries.”
The Carroll family has called on the state’s congressional delegation to intervene.
“Help us raise this issue to the highest levels, not in a way to manipulate in any way, but in a way to plea our case for our boy,” Jonathan said.
Stock urges families to follow the Carrolls’ example.
“Our two U.S. senators could look into the situation and possibly contact the State Department and try to get the State Department to come up with a policy that will help these American families,” Stock said.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Sen. Dan Sullivan said there was little public information on the case to share.
“Because of strict privacy guidelines, we aren’t able to share details on individual cases,” the statement read. “Senator Sullivan’s office is working on one case now, but there has not been a significant increase in such cases brought to our attention.”
A spokesperson for Sen. Lisa Murkowski told Alaska’s News Source said that they are still looking into the situation.
The Carroll family does not see why political tensions should prevent adoptions already in place.
“I think there can be tension everywhere in the world at any time,” Jonathan said. “I think we just realized that all it takes is two people getting together and saying, ‘Yes, let’s make this happen,’ because they have the power to do it.”
In the meantime, the family will continue to care for Seth in any way they can.
“We want him to know that out of all the billions and billions of people in this world, we want to call him ‘son,’” Jonathan said.
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