New Adoption Process and Travel requirements

We received this update from Holt on the adoption process and when we would travel.
With this new process we would make our first trip to see the girls a lot sooner. Hope to have an update on getting into IBESR soon.

Travel to sign papers in Court – Not too long ago, Parquet (the Civil Court), decided to require adoptive applicants to travel to Haiti and sign papers at the local court where the child they are adopting was relinquished. Some of you have already heard about this. We had received conflicting information about whether or not this was really true, so wanted to verify it for ourselves before acting on it. This signing must occur before Parquet will ultimately approve a case. This new requirement meant an additional trip for adoptive applicants, other than the two already required at the end of the process for a family to file their I-600 with DHS and then the last one to bring their child home.

The Adjudicate Orphan Status First Program (AOF) – In light of this new requirement, Mansour and I met with the DHS office to see if they might now be willing to allow Mansour to file the adoptive family’s I-600 with a Power of Attorney (POA), thus reducing the number of trips back to two. They were not willing/able to accept this recommendation based solely on the basis of families having to travel to sign papers in the court.

However, we also discussed the AOF with them. The AOF is a pilot program being offered for only 4 different countries in the world, Haiti being one of them. It allows a family to file their I-600 early in the process. The DHS office said families could file the AOF with them in Haiti at any point, as long as the adoptive family’s I-600a and fingerprints were up to date.

Since adoptive families must now travel to file papers at the local court, we are going to recommend that families file the I-600 AOF with DHS in the same trip. This means that with a POA to Mansour, the adoptive family would not need to return to Haiti again until the end of the process to bring their child home, after the child’s visa has already been obtained – thus reducing the number of trips to two again.

Signing papers in the court and filing the I-600 AOF can be done fairly quickly, thus making this trip a fairly quick one (3 – 4 days more or less). Since families will be signing papers in the local court near Holt Fontana, they will also be able to see their child and visit the Holt Fontana Village as well.