The Adobe Flash Player is required to view this multimedia interactive. Get it here.

Area family caught in international adoption dispute

Angela and Terry Manuszak show a photo of their 3-year-old adopted son Thomas who they are desperately trying to bring home from Vietnam. In fact, Angela is traveling to DC this week to talk with legislators about the bureaucratic nightmare that is keeping their son from joining his family in Washington Twp.

Jan Underwood/Staff Photographer Angela and Terry Manuszak show a photo of their 3-year-old adopted son Thomas who they are desperately trying to bring home from Vietnam. In fact, Angela is traveling to DC this week to talk with legislators about the bureaucratic nightmare that is keeping their son from joining his family in Washington Twp.

ENLARGE PHOTO

Angela Manuszak looks through the large file of adoption paperwork. Manuszak and her husband Terry Manuszak are desperately trying to bring their 3-year-old adopted son Thomas home from Vietnam. In fact, Angela is traveling to DC this week to talk with legislators about the bureaucratic nightmare that is keeping their son from joining his family in Washington Twp.

Jan Underwood/Staff Photographer Angela Manuszak looks through the large file of adoption paperwork. Manuszak and her husband Terry Manuszak are desperately trying to bring their 3-year-old adopted son Thomas home from Vietnam. In fact, Angela is traveling to DC this week to talk with legislators about the bureaucratic nightmare that is keeping their son from joining his family in Washington Twp.

ENLARGE PHOTO

Man, 68, drowns at Caesar Creek Lake
5/26/12
Water rescues prompt warning from health officials
5/25/12
Beach Waterpark sued for failure to deliver
5/25/12
Raleigh Trammell’s defense opens in felony trial
5/25/12
UD to move satellite campus to Dublin
5/25/12
> More headlines

By Mary McCarty, Staff Writer Updated 8:12 PM Saturday, May 28, 2011

In the fall of 2009, Angela Manuszak first met the little boy she hoped to call her own at a prison-turned-orphanage in rural, southern Vietnam. “That’s your mommy,” his caregiver told 2-year-old Thomas, commanding him to sit on Angela’s lap. By the end of the visit, Thomas was ready to go home to his new family in Washington Twp.

He’s still waiting. So is his adoptive family — Angela and her husband, Terry, and the three siblings they adopted from Taiwan in September. And so are 15 other so-called “pipeline families,” all of them caught in what Angela calls a “nightmare of bureaucracy” brought about because of changing regulations designed to prevent human trafficking in international adoptions.

While they wait, the Manuszaks say Thomas’ health has deteriorated. “They’re putting process before the life of a child,” Terry Manuszak said. “It’s unconscionable.”

The Manuszaks and the other pipeline families are in legal limbo because their adoptions were approved shortly before the U.S. began enforcing stricter guidelines as part of the Hague Adoption Convention. Adoptions between the two countries, which peaked with 828 in 2007, have halted as Vietnam contemplates signing onto the Convention guidelines which, among other things, require participating countries to have a central authority that investigates cases to ensure that children aren’t being trafficked.

Previously, the rules and seriousness about the issue varied depending on the country.

State Department officials say they are “working diligently to raise these cases with Vietnamese adoption officials at every opportunity.” The families’ plight drew national attention last week when freshman Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, blocked President Obama’s nominee for ambassador to Vietnam over the issue.

The Manuszaks’ attorney, Lynda Zengerle, said the pipeline families support that maneuver, not as a personal attack on nominee David Shear, but in an attempt to bring the issue to the forefront. “We hope it makes a difference,” Zengerle said. “I think the State Department understands the gravity of the situation, but they don’t know how to undo the mess. They’ve backed themselves into a really uncomfortable corner. We’re trying to draw a road map that could save face for everyone, but get these kids home.”

Zengerle said it has long ago been settled that these are not trafficked children. “Their parents have renounced them not once but three times,” she said. “Nobody is coming for these children, but because of some diplomatic glitch we’re going to let them rot in an orphanage. They are basically starving. It’s not fair, it’s not right, it’s not the way we do things in the United States.”

Advocates for the families believe they should be grandfathered in under the guidelines that existed at the time the adoptions were approved. “There’s no reason this can’t be done,” Zengerle said. “Vietnam hasn’t signed the Hague Convention yet.”

Terry Manuszak applauds the concern over human trafficking. “But prosecute those incidents case by case,” he said. “Don’t punish all of the children.”

Angela felt much more hopeful Thursday after a “lobby day” in which she and other pipeline parents met with staffers from the offices of Ohio’s two U.S. senators, Sherrod Brown and Rob Portman as well as Rep. Mike Turner, R-Centerville. “They showed compassion and concern over the injustice to the kids,” she said.

In a statement issued Thursday Brown said, “It’s heartbreaking that so many innocent families have been torn apart in their efforts to give a child a better life. That’s why there was such broad support behind the Hague Convention, aimed at ensuring that legitimate organizations and orphanages are able to place children with families. I will continue to work to ensure that families like the Manuszaks are treated fairly and not caught up in needless red tape.”

Zengerle argued that the 16 cases have been thoroughly investigated and that none of the birth families want to raise these children. The families also say they’re being penalized for issues out of their control. Dueling letters from the U.S. Citizens and Immigration Services are one illustration of the frustrating process. The first, dated July 16, 2008, states that Thomas qualifies as an orphan for immigration purposes; the second, dated Feb. 8, 2010, says he does not, citing “irregularities surrounding the circumstances of his abandonment and placement in the orphanage.”

One of the explanations, Terry said, “is that his mother didn’t give her true name. Well, duh.”

The Manuszaks expected to bring Thomas home within months of their 2008 referral. As the months dragged on, Angela started browsing the “waiting children” websites of various adoption agencies before falling in love with the profile of three siblings from Taiwan. “Honey,” she said one night, “how would you feel about three?”

Terry, an engineer who works at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, had only one concern: Would adopting the children mean giving up on Thomas?

1 | 2 next page »

Share this article