bigskydreaming:

So for anyone who thinks the claims of child trafficking with kids separated from their families at the border are melodramatic and baseless, here’s some stuff you should look at.

For an example, let’s take a look at one of the places a number of these children were sent to: Bethany Christian Services, a global nonprofit organization based out of Michigan, who have federal contracts with the government for finding placement for refugee and immigrant children, which is why they were one of the first places these children were sent. Per their own website, they’re a faith-based organization that provides foster care, adoption, resettlement services and other assistance, and their only priority is the well-being of the children they care for.

Sounds good, right? Defenders of this organization have claimed that BCS is against the separation policy and have called for an end to it, but despite searching, I haven’t actually been able to find any such comments from any official spokesperson for the agency.

However, I did find this:

“Right now, we have 99 foster care beds at Bethany across the country, and we’re at capacity,” Dona Abbott, branch director of refugee services at Bethany Christian Services, said. “We’re now recruiting new homes and we’re approaching our government with the offer to provide more beds.”

Now, here’s where some eyebrows should start to be raised.

BCS is not simply a nonprofit charity organization that looks after children in need as best they can in accordance with existing laws. They also are extremely aggressive lobbyists who push for legislation in accordance with their personal religious views….views which most people would consider Christian fundamentalist.

For instance, take a look at this, written back in 2015:

As previously reported by PRA, this past summer Michigan passed a statewide religious exemption law that gives adoption agencies the right to claim a religious exemption from having to serve LGBTQ couples. The DeVos family donated $300,000 in 2013 alone to Bethany Christian Services, Michigan’s leading adoption agency and the main group that lobbied for the religious exemption bill.

So to make sure we’re still on the same page here, let’s be clear about that…..one of the first agencies the government relocated these children to due to existing federal contracts just so happens to be a primary beneficiary of a member of the Trump administration’s charitable givings….and also just so happens to be in the habit of using said funds in the lobbying of religious fundamentalist based laws that have successfully barred potential parents in at least one state from adopting children if they happen to be of a demographic that Bethany Christian Services (and the DeVos family) deem unfit to parent children.

But remember….these people are still clearly, definitely JUST in it to help kids in need.

Now keep going back further. Here’s a book that was written in 2013, called 

The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce.

When Jessie Hawkins’ adopted daughter told her she had another mom back in Ethiopia, Jessie didn’t, at first, know what to think. She’d wanted her adoption to be great story about a child who needed a home and got one, and a family led by God to adopt. Instead, she felt like she’d done something wrong.

Adoption has long been enmeshed in the politics of reproductive rights, pitched as a “win-win” compromise in the never-ending abortion debate. But as Kathryn Joyce makes clear in The Child Catchers, adoption has lately become even more entangled in the conservative Christian agenda.

So this book apparently is an investigative look into Evangelical missionary adoption and the links to illegal adoptions and literal human trafficking. Crimes committed by faith-based adoption and foster care agencies and parents who believe its their mission to ‘save’ children from third-world countries by taking them away from parents who they deem unable to properly care for them (and who are unlikely to raise them according to the Christian fundamentalist views these organizations and parents view it as their mission to spread, just like missionaries of past centuries).

I haven’t had a chance to read the book in full myself yet, so I can’t attest to everything in it, just various excerpts I’ve found online. Yes, it is biased – the author takes a clear stance against these groups and their views and actions, but she does not claim to be impartial, nor is she trying to be. The book is her research into proving why her beliefs these people have committed criminal acts are not unfounded. I mention this because this unapologetic bias is what the 20% of reviews on this book that gave it 1-star have focused on to discredit the author and her conclusions here, in the name of defending these various organizations. However, the 48% of reviews that gave it 5-stars frequently express how regardless of any conclusions made within the book, one thing that stood out for most of them is how exhaustively researched and detailed the book was.

And why did I come across this book specifically, and link it here?

Because Bethany Christian Services is one of the organizations the author investigated based on suspicions of child trafficking and illegal adoptions.

Please note….even if you personally do not draw the same conclusions as the author from her research into them, it should at the very least be deemed significant that this organization, one of those that the Trump administration has prioritized sending these children to due to previously established contracts, is

a) Ready and looking to recruit more homes and supply more beds for children the administration sends them, despite already being stretched to the capacity of their ability to care for the children they’re already responsible for.

b) Has an existing relationship with The DeVos family, many of whom (not just Betsy) are part of the administration’s inner circle, and this existing relationship includes lobbying for the advancement of legislation born of their religious fundamentalist views and the prioritization of child care that’s in accordance to what they think a good conservative upbringing should look like

c) has been under scrutiny due to rumors of child trafficking, illegal adoptions and crimes against children in the name of their personal religious convictions stretching back at least five years before these current events

And this is just ONE of the places where we KNOW some of these kids taken from their parents have ended up. It doesn’t even address the hundreds, potentially thousands of kids who’ve already mysteriously ‘slipped through the cracks’ with no official accounting of their whereabouts.

Also something to consider is what happens AFTER these ‘good Christian families’ open up their homes to these poor, disenfranchised refugee children who are just so desperately in need of their enlightened priorities when raising children to be good conservatives.

It shouldn’t shock anyone but people who don’t actually have the well-being of children in mind when they adopt, but rather are just playing into self-serving white savior bullshit and some religious fervor to replicate the missionary work they feel its a Christian mandate to spread……shockingly, many of these people end up ‘regretting’ these adoptions when the children traumatized by being ripped away from families who actually do love them and want them aren’t appropriately grateful. Who have attitude problems or behavioral issues or just aren’t receptive to the ideas and values these people try and drill into them.

And then this happens:

Americans use the Internet to abandon children adopted from overseas

That’s a link to a Reuters investigative article that delved into the practice of ‘rehoming’. Or when fucking pieces of shit who adopt children from other countries through legal or illegal means change their minds once the novelty of the living human being they vowed to guard and protect but really just view as a shiny new toy wears off…..literally just….give these kids away to whomever will take them. 

Warning, the article can be triggering as hell not just because of what it describes, but how it describes it, frequently referencing these parents in much more generous language than what I just used and acting like there’s something worth empathizing with in their behavior. I think it’s worth the read if you can stomach it, however, because of the facts it does lay down about this downright EVIL practice.

An excerpt from the article:

Part 1: When a Liberian girl proves too much for her parents, they advertise her online and give her to a couple they’ve never met. Days later, she goes missing.

KIEL, Wisconsin – Todd and Melissa Puchalla struggled for more than two years to raise Quita, the troubled teenager they’d adopted from Liberia. When they decided to give her up, they found new parents to take her in less than two days – by posting an ad on the Internet.

Also….three guesses what kind of people go looking online for ads about troubled kids people are looking to unload without any kind of paper trail.

Go ahead. Guess what kind of people those kids end up with. 

So in conclusion…..fuck Bethany Christian Services, fuck the DeVos family, fuck the Trump administration, and fuck whomever defends any of this vile, despicable shit by harping on about how people are just being melodramatic and exaggerating and that nobody’s actually trafficking immigrant children here.

Yes. 

They are.

This is happening.