Thousands of pages of once-secret court documents show how federal officials and a Virginia court helped a U.S. Marine adopt an Afghan war orphan, ignoring official U.S. government policy of reuniting children with their families.
The AP fought for three years to obtain the documents, which reveal how the country’s fractured bureaucracy allowed Marin Joshua Mast and his wife, Stephanie, to adopt a child halfway around the world to be raised by a couple the Afghan government recognized as her family.
Records show the federal government and courts traded blame for the international incident, which the government said threatened America’s standing in the world and appeared to be an endorsement of child trafficking.
In 2019, the baby was orphaned on the battlefield in Afghanistan. American soldiers rescued her from the rubble and took her to a hospital at a US military base. Under President Donald Trump’s first administration, the U.S. State Department worked with the Afghan government to find her family.
But the Masters were determined to bring her home and convinced a Virginia judge to allow them to adopt the girl from 7,000 miles away. They then used those adoption documents to take children from Afghan families as they fled their homes during the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops in the summer of 2021.
Below are the highlights of these documents.
How does a Virginia court deal with the adoption of an Afghan girl?
Documents show the Fluvanna County Court’s decision to approve the Masters’ adoption skipped legal safeguards designed to protect children. Virginia law does not allow judges to adopt foreign children without the consent of their home countries.
Yet Fluvanna County Circuit Court Judge Richard Moore did just that. He relied on Master’s words to declare the child “stateless.”
Lawyers representing the government, Afghan families and the children will note many flaws in these proceedings; lawyers representing the children’s best interests describe these flaws as “glaring”. The child must be adopted by parents or an agency, and the child was never adopted. The court waived a requirement that the child be present when social services visit her foster parents’ home, requiring someone to investigate her history and tell anyone with custody what happened.
Even Moore acknowledged that the adoption plan he approved was flawed. “This case contains procedural irregularities, flaws or deficiencies,” he wrote in a 38-page opinion issued before his retirement.
“I’ll probably think about this for the rest of my life, should I say, I’m sorry, that kid is in Afghanistan. We’re just going to pull out,” Moore said during the hearing. “I don’t know if this is what I should do.”
What the court doesn’t know
Moore said there were things he wished he had known when he approved the child’s adoption in December 2020 and declared the child an “undocumented, orphaned, stateless minor.”
Recently released records show the federal government insists it was not notified of Master’s application for adoption. Government lawyers said that if notified, they would have told the judge that the child was not stateless and that the government was looking for her family and would quickly determine that she was Afghan and not the child of a foreigner.
Nor was she in a medical crisis: A month earlier, her doctors had described her as “a healthy recovering baby in need of normal infant care,” the exhibit shows.
The judge said he was never aware of a federal judge’s rejection of Masters’ attempt to block the U.S. government from sending the girl to her relatives in Afghanistan. Mast told Moore the child was for an unmarried girl and her relationship to her was unclear. He testified that he insisted the child was the daughter of a foreign fighter.
‘Inconsistent’ approach by federal government
An Army colonel wrote in a court statement that the military had determined that Mast “attempted to interfere inappropriately” and that the military and State Department worked to keep him away from his children.
But others within the same agency helped him.
At Mast’s request, the military evacuated the family from Afghanistan during the chaotic U.S. troop withdrawal in the summer of 2021. They were joined by Afghans who had helped U.S. troops. They never were; the only reason they were added to the list was Master’s desire to bring the children to the United States
Government employees working at a refugee resettlement center in Virginia took Mast’s adoption documents at face value, never knowing that their own government had deemed the documents “defective” and denied Mast’s claim for the child. A State Department employee was ordered by her superiors to take a child from an Afghan and hand it to Masters while the Afghan woman fell to the floor crying.
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Contact AP’s global investigative team at investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/.
