Grandfathering of Non-Hague Adoption Cases Stakeholder Engagement

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) invited interested parties to participate in a national stakeholder teleconference on Tuesday, January 31, 2012 @ 2:00 PM EDT. The purpose of this engagement was to discuss changes to the process of “grandfathering” certain adoption cases as orphan cases when the U.S. and another country become Hague partners. The call focused particularly on cases for Chinese and Guatemalan children as these are the countries from which there are currently “grandfathered” cases.

The U.S. became a Hague Adoption Convention partner with China and Guatemala on April 1, 2008. At that time, there were many U.S. families in the process of adopting children from China and Guatemala under the orphan process. USCIS allowed those U.S. families’ cases to be “grandfathered” under the non-Hague process so that they could process their cases to completion as orphan cases. As the second “grandfathered” Form I-600A approvals for many of these cases are now beginning to expire, USCIS has developed an alternative approach that we believe will preserve the standing of the cases in the most effective and appropriate way.