In brief
The adoption process of a war orphan from Afghanistan by Marine Joshua Mast and his wife, Stephanie, has become a major controversy in U.S. courts. Initially believed to be an emergency measure, new documents reveal that the adoption was fraught with procedural flaws, as the Afghan government was still searching for the child's family. The Virginia court's ruling to void the adoption brings into question both the ethical implications of the adoption and the bureaucratic failures in handling the case. As the Afghan family seeks to reclaim their child, the situation remains under legal scrutiny, with potential repercussions for the Marine and federal officials involved.
The judge wanted everyone in the courtroom to know that when he’d signed a war orphan over to an American Marine he thought it was an emergency — that the child injured on the battlefield in Afghanistan was on death’s door, with neither a family nor a country to claim her.
A lawyer for the federal government stood up.
“That is not what happened,” she told the judge: almost everything he’d believed about the baby was untrue.
This group had gathered 15 times by then, in secret proceedings in this small-town Virginia courtroom to try to fix what had become an international incident. Fluvanna County Circuit Judge Richard Moore had granted an adoption of the orphan to U.S. Marine Joshua Mast and his wife, Stephanie, while the baby was in Afghanistan, 7,000 miles away.
Now the U.S. government insisted the baby’s fate had never been the judge’s to decide; officials in President Donald Trump’s first administration had chosen to unite her with relatives months before Moore gave her away, according to once-secret transcripts of the November 2022 hearing.
Thousands of pages of those transcripts and court documents were recently released as a result of The Associated Press’ three-year fight for access after a 2022 AP report about the adoption raised alarms at the highest levels of government, from the Taliban to the White House. The newly released records reveal how America’s fractured bureaucracy allowed the Masts to adopt the child who was halfway around the globe, being raised by a couple the Afghan government at that time decided were her family, in a country that does not allow non-Muslims to take custody of its children. The documents show the judge skipped critical safeguards and legal requirements.
Mast has said he believed — and still does — the story he told Moore about the girl, and insists he acted nobly and in the best interest of a child stuck in a war zone with an uncertain future.
High-ranking military and government officials took extraordinary steps to help him, seemingly unaware that others in their own agencies were trying to stop him.
The documents reveal that the court and federal government have blamed each other for the legal predicament. The Justice Department has said what happened in this rural courthouse threatens the nation’s standing in the world and appears as an endorsement of child abduction.
In March 2023, Judge Worrell voided the adoption, stating that America did not ascertain the legality of the transaction prior to constitutionally binding decisions. The Afghan couple who cared for the child contemplates their feelings wondering if the prolonged distress could have been avoided had officials stepped in sooner.
