Justice.gov:
[…] Arkansas Attorney General announced today that Paul Petersen was arrested on federal charges. A federal grand jury in the Western District of Arkansas indicted Petersen on one count of Conspiracy to Smuggle Illegal Aliens for Commercial Advantage and Private Financial Gain, four counts of Aiding and Abetting in Alien Smuggling for Commercial Advantage and Private Financial Gain, seven counts of Wire Fraud, five counts of Mail Fraud, one count of Conspiracy to Commit Visa Fraud, and one count of Conspiracy to Commit Money Laundering.
According to the Indictment, Petersen is a licensed attorney who practices law in Arizona, Utah, and Arkansas. Beginning in 2014, Petersen devised a scheme to defraud and obtain money and property from unknowing adoptive parents and others. He paid pregnant Marshallese women large sums of United States currency to induce them to travel to the Western District of Arkansas and to put their babies up for adoption in the Western District of Arkansas. He purchased airline tickets for them and caused them to conceal their true travel purpose from the authorities in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) and the United States. read more
I hope Shelly Fabares wasn’t involved.
One of many I’m sure.
And how many US Customs & Immigration holdovers are in on it? The ones who turned a blind eye to the regularity with which pregnant Marshallese women came through a certain airport? It’s not as though the pattern would be hard to spot.
Voter suppression!
Why do some fight so hard for illegal aliens? This is why.
It is their pipeline to children. Make no mistake, this is not an adoption scandal. It is a child sex trafficking scandal.
Cliche,
Homosexuals aren’t going to make themselves, you know.
@Cliche Guevarea — Actually, no, this is not a human/sex trafficking situation. Adoption of children from the Marshall Islands began back in the 1990’s because that source became a very easy way for prospective adoptive parents to adopt — according to the available information from a number of adoption agencies. The trouble is/was that all the adoption agencies were being mislead or were misleading others. This is a case of non-enforcement of changing adoption law. Peterson is just one of many private adoption lawyers who facilitated hundreds of adoptions — legally, though the U.S. courts. Not all international adoptions are of orphans. There have been just as many (more, perhaps) adoptions of children from places like Guatemala in which one or both parents are still living — who wish to place their children for adoption. Third world or still-developing nations do not have welfare programs that allow them to have an unlimited number of children which their state (taxpayers) will then support.
Even I, upon hearing about how relatively fast it was to adopt from the Marshalls, proposed just such an adoption to Geoff C. We’d already been through international adoption and the long wait was excruciating. I thought a younger brother would round out our growing family. Fortunately, Geoff C. brought me back to earth with his vivid prophecies of a giant boy child eating his way through 50# of rice a week and forever standing in front of an open refrigerator until he was eighteen years old. I later discovered that the “birth mothers” of the Marshalls were being told that “their” children were merely going to America to be raised in better conditions and would return to these “real mothers” when they turned eighteen; educated, well-fed, and with the ability to take care of their elders in old age. These women were also being told that they would have open access to their children during the kid’s temporary situation with so-called adoptive parents.
https://www.civilbeat.org/2018/11/marshallese-adoptions-fuel-a-lucrative-practice-for-some-lawyers/
…
P.S. Ours was an adoption of a documented orphan whose mother left her outside to face the fates. Our child was found without so much as a note from the woman who left her. That baby is now a very happy, accomplished young woman.
AA: sorry for the delay in my response as I’ve been traveling all day.
That Peterson story does not necessarily quell any concerns that I would have about a guy charging $35k to grease an adoption path.
The Marshall Islands situation is different somewhat due to their relation to the US.
An adoption is admirable.
But what Peterson is accused of stomps over all kinds of moral, legal and ethical lines for the purpose of purchasing humans.
@Cliche — Unless you’ve been through an adoption, $35K and more seems like an outrageous sum and for some reason it makes the adoption process sound like “baby purchasing”, which it is not. $35,000 would be on the low end, actually, for an international adoption. There are too many costs to go into detail here, but 20-some years ago, the cost would have been around $20K, and that depends on how much the other country charges; it could have been more. One question adoptive parents hate is, “How much did you pay?” just because it sounds like we bought our children. And that’s just not true. No one is “greasing” the skids. It just costs a lot of money to adopt out of country. We were motivated by international adoption for many reasons, but no one got rich off our adoption fees, there are just too many people involved in the process.
And the Marshall Islands situation is not different, in this case, because of their status as a territory. I hope you get to read the whole article I linked.