I reported the other day that the Catholic Church in Florida was eager to repeat the controversial 1960’s Operation Pedro Pan and airlift thousands of “orphans” from Haiti to Florida.
According to the Miami Herald, it isn’t going to happen. The Haitian government wants to keep its kids!
Florida is unlikely to see a wave of Haitian children orphaned by last week’s killer earthquake, as Haitian and U.S. leaders do not favor a recreation of the famed 1960s Pedro Pan effort that rescued thousands of children from communist Cuba, the state’s top social service administrator said Tuesday.
“The Haitian civil government is starting to reemerge,” said Florida Department of Children & Families Secretary George Sheldon, who has been meeting with state, county and federal leaders for several days to coordinate refugee resettlement efforts.
“The desire of the Haitian people, to the extent that this can be done, is for the children to be cared for in Haiti,” Sheldon added. “That is their preference.”
Florida and U.S. government leaders, Sheldon added, are also reluctant to airlift hundreds or thousands of orphans because of concerns that children who lived through the earthquake may be too fragile to withstand being uprooted from their homeland.
“These children who have gone through the earthquake have suffered a tremendous trauma,” Sheldon said. “To move them now to a foreign country where they don’t speak the language and do not have families would be to re-traumatize them.
Mary Ross Agosta, a spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Miami, reiterated the Catholic church’s offer to help spearhead a Pedro Pan-like rescue effort.
Supposedly only kids that were previously (before the earthquake) assigned to American adoptive parents can leave, see my previous post here for details.
Currently, only children with valid adoption papers or in the process of being adopted by a U.S. family are entering the United States, Homeland Security officials said.
One flight carrying 54 children bound for adoptive families in Pennsylvania landed at Orlando Sanford International Airport early Tuesday before departing for Pittsburgh at about 7 a.m., Sheldon said. The children had been living in an orphanage run by two Pittsburgh-area sisters.
Another flight with 16 children landed in Port St. Lucie, Sheldon said. The children will remain in the Treasure Coast overnight as they await their prospective parents.
The Miami Herald references Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell’s potentially precedent-setting trip to Haiti where he brought 53 orphans to Pittsburgh* of all places. How many other attention-getting gambits will we see from politicians now that Rendell has done it? And, check this out, I never would have believed it, but CNN’s Anderson Cooper criticized the Rendell rescue, here.
Currently, only children with valid adoption papers or in the process of being adopted by a U.S. family are entering the United States, Homeland Security officials said.
One flight carrying 54 children bound for adoptive families in Pennsylvania landed at Orlando Sanford International Airport early Tuesday before departing for Pittsburgh at about 7 a.m., Sheldon said. The children had been living in an orphanage run by two Pittsburgh-area sisters.
Another flight with 16 children landed in Port St. Lucie, Sheldon said. The children will remain in the Treasure Coast overnight as they await their prospective parents.
At least someone is making sense! US Ambassador Kenneth Merten said we need to be sure that in our eagerness to scoop up the “orphans” we don’t separate children from their families.
U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten said the U.S. Embassy in Haiti is spending a lot of time processing adoption papers for orphans.
“We are trying to move legitimate orphans out of here as fast as we possibly can,” he said. “We need to get Haitian government authority for that, but . . . people need to understand we are trying to protect adoptive parents in the United States to make sure the child that ends up on their doorsteps . . . is the child they have developed a relationship with down here.”
He said the embassy also is trying to ensure children aren’t mistakenly separated from their parents and labeled as orphans.
That is it for today, check back tomorrow to see if the Obama Administration has caved. You can bet they are being lobbied by the Left (the Religious Left too!) to reverse themselves and open the flood gates.
* Pittsburgh! We have written many posts in recent months about how Pittsburgh is overloaded with refugees, some being evicted from apartments. Refugee agencies there are already overwhelmed. Here is just one of many posts on the subject.