Takeaways on AP report about how US government worked against itself to let Marine adopt Afghan girl

Thousands of pages of once-secret court documents show how federal officials and a Virginia court helped an American Marine adopt an Afghan war orphan, in defiance of the U.S. government’s official policy to unite the child with her family.

The Associated Press fought for three years for access to the documents, which reveal how the country’s fractured bureaucracy enabled Marine Joshua Mast and his wife, Stephanie, to adopt the child who was halfway around the globe, being raised by a couple the Afghan government decided were her family.

The records reveal that the federal government and the court have blamed each other for what has become an international incident, which the government says threatens America’s standing in the world and appears as an endorsement of child trafficking.

The baby was orphaned on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2019. U.S. soldiers pulled her from the rubble and took her to the hospital at an American military base. The U.S. State Department, under President Donald Trump’s first administration, worked with the Afghan government to locate her family.

But the Masts were determined to bring her home, convincing a Virginia judge to grant them an adoption of the girl, who was 7,000 miles away. They then used those adoption documents to take the child from the Afghan family as they fled their homeland during the U.S. military’s chaotic withdrawal in the summer of 2021.