Category: News

Action Alert, News

Action Alert: Urgent! Join the Adoptee Citizenship Act Virtual Rally, September 23. Here’s how!

September 20, 2020

Big news! We’ve hit a key milestone with the Adoptee Citizenship Act and we need YOU to speak up for citizenship for ALL adoptees. Join us for a Virtual Rally on Twitter this Wednesday to demand that lawmakers pass the Adoptee Citizenship Act, H.R. 2731, and ensure citizenship for ALL adoptees.

On Wednesday, September 23rd, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration & Citizenship will discuss and listen to evidence regarding “Immigrants as Essential Workers During COVID-19.” During this time, a statement by Adoptees for Justice will be submitted to the Subcommittee. If the statement is accepted, H.R. 2731 will move onto markup, the next step in the legislative process.

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New York : Update on OBC Access and Orders–NEW YORK CITY

August 9, 2020

The processing time for opening a sealed record and preparing for issuance is sixteen weeks. I cannot provide a time frame as to when we will resume normal business functions at this time. I understand that adoptees have waited many years to obtain their pre-adoption record, NYC apologizes for the interruption in services and appreciates your understanding during these challenging times.”

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New York: Update on OBC Access and Orders–NEW YORK STATE

August 5, 2020

The Pre-Adoption Birth Certificate Unit at the NYS Bureau of Vital records has been up and running for several weeks. Currently, they are experiencing significant delays in processing orders for Pre-Adoption Birth Certificates. At the direction of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s Executive Order 202, pertaining to the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency, offices are currently operating with reduced staff and resources. Due to the research needed to locate and fulfill an order, their limited staff is still working to process the remaining orders. Depending on volume of forthcoming inquiries received from the public, they are currently processing 200-300 orders per week. They have continued to process applications in the order in which they were received. We all appreciate everyone’s patience as the Bureau of Vital Records works to fulfill the high volume of requests for Pre-Adoption Birth Certificates.

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Bastard Nation Action Alert: Don’t let ancestry.com purge DNA matches

July 25, 2020

Ancestry.com has announced that it plans in August to purge its smaller matches –6-8cM- segments. In other words, ancestry.com DNA customers are about to lose a substantial number of family members/DNA connections from its customer’s DNA matches.

In general, this is a terrible idea, but specifically, these smaller matches are the exact place where African American and mixed Native Americans find their ancestral connections. This change will also affect adoptee connections.

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Framed in Bigotry and Discrimination: A look at Trump’s Executive Order: Strengthening the Child Welfare System for America’s Children.

July 15, 2020

The emphasis in the Executive Order is not some abstract improvement, but the creation of a robust evangelical-coded “faith-based” equalization in child welfare. The EO promises to increase much-needed child welfare improvement not through government initiative, but through taxpayer-funded tax-exempt so-called “faith-based” partnerships with private religious child welfare organizations and corporations including churches, para-churches, and ministries. Moreover, the EO promises “faith-based “foster and adoption recruitment.” This suggests nonsensically that the lack of “faith-based partnerships” keeps children stuck in state foster care when they could be transferred to the Christian adoption market if that market were more open and availab

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Good News from Missouri: Reclaim the Records takes down bureaucratic secret keepers

May 7, 2020

In 2016 Reclaim the Records, using the Missouri Sunshine Law, requested a simple database extraction of state birth and death listings from January 1, 1910-December 31, 2015. According to Reclaim the Records attorney, Bernie Rhodes, the extraction should “take only a few keystrokes” to complete. DHSS , however, for reasons unknown, responded with a “backdoor denial.” It first demanded $1.49 million to fulfill the request, crazy-claiming compilation would take over 35,000 staff hours at $42.50 per hour (!) When Reclaim the Records balked, the fee was lowered mysteriously to a still high $5000. Then, DHSS rejected the request in full and ran to former Missouri Registrar Garland Land for advice on how to keep the birth and death indices from public perusal.

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