Five American families and the special needs SA children they have legally adopted will finally be able to go home after the Home Affairs Department agreed to issue the necessary documents and passports.

This, notes a report in The Herald, was after they launched an urgent High Court application last week at which all the families testified about their plight. The families have been trapped in SA for months because of an apparent change in policy by Home Affairs which now labels the children as foreigners and was refusing to issue them with SA passports, effectively leaving them stateless.

Their attorney, Debbie Wybrow, in the application before Judge Gayaat Salie-Hlophe, said Home Affairs officials were acting unconstitutionally by ignoring the rights of the children, aged between three and five, who were living in institutions before their adoption.

She said that up until earlier in 2019 the practice was that the children would be issued SA passports to allow them to leave the country while Home Affairs processed their ‘noting and name change’ applications, which could take up to four years. But in September, department officials told her that from the time the adoptions were finalised the children were ‘legally as if they were born to the adoptive parents’ and that the ‘US should show their commitment to the children by issuing them with US travel documents’.

They refused to process their passport applications.

The US consulate then issued them with visas and ‘waiver documents’, explaining that they were ‘Hague-adopted’ children and it was in their best interests for them to reach their new homes without delay.

While immigration officials allowed the first family to depart, the following day an official told another family that, on the instructions of the Minister of Home Affairs, the child had to leave on a SA passport, notes The Herald report.

‘These families, and the children, are in an invidious position,’ Wybrow said.

‘The department has refused to issue them with SA passports and it is refusing to allow them to travel on the US documentation.’

After three days of negotiations, the department finally agreed to fast-track their applications for noting and name change and applications for SA passports. ‘We have been asking for this since May,’ Wybrow said.

Full report in The Herald (subscription needed)