Child's homecoming delayed nearly a year by probe, paperwork

Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH)

Author: Stephen Koff; Plain Dealer Bureau Chief

Washington - Brown-eyed Eli Cahoon Rosenberg is a baby in limbo.

American parents adopted the 15-month-old Vietnamese boy nearly a year ago, and the Vietnamese government recognizes the adoption. But for reasons that started with claims of fraud and black-market babies but now hinge on one thing - paperwork - the United States refuses to let Eli in.

He is with a foster mother in Vietnam, with his American parents paying for the care.

"Eli," vows Jane Cahoon, his Ohio-born mother, "will one day come to America." She waits to rock him in the blue-walled nursery she set up in her Washington home, where she keeps two of her family's rocking chairs that lulled generations of her Medina County relatives to sleep.

"This is just wrong," says Lynda Zengerle, an attorney for Jane and her husband, Seth Rosenberg. "It's form over substance."

But Bill Strassberger, a spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, defends his department. "It's very important that everything be aboveboard and there not be any question as to the integrity of the documents that are being provided, of the statements that are being made," he said. "It's not a technicality."

The Cahoon homestead in Medina County has produced prodigious amounts of milk, abundant crops and four generations of farmers. Jane, 45, grew up riding horses and for a time as a young adult lived on the family farm. But she eventually moved to Washington.

There she met Seth Rosenberg - who, like Jane, had gone to Kent State University.

Seth, 50, who grew up in Connecticut, is a painter and sculptor. He married Jane in 1991 in a ceremony at Jane's brother's Bratenahl home, and during the ensuing years they put their energy and sometimes-meager earnings into building up Seth's document-and-picture-framing business and art gallery. That meant putting off a family.

On a vacation to Italy in May last year, with the business finally stable, Jane started thinking it was time to add a child to the picture. "Eli to me was conceived in Venice," she says.

They initially considered seeking a baby from Ukraine, then switched their focus to Vietnam. They hired the Adoption Center of Washington, which in turn worked with a California-based agency, Asian Orphans of Hope, that specialized in Vietnamese adoptions.

On Nov. 10, 2000, they got the notice that the child was available, with an e-mail photo. "All of a sudden here was this little boy," Seth says. "We were both speechless."

Adopting a baby in Vietnam requires several steps. First, you must go there, fill out paperwork and spend some time with the child. Then, usually while the baby waits in foster care, the Vietnamese government waits for 40 days to make sure no family members come to claim him.

But before the INS will issue a visa, the adoption must be complete - which is why Seth went to Vietnam and fell in love with his son before applying to bring him home.

On Nov. 23 last year, Seth flew to Ho Chi Minh City and for a week lived in the Caravelle Hotel caring for the child named Huynh Hoang Hung. Seth called him Eli - for Seth's mother, Lillian, his late brother Eric, and Jane's aunt Elizabeth. Eli's 29-year-old birth mother, a worker in the rice fields, was giving him up because she was poor and had another child to feed, according to her affidavit.

Putting Eli in foster care, Seth flew home, then returned to Vietnam in early January with his wife and his sister, Jan Potts, to officially get custody of Eli. They went to the INS office and presented paperwork for Eli's visa. Agents told them to go back to the hotel, that they'd call when everything was ready.

But soon the INS agent in charge, Larry Crider, notified the adoptive parents that there could be problems. According to correspondence and affidavits from several other adoptive parents who also were in Vietnam, the INS suspected that "baby brokers" were paying women to give up their children for adoption to American couples.

Jane and Seth waited for days for Eli's visa to be approved, and six other couples at the hotel waited and worried about their babies, too. Eventually the other children got their visas. Eli did not.

There were several problems, the INS said in meetings and correspondence with Eli's American parents. One was from a "field investigation" in which unspecified neighbors of Eli's birth mother said that a man had come around offering money to women who would give up their babies for adoption. Eli's mother had accepted such an offer, the INS asserted.

Another problem was that neighbors said a man was in the household - a man named "Yamaha," who beat the mother and who was probably Eli's father. This would seemingly contradict the mother's claims that she was single and that Eli's birth father could not be found.

The third problem related to the mother's identification papers. Her name is Huynh Kim Chi, yet she registered the birth and adoption in the name of Huynh Kim Loan, her sister. So who, asked the INS, was the real mother?

"I was absolutely in shock," Jane recalls of a meeting in which the INS told her of its concerns. "I absolutely fell apart."

Depressed, angry and financially unable to stay in Vietnam indefinitely, Jane and Seth returned Eli to foster care, flew back to Washington and eventually hired an immigration lawyer. They also hired lawyers in Vietnam to investigate their case, going into debt to pay for it all, they said.

Here is what those lawyers found: The person identified as "Yamaha" turned out to be a female roommate named Damaha. The claims of baby selling could not be backed up with witnesses or evidence.

How these facts could be so wrong remains a mystery. Crider, the INS agent in charge in Vietnam, reportedly has been transferred and could not be reached for comment. Strassberger, the department spokesman, said he could not discuss this specific case because it is pending, but noted that opportunities exist for baby buying in poor countries like Vietnam, "and we want to make sure the system is not corrupt."

Documents from Eli Rosenberg's case make clear that the INS was focusing on adoptions assisted by Asian Orphans of Hope, and the INS at one time claimed to have a confession of baby buying from an employee of that agency. But the employee denied ever making such a statement. And the director of the INS appeals division in Washington noted in an opinion last month that the record "does not contain any investigative reports, witness statements, or the signed confession that was allegedly made."

Nor did the INS provide any evidence or witnesses to buttress almost all of its other claims, prompting the appeals division last month to throw out those obstacles to Eli's immigration.

"They make all these allegations and then when they're asked to provide the documentation, they fold up the tent and go away," says Zengerle, the couple's American lawyer.

But the INS did get one fact right. Huynh Kim Chi had used her sister's identification card. In sworn affidavits, she and her sister said that Chi had lost her own card and needed one for all official paperwork in Vietnam. So she borrowed her sister's, using her sister's name instead of her own when giving up her son for adoption. DNA tests obtained by Jane and Seth's lawyers show the birth mother, her sister and Eli are blood relatives, but that does not fix the documentation.

This is why the INS still will not let Eli in. It has proposed that Eli's adoption be reversed, that his birth certificate be corrected to show his mother's real name, and that Jane and Seth then start the adoption all over.

It's not so simple, say their lawyers. Vietnam has no established way to handle such an extraordinary circumstance, so it could take another year to turn everything around, the Vietnamese lawyers say. Plus, "we need to find [the mother's] identity papers, which was the problem in the first place," says Zengerle, the American lawyer.

They have applied for humanitarian parole on Eli's behalf, which would allow him to come here while the technicalities are resolved. Members of Congress, including Rep. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who represents Jane's parents, have written letters and made calls on their behalf.

Christmas is coming, which means INS will close operations in Vietnam for a week. Then comes the Tet holiday, when the Vietnamese government virtually shuts down.

"If we don't get the baby before Christmas," says Zengerle, the lawyer, "it will be spring" before there's any possibility of resolution.

And so Eli's American parents wait and hope, with two rocking chairs - one that was Jane's great-grandfather's, the other from her mother. "She said, 'You have to have that rocking chair. Every grandchild of mine has been rocked in it, and Eli's no exception,' " Jane says.

Contact Stephen Koff at: skoff@plaind.com, 216-999-4212