Deported woman seeks MEA’s help
Washington: An Indian orphan who was deported from the US in 2008 following her arrest on drug charges today wrote to External Affairs Minister SM Krishna asking him to help her get back to the US so that she can live with her two children – eight and nine year olds.
In a letter to Krishna, Jennifer Edgell Haynes, claims that she was a victim of child trafficking, sexual abuse and exploitation after she was adopted by an American couple when she was seven years old.
“Until three years back I believed I was a citizen of the United States. Now I realize that I was a victim of child trafficking, sexual abuse and exploitation,” Hayens said in an email sent to the minister through Anjali Pawar, of Sakhee, a Pune-based NGO.
“When I was just seven years old, I was adopted from an Indian orphanage by an American couple from Atlanta Georgia via American Aid for International Adoption,” she said.
“Unfortunately the adoption was a fraud and within a year of arriving in the United States I found myself placed with a foster family who later adopted me, where I was sexually abused and physically beaten. Thereafter for the next ten years I was shuffled from foster home to foster home,” she said.
“Never did I think that I was not an American citizen until I was arrested for a minor drug charge and send immediately for deportation.
“In 2008 I was separated from my husband and two children in the US and sent back to India, a country which I had forgotten and which had forgotten me,” Hayens said.
“I’m trying desperately to return home to my kids Kadafi, 9 and Kassana, 8 who are missing me a lot and need their mother,” she said adding that her case is also pending in the Supreme Court of India.
The petition before the Supreme Court, she noted, will “take years together for adjudication”.
“By then my children who are yet minor will be grown up. I request intervention by your office…” Haynes said in her email dated 28 May.
The copy of the email sent to Krishna was released in Washington today.