By Catholic New vice

WASHINGTON (CNS) — The heads of five Catholic agencies that work with Haitian earthquake victims have outlined steps they say the U.S. government should take to protect children left alone after the Jan. 12 earthquake.

One-year-old Kevin St. Fleve sits on a bench on a street in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Feb. 6. More than 1 million people remain homeless after Haiti’s Jan. 12 earthquake. CNS PHOTO/BOB ROLLER

In a Feb. 4 letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Home-land Security Secretary Janet Napoli-tano, and Health and Hu-man Ser-vices Secre-tary Kathleen Sebelius, the heads of Catholic refugee, immigrant and relief organizations urged specific steps to be followed before “children are brought to the United States and placed in any legal adoption proceedings.”

The agency heads acknowledged the compassion of people in the United States as demonstrated by the “many offers to adopt children who might have lost their parents in the tragedy.”

In any humanitarian crisis, they said, “many children are left without anyone to care for them. Whether parents or guardians are killed or families are separated by war or natural disaster, these children are in dire need of special assistance or protection. In order to properly serve these children and to ensure that their special needs are met, safeguards and procedures must be established that preserve the best interest of each individual child.”

The Catholic leaders stressed that Haitian children who are not already matched with U.S. adoptive parents should only be brought to this country if it is determined to be in the best interest of those children.

The letter was signed by Johnny Young, executive director of the Migration and Refugee Services of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops; Maria Odom, executive director of Catholic Legal Immigration Network; Father Larry Snyder, executive director of Catholic Charities USA; Ken Hackett, president of Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. bishops’ overseas relief and development agency; and Johan Ketelers, secretary-general of the Geneva-based International Catholic Migration Commission.

“Family reunification is an important goal and must be protected to the greatest extent possible, while placement with a guardian within Haiti will sometimes prove to be the appropriate course,” they wrote. “If no family or appropriate guardian is found, and if it is further determined that it is in the child’s best interest not to remain in Haiti, the child should be considered for international placement.”

Save the Children, the international aid organization the United Nations has asked to coordinate efforts to reunite Haitian children and their families, has similarly stressed the need to make every attempt to reunite children with their families and evaluate orphans’ needs before adoptions take place.

A Jan. 21 press release from Save the Children said that “it is almost always in the best interests of a child to remain with their relatives and extended family, when possible.”

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