Chris Rock (pictured here leaving a court room on Tuesday), isn’t my client, but I wish he was. I also wish people would leave him, his ex-wife and their child alone. Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere (ha ha), you’ve heard by now that Chris Rock is the subject of an international adoption scandal. According to Perez Hilton, and other unreliable sources, he and his ex-wife somehow spirited a child out of South Africa without complying with the laws of either the United States or South Africa and now they’re all the subject of an international adoption foray of gargantuan proportions. Chris is about to be arrested for child trafficking, the child will be ripped from the arms of her mother and deported, everyone is going to jail, the sky is falling….. Not so fast Perez Hilton, I think this was all above board.
As I’ve stated many times before, I believe everything I read in the tabloids. Every. Single. Word. But this one is a tough sell and here’s why. There are few immigration problems that do not have a solution and I see several options here even though it may seem to many that there is no way that Chris Rock could have complied with the law. Anybody who knows anything about international adoption knows that it’s a complicated process that is carefully monitored by a variety of different governmental bodies. It takes hard work, dedication, commitment, time and money. There’s no way around this.
South Africa is a signatory to the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. This convention establishes very clear rules about how a child can come to the United States through adoption. The country of South Africa will permit adoptions in two, well defined circumstances.
1. Local adoptions of children resident in South Africa by foreigners who have been residents of South Africa for five years.
2. Intercountry adoptions of children resident in South Africa by foreign citizens residing abroad but only if the foreign citizens come from a county that has a “working agreement” with South Africa.
Unfortunately, the United States does not have a “working agreement” with the country of South Africa so option 2 is out. Without this “working agreement” in place, US citizens must be residents of South Africa for 5 years in order to adopt.
To complicate things further, US law has additional requirements for this type of adoption but those go beyond the scope of this blog. You can e-mail either me or Chris’s ex-wife, Malaak Rock, if you’d like to know what those are. I am more likely to respond. My e-mail address is [email protected]
But Chris Rock didn’t reside in South Africa for 5 years, I hear US Magazine and Perez Hilton cry in unison! Not so fast guys, I still think this is all kosher . There were lots of options available.
Option 1- Chris Rock and his wife have decided to become residents of South Africa without first notifying the tabloids. Imagine! The audacity of some people! It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Chris Rock owns a home in South Africa. Perhaps he files tax returns there, perhaps he and his family spend a lot of time there. Perhaps he or his ex-wife are in the process of completing their five years of residency in South Africa (even as they spend time here in the US) at which point, they plan to adopt the child and bring her back to the US as the adopted child of a US citizen. Perhaps, the Rocks explained to the US embassy that they needed to return to the US temporarily due to work commitments and the US embassy granted the child a visitor visa or a humanitarian visa, as they frequently do for adopted children. Once the five year residency requirement has been met, the family can return to South Africa and complete the adoption.
Option 2- The more likely option in my opinion is that the US authorities granted the child permission to come to the US either through a visitor visa or a humanitarian visa. If the US authorities granted the child permission to enter the US, then the child entered the US legally. Once here, the Rock family would then need to obtain a guardianship order stating that it was not in the child’s best interest to return home to South Africa among other things. Armed with this guardianship order, the child can apply for a green card herself and can be adopted by Mrs. Rock. She’ll become a US citizen immediately upon adoption. This process is known as Special Immigrant Juvenile Status.
I have options 3, 4 and 5 too. Call me if you’d like to hear them. I love to talk about this stuff.
So sorry American tabloids, nothing to be seen here. No, Chris Rock did not somehow use a stork shaped drone to have his baby dropped on his door step in the dark of night. I don’t think he hired a coyote to bring the baby across the Mexican border. I doubt very much that he bribed government officials to get his child into the US illegally. Although it may seem impossible to some that the Rock family complied with the law, I think it’s highly unlikely that they didn’t. Change your headline to “Committed parents jump through legal hoops in effort to provide child with family.” Or maybe “Nice guy does what’s best for child.” Also consider these headlines for shock value, “3.7 million orphans in South Africa need a home“, “45 babies found dead in trash cans daily in Karachi“. It’s worth thinking about.
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