Mickey is free at last!

Our little friend Mickey, late of Vietnam, is now home perched on the Appalachian ridge at Deep Gap, overlooking most of North Carolina, with his big sister Máeráed. He is a newly minted American, no thanks to the US State Department. Pretty much the whole sorry story is in the local paper here.

You will notice that while saner heads in Washington approved the granting of a visa to young Mickey, the good folks at the American Embassy in Hanoi simply refused to accept being overruled.

The Deep Gap couple had already successfully rebutted a State Department challenge to their visa request and had to wait for this successful conclusion to a second challenge from the State Department. Although the State Department, through the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, recommended revocation of the petition for the visa, U.S. Immigration had the final word.

This would seem to indicate that somebody at the Embassy had a personal stake in denying exit visas for twenty-six American families, thus screwing up their lives and costing them tens of thousands of dollars. For what? To prove some folks in the US government don't like doing business with the Vietnamese? Some other reason?

It was not a good faith argument in any case. Consider this:

The U.S. State Department is concerned about baby trafficking and initially demanded further proof that Mickey had been abandoned to ensure that he fit the legal definition of an orphan under U.S. law. The guard at the orphanage did not record Mickey as an abandoned child, but “[he] pointed out to both the U.S. investigators and to the Vietnamese law firm we hired that he is not required to record abandonments,” said Mary.

This is proof of how corrupted by bias the State Dept at Hanoi was in this case. When pressured, they produced the Vietnamese transcript of the interview with the orphanage guard and a translation into English.

Funny thing. The English transcript provided by the embassy did NOT include the clear statement in Vietnamese that he was NOT required to record abandonments. Since the embassy based its objection to Mickey solely on that one point, failing to translate the key sentence smacks of "cover our ass as usual."

If Máeráed's family had not had the resources to hire an investigator for themselves, and to have the transcript translated themselves, they never would have known this.

And there are 25 other families dealing with the same nightmare.

You're government at work. These clowns have to go.


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