For those of you adopting internationally, you probably know that one of the most difficult and dreaded aspects of international adoptions is dealing with the USCIS, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.

I have already written several posts on “how to” best navigate the necessary steps with immigration for your adoption here, here, here... more

Here are some tips for filing your applications with USCIS.

-File your I600A application as soon as you can. As I said earlier, you may or may not need to wait until your homestudy is complete and you should have a good idea of where you are adopting from, what agency you are using, how many children you are adopting, etc. before you can file. Since some offices take up to several months to process the I600A and since many adoption programs require you have it in hand before submitting your paperwork overseas, you do not want to end up waiting on this... more

The second part of USCIS’s “job” regarding adoptions is the I-600. This is the form that is submitted for a particular child. This is another one page, two-sided form that has general information about the adoptive parents, and it also has detailed information about the child being adopted. There is quite a bit of supporting evidence required, including proof that the child is an orphan, proof of the adoption, a medical exam from a designated doctor including tests for HIV and other communicable diseases, etc. These documents and the medical exam are typically... more

The “job” of USCIS in an international adoption is two-part. They have to approve the parents to be qualified to adopt, and they have to approve the child as being a legal orphan and qualifying for a US visa. There is lots of info on their website regarding who qualifies as a legal orphan, and it is very important that you are working with a trust-worthy agency who can ensure that the child you are adopting, is indeed an orphan, not just in the sense that they are not living with any parents, but in the legal US immigration sense too. In cases where a child... more

I have mentioned USCIS in my posts quite a bit lately, and I thought I would do a series of posts on just what USCIS is, what its role is in adoption and some tips on getting your applications handled as smoothly as possible. These posts will only be relevant to families who are citizens of the US, so I apologize to anyone reading who this doesn’t apply to.

USCIS stands for United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. In recent years it has also gone by the acronyms INS, BCIS and possibly another one I am not remembering at the moment. Their... more

In my last post I talked about what a dossier is, what sort of things are required for one, and what you could do to start getting things ready for preparing your dossier for your adoption.

In this post I am going to give you some tips on how to best get through your mountain of paperwork and get that dossier done quickly. Remember, every day those papers sit on your kitchen counter or on your desk, is another day your child won’t be home with you. How’s that for motivation?

After doing this quite a few times, here are my tips…

-Get/make two of everything, even if you don’t... more

If you are new to the adoption world and planning on adopting internationally, you may have wondered what the heck a dossier is. I remember with our first adoption that I had excitedly joined an adoption email group and announced that we had officially started the adoption process by sending in our application to the agency to start our homestudy. I got an email back from another adoptive parent asking if we had sent in our dossier yet and I was thinking, “My what??” Since I had no idea what it was, I was pretty sure I had not sent it in yet.

Your dossier is all of your paperwork... more

Once you start your adoption journey, once of the very first decisions you will have to make is what agency you will choose to do your homestudy. Homestudy regulations and policies vary from state to state, so please use this as a starting point only.

If you are very new to the world of adoption, most people use two agencies in their adoption process, with one being their “homestudy” agency, and one being the “placing” agency. Some people do use the same agency for both, but that is usually people who live in a metropolitan area, near a good choice of placement agencies.

Here is how it works. Your homestudy is basically your permission slip to adopt. You must have a homestudy... more