Samoan lawyer defends adoptions

Samoan birth parents who placed their children for adoption through an embattled Utah-based agency were well aware the placement was not temporary, said an attorney on that South Pacific island who represented Focus on Children in a majority of the cases.

"What we basically explain to them is that once they sign off on these things, we keep telling them this is not like an education scholarship or anything these kids are going on, your rights are severed ... you're not going to see your kids again," Patrick Fepuleai said Friday from his law office in Samoa.

Fepuleai has little sympathy for natural parents who now claim they were duped into relinquishing their children to the Focus on Children program, run by Scott and Karen Banks. The couple and five of their employees face a 135-count federal indictment essentially accusing them of running a profitable baby-smuggling operation out of Samoa.

"In those cases where we told them what the reality was, and then they decided to take the kids away from the program, that's why the legal process is there to protect everybody," he said. "And that's the whole thing that's missing from the indictment."

Federal prosecutors have accused agency officials with targeting vulnerable birth parents and misleading them into signing away their parental rights by promising their children would return to Samoa after they turned 18 or by giving them nominal amounts of money or bags of rice.

Fepuleai did not dispute that some natural parents may have started the adoption process with the wrong idea, but he said each had plenty of chances along the way to put a stop to the proceedings.

"That may have happened, but what we're saying is the legal process would have taken care of it," he said, noting the process includes a series of sworn affidavits by all parties, as well as an interview between the natural parents and a judge — a requirement under Samoan law since April 2004.

For the parents who represented their beliefs that their children would one day be returned to them, Fepuleai said: "We tell them to pull their kids out straightaway."

Criminal charges against the agency and its officials include conspiracy to commit alien smuggling, visa fraud and money laundering. They focus on the adoptions of 37 Samoan children between March 2002 and June 2005, though in total, the agency is believed to have placed 81 children from some 40 birth families with adoptive parents in the United States. Eight to 10 of those children now live in Utah homes, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.