The case centers on a girl orphaned in Afghanistan after U.S. Army Rangers and Afghan forces raided a rural compound in September 2019, killing her parents, according to records described in the report. U.S. troops took her to Bagram Air Base in Kabul for medical treatment, and she later became part of a story that carried through U.S. courts and government agencies for years.
The Fluvanna County Circuit Court judge who signed off on the adoption, Richard Moore, approved Joshua Mast and his wife’s adoption while the child was still in Afghanistan, about 7,000 miles away, the records show. Moore granted the emergency adoption on Nov. 10, 2019, ordering Virginia’s Department of Vital Statistics to issue a new birth certificate making the girl the Masts’ daughter, and the judge later said he had believed the situation was an emergency. “That is not what happened,” a government lawyer told Moore during a later dispute over the facts presented in the adoption proceeding, according to records of a November 2022 hearing.
The dispute intensified after The Associated Press obtained and published thousands of pages of transcripts and court documents that were previously secret. The materials were released as a result of AP’s effort for access after a 2022 AP report raised concerns at the highest levels of government, spanning officials in the Taliban and the White House, the report said. In court filings and transcripts, U.S. officials later argued the judge’s decision should not have been the one to determine the child’s fate because officials in President Donald Trump’s first administration had chosen a different path—unifying the girl with Afghan relatives—before Moore signed the adoption, the records show.
The newly released documents also describe how the judge and government officials wrestled with competing accounts of the child’s identity and legal status. A juvenile court judge had earlier approved the Masts’ custody petition after a fast-moving process, with a judge declaring the child “stateless” and ordering Afghan authorities to waive jurisdiction, according to the report. The records described in the report say Afghanistan never waived jurisdiction and that U.S. officials were simultaneously seeking to reunite the child with family, including after a State Department meeting in October 2019 that was convened with military and Afghan officials to explain the U.S. government’s obligations under international law.
Those background steps did not prevent the adoption from moving quickly, the report said. Moore described being told that the child needed urgent medical care and that adoption would help get her on a plane to America, and he granted the emergency adoption during a weekend, the report said. The documents described by AP assert that the federal government had not been notified of Mast’s adoption bid and that, had it been informed, government lawyers would have told Moore the child was not stateless and that Afghanistan was searching for her family, the report said.
The records depict additional efforts by U.S. officials after Mast returned home and continued seeking adoption. Two days after the emergency adoption, a State Department-led message arrived in Kabul seeking confirmation that Mast had been granted custody of the orphan, according to the report. The account also describes U.S. officials learning that a man came forward in Afghanistan claiming to be the girl’s uncle and that Afghan officials vetted his story, with U.S. officials signing off, the report said, while Mast’s team pursued a different narrative.
As the U.S. tried to manage the conflict between competing government positions, the evacuation that followed the Taliban’s takeover in 2021 became another inflection point. The report says Mast enlisted help of a translator, Ahmad Osmani, and that U.S. servicemembers were “frantically evacuating” Afghans as the Taliban took control. During that period, records described in the report say military officials worked to place the Masts’ child and caretakers on evacuation-related routes, even as other officials later argued that doing so conflicted with U.S. reunification goals.
The documents also describe tensions between agencies. The report says a State Department official, Rhonda Slusher, submitted a declaration describing how officers drove the Afghan family to a building near the camp’s front gate and that Slusher picked up the baby and insisted she hold her while the family went inside. Slusher’s declaration described being told there was “no U.S. jurisdiction to hold the child” and instructions to transfer the child at the earliest point possible, according to the report, while the Afghan man and woman later characterized what happened as the kind of seizure that should not have occurred.
Judge Richard Moore revisited the case in a hearing in November 2022 after the Afghan couple filed petitions challenging the adoption he had granted. The report says Moore described being uncomfortable with either outcome and listened for about five hours as lawyers argued that the adoption was so riddled with errors it should not be called an adoption at all. Moore blamed the federal government for some of what happened, saying he had known as early as 2020 that Mast was trying to get the girl and that the case involved the government and a court in Fluvanna County, according to the report.
In that same hearing, the judge described uncertainty about what he should have done. “I’ll probably think about this the rest of my life whether I should have said, sorry, that child is in Afghanistan. We’re just going to stand down,” Moore said, according to the records cited in the report, adding: “I don’t know whether that’s what I should have done.” Moore’s later written account also said that “anything they did improper grew” from a desire to help the child, the report says, while he was less sympathetic to the Afghan couple.
After Moore retired, the case continued before a new judge, Claude Worrell, who voided the adoption in March 2023. The report says Worrell took a different view than Moore, focusing on Afghanistan’s claim to the child as its citizen and concluding that Afghanistan should decide her fate, and that Virginia’s appellate courts later upheld the voiding decision. The Virginia Supreme Court considered the case in February 2025, and the report says it had not yet issued a ruling as the years continued.
Meanwhile, the report says the U.S. military reviewed whether Mast violated rules. A three-member panel in an administrative hearing in October 2024 found Mast acted in a way that was “unbecoming” of an officer but did not impose suspension or other formal punishment. In recent months, the federal government indicated in court that it was reconsidering its role in the case, and the report says the Justice Department did not respond to repeated requests to clarify its current position on the child’s fate.
The newly released documents, AP said, depict what the outlet described as a dysfunction between agencies and courts that helped the adoption proceed even as other officials pursued reunification. The report said it had been four years since the Afghan couple has seen the girl, and that in July she turned 6. The AP report was written by Claire Galofaro, with Angeliki Kastanis contributing, according to the story text.