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The Virginia Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a U.S. Marine and his wife will keep an Afghan orphan they brought to the United States, concluding that a Virginia adoption-finality law prevents the child’s Afghan relatives from challenging the adoption after a six-month deadline.
The case stems from an adoption order granted in 2020 by Fluvanna County Circuit Court Judge Richard Moore, after Joshua and Stephanie Mast received custody of the child while she was in Afghanistan. The Virginia Supreme Court said the statute meant to create permanency bars the relatives’ challenge, reversing two lower courts that had concluded the adoption was void from the start.
According to the Supreme Court’s decision, the adoption challenge could not proceed on the relatives’ theory that they had a continuing legal relationship with the child that American courts could not sever. The justices said the relatives were trying to undo the adoption after the time set by Virginia law had passed, and that the only remaining way to undercut such finality would be to argue a parent’s constitutional rights were violated.
In writing the majority opinion, the court leaned on Moore’s findings from a long-running proceeding that followed the initial adoption decision. The opinion cited Moore’s determination that the Afghan couple were “not and never were parents,” describing their lack of an Afghan court order and their failure to prove a biological relationship to the child.
The underlying dispute dates back to the child’s injury on the battlefield in Afghanistan in September 2019, when U.S. soldiers raided a rural compound. Her parents and siblings were killed, and soldiers brought her to a hospital at an American military base.
The U.S. government and the Afghan authorities ultimately decided that the girl was Afghan and to reunite her through the Afghan government’s identification and vetting process, according to the case record described by the court. An uncle the Afghan government cleared chose to give the child to his son and his new wife, who raised her for roughly 18 months in Afghanistan while the Masts pursued adoption in Virginia.
After the Masts were granted custody in rural Fluvanna County, they later received a final adoption in December 2020. When the six-month statute of limitations expired, the child was still in Afghanistan living with the Afghan relatives, who testified they had no idea a judge was granting the girl to another family. Mast later worked through intermediaries and military contacts to try to move the relatives to send the child to the United States for medical treatment, but they refused to allow her to go alone.
As the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban took control, the Afghan family agreed to leave, and Mast helped arrange an evacuation flight. After that, the record described in the Supreme Court’s opinion says Mast took the baby from the family at a refugee resettlement center in Virginia, and the relatives have not seen her since.
The case also included a federal government involvement that changed over time. The Supreme Court’s opinion said the lower-court rulings and the relatives’ arguments ran into the adoption-finality law, and it also dismissed the government’s emphasis on a foreign-policy decision connected to the Trump administration’s first term to reunite the child through Afghan channels. The justices noted that the Department of Justice in the Trump second administration withdrew a request to make arguments in the case on the morning of oral arguments, after permission to do so.
In their written dissent, three justices—Thomas P. Mann, Chief Justice Cleo E. Powell and LeRoy F. Millette Jr.—said the outcome reflected a deeply flawed process. The dissent described the case as “wrong,” “cancerous” and “like a house built on a rotten foundation,” and it said a Virginia court had “never had the right” to give the child to the Masts.
The dissent also criticized the Masts and the circuit court, saying the adoption process required an “impeccable” procedure and that the Masts “brazenly” misled the courts in their effort to adopt the child. “If this process was represented by a straight line, (the Masts) went above it, under it, around it, and then blasted right through it until there was no line at all — just fragments collapsing into a cavity,” Mann wrote.
In the proceedings described by the court, the relatives refused DNA testing, arguing it could not reliably prove familial connection between opposite-gender half-cousins. They also argued that Afghanistan’s decision to claim the girl as a citizen and determine next of kin mattered for the child’s custody and future.
An attorney for the Masts declined to comment publicly, citing a circuit court order shielding details of the case. Lawyers representing the Afghan relatives also said they were not yet prepared to comment, while the Afghan couple’s identities were withheld in the reporting because of fear of retaliation in Afghanistan, according to the case’s court-protective order.