Kyle Adler was nine months old when he left Chile and arrived in an affluent Chicago suburb, unaware that his adoption was built on state-sponsored child trafficking. It took thirty-six years and a DNA database for the truth to surface, triggering years of identity crisis until he traveled to South America earlier this year to meet the birth mother who had never stopped looking for him. It is the story of twenty thousand Chilean children. The system worked exactly as designed.
You did not wait to find out. You placed your application, you paid the fees, and you imported a child, committing an evil against the stranger that the prophets named. Exodus 22:21 commands us to remember the stranger because we were once strangers ourselves. You made the stranger into property, and the transaction was laundered through notaries and state seals. The system worked exactly as designed.
We told ourselves that we were saving infants from poverty when the truth is that we were purchasing a surplus of human beings. We confused a notarized birth certificate with a soul. We treated a mother’s forced silence as a gift to be unpacked in the suburbs of the affluent West. Fairness demands that we recognize this is not a crime unique to the 1970s; it is the structural logic of buying and selling human beings, whether the market is fueled by a right-wing dictatorship or by domestic greed. The Lord will ask what we did to the stranger we invited into our homes, and the truth is that we invited him to escape the very men we were sending weapons to support.
This is not historical artifact. We watch a Utah couple ordered detained for kidnapping while the state facilitates the quiet laundering of children across borders, proving that property rights for the affluent outweigh the fundamental human right to family. We see the same impulses today, masked in the language of security, when families are torn apart in detention centers, treating parents and children as negotiable assets in a border policy built on the denial of human dignity. We have seen this hunger to possess and rearrange the lives of the vulnerable even within our own privatized systems, where adopted children are confined in residential programs, trading one state-sanctioned exile for another. In every instance, the logic remains: a child is a unit of output, a site for profit, or a tool for geopolitical signaling.
Romero stood in the plaza and offered his open hand to the soldiers ordered to kill his flock. “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you: Stop the repression!” Whether you were handed fraudulent paperwork or you chose the silence of convenience, you become the demand that makes a mother forget her child. You are not soldiers, but you were given the same order to turn away from a grieving mother. The door is still open. You do not have to burn the adoption papers to begin the work of return. You can call the birth mother and ask her forgiveness. You can tell your adopted children what you were told and what you were not told. You can spend your life undoing the theft your parents committed. The airport waiting room in Santiago is quiet today. The mother with the faded photograph is looking at the door. And the son from Chicago is walking toward her.