In my state, as I mentioned, we have the highest rate of international adoptions in the country. We have families that have opened their hearts and their homes to kids from every country from Vietnam to Guatemala to Nepal to Haiti. My background as county attorney for eight years, I oversaw the lawyers who worked with foster care and adoptions. We made it a huge priority to try to speed up the process for kids to be adopted from foster care. Right now in our country nearly 400,000 children are living without permanent families in the foster care system. Over 100,000 of these children are eligible for adoption, but too many of them will languish for years in foster care. Often times, with very good families for them, but obviously a permanent home is what you want. We talked about international adoptions around the world, there are estimated to be nearly 18 million orphans who have lost both parents and are living in orphanages or on the streets that have again a permanent home.

Senator Blunt talked about some examples from his own state, I use one example when the Hatch family, Emerson Hatch was one of these children, an orphan, started the process to adopt her from India in 2000. Emerson was one of 300 kids living in an orphanage built to house 34 children. The Indian government refused to release her and the family had to endure a two year wait and an earthquake and a contested election in India before they were finally able to get her out of India with one minute to spare before her passport expired. She was malnourished, she was two years old, but only weighed fourteen pounds and was in poor health. But, with a lot of love and with the help of the adoption medicine clinic at the University of Minnesota, Emerson and the Hatch family are thriving, she is in high school and the family is passionate about giving orphans permanent, loving homes. And so there are many things that this Senate can do.

The first is, as Senator Blunt has explained, leading efforts when countries put up barriers for no good reason. Obviously sometimes you’ll have legal issues in countries that have corruption or other reasons there are pauses in adoptions. But, when other countries are putting up barriers for no good reasons, and for reasons that are fairly transparent, we must lead and work with other senators across the aisle to get this done.

The second is legislation, we’ve had a number of successful bills pass in the senate. The bill I’m probably proudest of is something I did with actually Senator Sessions and Senator Inhofe which was to allow older siblings to come in internationally when a younger sibling had been adopted. What was happening was kids would turn 17 after holding the family together as the oldest sibling and then they would no longer be eligible for adoption. We had a family out of the Philippines, 9 children, oldest kid held them together in an orphanage, oldest two kids, and then they turned too old to be adopted. That family I will never forget, the Merkouris came to me and they said well we have these choices we can adopt the 7 kids and leave the two behind, it was like a Sophie’s Choice, or we can leave them all there because we want them to stay together or you can change the law. That was the discussion. So I worked with my colleagues and I’ll never forget the Mccorrises came with pictures of these children on their iPads and went around the offices to house members and Senators that were holding up the bill, and showed them to their staff members, and the staff members would call our staff crying and said okay we won’t hold it up anymore. And we were able to get that passed and I was able to be there Senator Blunt with that family in their home, a farmhouse that they’ve expanded, and it was like a Philippines version of The Sound of Music. And they’re an incredible family, I just talked to them a few months ago doing well.

So this is I would argue to our colleagues a bipartisan area in Congress, something we can do across the aisle, but it’s also something where we can make a significant difference not just in one family’s life, but in many, many families’ lives. So, I want to thank you for your work and your continued leadership in this area.