Texas A&M University School of Law Texas A&M Law Scholarship Faculty Scholarship 3-2019 Adopting Civil Damages: Wrongful Family Separation in Adoption Malinda L. Seymore Texas A&M University School of Law,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar Part of the Family Law Commons, and the Torts Commons Recommended Citation Malinda L. Seymore, Adopting Civil Damages: Wrongful Family Separation in Adoption, 76 Wash. & Lee L.R. 895 (2019). Available at: https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/1309 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Texas A&M Law Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Texas A&M Law Scholarship. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Adopting Civil Damages: Wrongful Family Separation in Adoption Malinda L. Seymore* Abstract The Trump Administration’s new immigration policy of family separation at the U.S./Mexico border rocked the summer of 2018. Yet family separation is the prerequisite to every legal adoption. The circumstances are different, of course. In legal adoption, the biological parents are provided with all the constitutional protections required in involuntary termination of parental rights, or they have voluntarily consented to family separation. But what happens when that family separation is wrongful, when the birth mother’s consent is not voluntary, or when the birth father’s wishes to parent are ignored? In theory, the child can be returned to the birth parents when consent is invalid because of fraud, coercion, or deceit.