Can Trump Break the China Adoption Logjam?

300 Chinese children matched with adoptive American families have been stranded in orphanages for six years. Families are pleading with Trump to bring them home.

As President Donald Trump conducts negotiations with China on a global scale, grand strategy isn’t the only matter likely to be affected. Nearly 300 little lives hang in the balance too.

The future of these children, now waiting in Chinese orphanages to be united with their promised American families, depends on Trump’s willingness to resolve their plight with China’s President Xi Jinping.

Waiting American families are taking to social media, pleading with Trump to personally intervene and ensure that China honors its six-years-old promise to them and the sons and daughters they pledged to adopt. The campaign follows a bipartisan appeal to Trump earlier this year from 105 members of Congress.

Pictures of children—some waiting in the U.S. hoping for a long-expected sibling, others waiting in China for long-expected new families—are seen with the caption, “Bring them home, Mr. President?”

The posts direct viewers to the site of “Hope Leads Home,” a group of parents advocating for completing pending China adoptions. The group is led by waiting mother Aimee Welch, whose efforts to bring her daughter home have been featured in outlets from the South China Morning Post to the New York Post, Bloomberg, CNN, and PBS.

Lifeline Children’s Services, one of the largest providers of international adoptions, has produced and shared the stories of several waiting families in a series of poignant video posts. Lifeline President and Executive Director Herbert M. Newell IV expressed their hope:

“For more than six years, hundreds of American families have been faithfully waiting to bring their children home from China. These children are growing up without the stability of the families already chosen for them. When we delay, we break promises to both parents and children. President Trump has the ability to cut through red tape, demand answers, and ensure that these waiting children are not forgotten. It’s time to honor our commitments and bring these children home.”

A year ago, China announced the closure of its international adoption program, leaving in limbo some 300 children who were formally matched with American families between 2019 and 2021.

For decades prior, the U.S.-China adoption program had thrived, placing some 80,000 children in families from 1999 to 2018.

In 2020, following the onset of COVID-19, the Chinese government first paused adoption processing. At the time, it promised to honor its commitments to children and their waiting families once pandemic conditions improved. Now, six years later, the beds that were lovingly readied remain empty, the little clothes and toys packed for the trip home long outgrown.

All of these 300 children have medical needs—needs that, China and the U.S. agreed, required care and nurture beyond what Chinese institutions could provide, making them unlikely candidates for domestic adoption. American families were eager to welcome these little ones into homes where they could grow and thrive.

Without access to the therapies and love permanent families can provide, the needs of some matched children have worsened irreversibly. Other children have aged out of the system.

Yet families didn’t wait idly. They banded together, they worked with their agencies, they wrote, they called, they prayed. They shared their stories in print, on television, online. Reporters and journalists covered them widely.

They pressed their representatives, senators, and governors to intervene. And their elected officials did—on both sides of the aisle and multiple times. These letters may be the most broadly bipartisan initiatives of the last four years.

After all, nearly every American has a friend or family member touched by international adoption.

And yet, while the Biden State Department raised the issue with its counterparts in China, President Joe Biden never responded to the families’ pleas to personally intervene. China’s top-down government read his lack of interest and didn’t budge.

Trump and the first lady’s recent passionate appeal on behalf of kidnapped Ukrainian children resonated with waiting families looking to Trump to break the logjam of Chinese children.

Today, as trade and tariff negotiations proceed with China, American families—who have seen the Trump administration’s support for foster care and adoption—are desperately hoping Trump will succeed where Biden failed.

300 little lives depend upon it.

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