Rehomed: The Notarized Form That Lets an Adoptive Parent Hand a Child to a Stranger — and the Federal Agencies That Refuse to Count Them

There is no federal registry of American children who were legally adopted, then given away. There is no state that reliably knows how many of its own adoptees have been transferred to adults it never screened. There is a $4.7 billion federal adoption-assistance program, a $75 million federal bonus pool that pays states roughly $5,000 for each foster-care adoption above a baseline, and a national data system — AFCARS — that HHS has run since 1995 without ever publishing a count of adoption dissolutions. What exists instead is a private transfer market that operates on a single instrument: a notarized power of attorney delegating parental authority to another adult. It costs about $15 at a bank. It requires no home study, no background check, no court, no caseworker, and in most cases no notice to anyone. Thirteen years after Reuters documented children being handed over in motel parking lots, roughly two-thirds of states still have no law against it, the federal bill meant to address it has been introduced in five consecutive Congresses without becoming law, and the practice's most visible institutional home has simply migrated from a Utah agency to a larger one in California.

How the Transfer Actually Works

The legal architecture is almost embarrassingly simple. Every state has some form of statutory delegation of parental powers — Virginia's is codified at Va. Code § 20-166, Utah's and Nebraska's run through their probate and juvenile codes. A parent signs a power of attorney handing another adult authority to make medical, educational, and custodial decisions for a child. Virginia caps the delegation at six months, but the statute places no limit on how many successive six-month instruments a parent may execute; the delegation can be renewed indefinitely. Critically, Virginia's statute states outright that under such a delegation "the child is not deemed placed in foster care or a foster home," and the receiving adult is not subject to foster-care licensing requirements or regulations.

That is the entire mechanism. The adoption is never dissolved. The adoptive parents remain the legal parents, which means they keep whatever subsidy they receive and retain nominal legal responsibility — but the child physically lives with someone the state has never met. The transaction is invisible to child welfare agencies precisely because it is, on paper, a routine parental delegation of the kind used by military families and parents entering hospital care.

The second structural hole is interstate. The Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC), adopted in all 50 states, is supposed to require the receiving state to approve any out-of-state placement of a child. Article VIII(a) exempts placements where a "parent, stepparent, grandparent, adult brother or sister, adult uncle or aunt, or his guardian" sends the child to a member of that same class in the receiving state. The operative phrase is "non-agency guardian." A power of attorney can be styled as creating exactly that relationship. A child moved from Wisconsin to Illinois under a notarized delegation is, in the compact's own terms, arguably outside ICPC jurisdiction — which means no receiving-state home study, no receiving-state file, no receiving-state knowledge the child exists.

Finding the recipient has never been the hard part. Reuters' 2013 investigation, "The Child Exchange," reported by Megan Twohey over 18 months, analyzed 5,029 posts across five years on a single Yahoo message board, "Adopting-from-Disruption." On average a child was advertised there once a week; 261 children were offered on that one board alone. Children from 34 states appeared in the posts. Most were between 6 and 14; the youngest was 10 months old. The great majority had been adopted internationally — from Russia, China, Ethiopia, and Ukraine.

When Yahoo groups died, the traffic moved to Facebook. A 2015 Channel 4 News investigation found the group "Adopting through Disruption" operating openly; Facebook disabled it after being contacted. A January 2025 article by Zena Hamilton in the Minnesota Journal of Law & Inequality documents that Facebook groups dedicated to rehoming adopted children remain active, and concludes that "only 17 states forbid an unregulated custody transfer."

The Money: $4.7 Billion Out, Nothing Back

The federal financial architecture around adoption is built entirely to move children out of foster care and contains no instrument for finding out what happened to them afterward.

Title IV-E Adoption Assistance paid out $4.706 billion in FY2024, up from $4.123 billion in FY2023. These are monthly subsidies — commonly $250 to $2,500 per child depending on state and the child's assessed needs — paid to adoptive parents under an adoption assistance agreement that runs, in most cases, until the child turns 18 or 21.

The Adoption and Legal Guardianship Incentive Payments program (42 U.S.C. § 673b, created by the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 and reauthorized by the Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act of 2014, P.L. 113-183) pays states a bounty per finalized adoption above a baseline — the base tier is $5,000 per foster-child adoption, with higher tiers for older children and children with special needs. Congress held the authorized ceiling at $43 million from FY2000 through FY2022, then raised actual appropriations to $75 million in FY2023, a level maintained in FY2024 and requested again for FY2025.

In FY2024, 46,935 children were adopted from foster care — down 6% from the prior year and 26% below 2019. Every one of those adoptions is a potential incentive payment and, in most cases, an ongoing subsidy obligation.

Here is what does not exist: any federal mechanism to recapture an incentive payment when the adoption collapses, any requirement that a state report a dissolution, and any audit that reconciles the roster of children drawing adoption assistance against the children actually living in the subsidized homes. HHS's Office of Inspector General maintains an open work-plan item on Title IV-E Adoption Assistance Program Payments — a tacit acknowledgment that payment integrity in this program has never been established.

The subsidy problem compounds the accountability problem in a specific way. An adoptive parent who transfers a child by power of attorney does not lose the subsidy, because the state does not know the transfer occurred. The parent remains the payee of record. The receiving adult — the one actually housing the child — has no legal claim to it, no Medicaid card for the child, and no reason to surface to any agency.

There is a parallel failure on the reinvestment side. Section 473(a)(8) of the Social Security Act requires states to spend "adoption savings" — money freed up as IV-E eligibility was de-linked from 1996 AFDC income standards — on child welfare services, with at least 30% required to go to post-permanency and preventive services. Post-permanency services are precisely what GAO identified as the missing ingredient driving families toward unregulated transfers. Yet in an October 2021 report, GAO found the reinvestment requirement so poorly overseen that it issued two recommendations to HHS, neither of which had been implemented as of June 2022. Earlier data showed only 21 states even calculated their savings for one reporting year, and 20 reported difficulty doing the math.

The Facilitators

The transfer market is not purely amateur. It has had licensed institutional participants.

Second Chance Adoptions, run by Cyndi Peck, operated as a program of Wasatch International Adoptions (WIAA) of Ogden, Utah — EIN 84-1411933, a 501(c)(3) with roughly 15 employees. The program advertised children from failed adoptions online and to its network and screened prospective receiving families, reportedly for a fee in the range of $2,000. WIAA's IRS filings show revenue of $663,853 in FY2022 and $464,972 in FY2023 against $536,487 in expenses — a small organization operating at a deficit. Its Schedule I records show it received a $10,000 grant in tax year 2023 from OUR Rescue (EIN 46-3614979), the anti-trafficking organization formerly known as Operation Underground Railroad, and $20,000 from Fidelity Charitable in 2021.

WIAA has since closed the Second Chance Program. Its website now refers families seeking adoption dissolution services to the Renewed Hope program at Nightlight Christian Adoptions — a substantially larger operation. Nightlight (EIN 95-2254634, Santa Ana, CA) reported $9.68 million in revenue and 143 employees in FY2023. Nightlight publicly opposes "re-homing" and states that Renewed Hope operates through court-supervised legal adoption with current home studies and background clearances on receiving families — a materially different process from a notarized POA.

But the funding trail matters. USAspending records show Nightlight has received a long series of federal awards under CFDA 93.007, the Adoption Opportunities program — including $1,036,875 in 2008, $996,440 and $574,000 in 2011, roughly $445,000 across two 2013 awards, roughly $598,000 across two 2014 awards, $992,000 across two 2015 awards, $598,000 in 2017, and $510,000 in 2019, totaling on the order of $5.8 million. Adoption Opportunities is the same discretionary program that the pending federal rehoming bill would amend. The organization that inherited the country's principal adoption-dissolution referral pipeline is a long-standing grantee of the program Congress proposes to use to police that pipeline. That is not an allegation of wrongdoing; it is a description of how thin the regulatory bench is. The federal government has no independent capacity here — it funds the same small set of private agencies it would have to oversee.

The Cases

Quita Puchalla. Adopted from Liberia by Todd and Melissa Puchalla of Wisconsin, she was advertised online after two years and transferred at 16 to Nicole and Calvin Eason of Illinois. Reuters found the Easons had lost custody of their own biological children and had taken in multiple children through internet transfers. The Puchallas handed Quita over after a brief meeting. Wisconsin, in direct response, became the first state to act, with Gov. Scott Walker signing a 2014 law barring adoptive parents from arranging a new home for a child without court permission.

Mary and Annie Harris. In October 2013, Arkansas state Rep. Justin Harris (R-West Fork) and his wife Marsha transferred two girls they had adopted through the Arkansas Department of Human Services — ages roughly 6 and 3 — to Eric Cameron Francis and his wife. That same month, Francis was hired as a teacher at Growing God's Kingdom, the preschool the Harrises owned, which drew state pre-kindergarten subsidies reported by the Arkansas Times at roughly half a million dollars a year. On March 28, 2014, an Arkansas State Police investigation found Francis had sexually abused the older girl. Francis is serving 40 years, that offense plus two second-degree sexual assaults involving other children. The transfer became public in March 2015 through Arkansas Times reporting. Harris faced no criminal charge, did not seek reelection, and voted for the Arkansas law — effective April 2015 — that made rehoming a felony. The case is the cleanest available illustration of the incentive structure: a sitting legislator who had taken children from the state system, given them away without notifying that system, and placed the recipient on the payroll of his state-funded preschool.

Hana Alemu (Hana Grace-Rose Williams). Adopted from Ethiopia in 2008 through Adoption Advocates International of Port Angeles, Washington, she died on May 11–12, 2011, in her adoptive parents' backyard of hypothermia and severe malnutrition at 13. Carri Williams was convicted of homicide by abuse and sentenced to 37 years; Larry Williams received 28 years, and Carri was separately convicted of first-degree assault of a child for abusing a second Ethiopian adoptee who survived and testified. AAI has closed. Ethiopia ended intercountry adoption in 2018, in part because of this case. Hana was not rehomed — but her case is the same failure at the front end: no post-placement supervision with any capacity to detect what was happening inside the home.

Huxley Stauffer. In May 2020, YouTubers Myka and James Stauffer disclosed they had "rehomed" the son they adopted from China in 2017, after monetizing his adoption story across years of content. The Delaware County, Ohio sheriff investigated allegations including that the child's hands had been duct-taped; the Stauffers were cleared, and the transfer was executed through an adoption agency rather than a private POA. The case matters less as a crime than as a market signal: the vocabulary of "rehoming" had by 2020 become normalized enough to be announced in a monetized video.

Jonah Bevin. The live case. Adopted from Ethiopia in 2012 at about age 5 by then-future Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin and his wife Glenna, Jonah was moved through a series of out-of-state facilities and ultimately to Atlantis Leadership Academy in Jamaica, a youth facility shut down by Jamaican child welfare authorities in 2024 amid abuse allegations. Jonah alleges he was physically abused there and that his adoptive parents did not travel to Jamaica to retrieve him after he and six other youths were removed. His attorney's framing — that the Bevins "paid for pain, not protection" — captures the institutional variant of the same practice: not a parking-lot handoff but a wire transfer to an offshore facility. Jonah, now 19, intervened in his adoptive parents' divorce case seeking retroactive support and educational compensation; the Kentucky Court of Appeals cleared his claim to proceed in October 2025. In June 2026 a judge issued an arrest order against Matt Bevin for failing to produce financial information, and Bevin failed to appear again at a July 28, 2026 hearing.

The legislative response is instructive. Kentucky House Bill 707 (2026 session) would bar children from directly participating in child support and divorce proceedings and require support to be paid to a parent, custodian, or agency substantially supporting the child — which would have foreclosed Jonah's claim. Two of its three sponsors, Reps. Steven Doan and John Hodgson, worked in the Bevin administration. When an abandoned adoptee finally found a legal remedy, the first bill filed in response was aimed at closing it.

The Accountability Gap

In September 2015, GAO published GAO-15-733, "Child Welfare: Steps Have Been Taken to Address Unregulated Custody Transfers of Adopted Children." Its central finding, after a 15-month investigation, was an absence: GAO could not establish prevalence because the transfers occur without oversight and no federal agency systematically collects the data. GAO's own search surfaced 23 active social media posts from parents seeking to transfer a child. It identified 15 states pursuing action, of which 7 had enacted legislation and 3 had changed agency policy as of July 2015. GAO also documented the upstream failure: about half of states require at least 27 hours of pre-adoption training for foster-care adoptions, while internationally adopting families frequently received far less preparation for children with severe trauma histories — and GAO found that transfers are typically driven by a family crisis compounded by inability to access intensive mental health services.

Eleven years later, the data gap is largely intact. The 2020 AFCARS final rule (85 FR 28410) added a prior-adoption element group — data elements 42 and 43 — which means states now report to HHS whether a child entering foster care had previously been adopted. That is a real capability. But HHS does not publish a national adoption-dissolution count, its public AFCARS dashboards do not display one, and its own Child Welfare Information Gateway continues to cite decades-old academic ranges: 10–25% disruption before finalization, 1–10% dissolution after. Against 46,935 foster adoptions in FY2024 alone, that range spans hundreds to thousands of children per year — an uncertainty band wide enough to be useless for policy and wide enough to conceal a market.

Federally, the Safe Home Act has been introduced repeatedly by Rep. Jim Langevin (D-RI) and Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) in the House and by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Roy Blunt (R-MO) in the Senate; its provisions passed the Senate HELP Committee in 2021 folded into a CAPTA reauthorization that never became law. It was reintroduced February 13, 2025 as S. 604, the Safe Home Act of 2025, by Klobuchar and Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND). What the bill does is narrow: it amends the Adoption Opportunities program to define unregulated custody transfer and directs HHS to issue guidance to states on prevention, identification, and response. It does not criminalize the practice, does not mandate dissolution reporting, and does not touch the incentive or subsidy structure. (It should not be confused with the unrelated "SAFE Home Act" introduced by Sens. Banks and Cotton, which concerns placement and gender identity.)

At the state level, the Uniform Unregulated Child Custody Transfer Act, approved by the Uniform Law Commission, has been enacted in Utah (effective May 4, 2022, Utah Code Title 78B ch. 24), Washington (Ch. 88, Laws of 2022, RCW 26.38), Colorado (HB23-1157, C.R.S. Art. 19-5.5), and Texas (HB 1892), with bills filed and not passed in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Missouri. The act prohibits soliciting, advertising, or transferring custody of a child outside adoption, guardianship, judicial or tribal action, or safe-haven law — and, importantly, reaches intermediaries, making it an offense to receive a child or broker a transfer you know or should know is unlawful. Washington classifies a prohibited transfer as a gross misdemeanor. That is the ceiling of current enforcement in the model states: a misdemeanor.

What Would Actually Fix It

The gap is not conceptual. Four changes would close most of it, and three of them cost almost nothing.

Make dissolution a reportable event tied to the money. HHS already collects prior-adoption data in AFCARS. Requiring states to report adoption dissolutions and disruptions as a condition of drawing Title IV-E adoption assistance, and publishing the state-level counts, converts an existing data element into an accountability instrument. A state that cannot say where a subsidized adoptee is living should not be able to certify the subsidy claim.

Condition incentive payments on post-permanency outcomes, not just finalization counts. A $5,000-per-adoption bounty with no downstream measurement pays for the event, not the result. Tying a portion of the $75 million pool to verified placement stability at 24 and 60 months would align the money with the child.

Enforce § 473(a)(8). The 30% post-permanency reinvestment requirement is already law. GAO told HHS in 2021 how to oversee it. Adoption support services are the documented alternative to a family in crisis reaching for a Facebook group; funding them is the only prevention that has ever been shown to matter.

Close the POA and ICPC holes together. Cap successive parental-power delegations, require notice to the child welfare agency for any delegation exceeding a defined period involving an adopted child, and amend ICPC Article VIII so that a POA-created "non-agency guardian" does not qualify for the relative exemption. States enacting the UUCCTA should reach intermediaries and should treat a transfer that results in abuse as a felony, not a gross misdemeanor.

Underneath all of it is the fact that makes this investigation possible and infuriating in equal measure: the federal government wrote a check for every one of these children. It knows their names, their birthdates, their case numbers, and the exact monthly amount it is still paying. It simply never asks where they went.

Sources: - Reuters, "The Child Exchange" (via NPR) · NBC News, "Inside America's underground network for adopted children" - GAO-15-733, Child Welfare: Unregulated Custody Transfers of Adopted Children · CWLA summary - Arkansas Times — Justin Harris rehoming coverage · UPI - Kentucky Lantern — Jonah Bevin appeals court ruling · Bevin no-show at hearing, July 2026 · HB 707 sponsors · Checklist for state lawmakers - Type Investigations / Slate — Hana Williams - 42 U.S.C. § 673b — Adoption and legal guardianship incentive payments · ACF incentive awards history · Voice for Adoption FY2024 funding - ACF Title IV-E expenditure and caseload data 2024 · AFCARS · AFCARS 2020 Final Rule, 85 FR 28410 - GAO-14-347 / adoption savings oversight · HHS OIG work plan: Title IV-E Adoption Assistance Payments - Hamilton, "Adopters' Remorse," Minn. J. Law & Inequality (Jan. 2025) - S.604 — Safe Home Act of 2025 · Klobuchar release - RCW 26.38 (Washington UUCCTA) · Colorado HB23-1157 · Utah Code 78B-24 · Va. Code § 20-166 - ICPC — Congressional Research Service RL32070 - Wasatch International Adoptions — 2nd Chance Adoption · Nightlight Renewed Hope · Nightlight position on re-homing - IRS Form 990 and USAspending records for Wasatch International Adoptions (EIN 84-1411933) and Nightlight Christian Adoptions (EIN 95-2254634), via PMC CivicOps database - Channel 4 News — adopted children given away on Facebook · Fox News — Wisconsin first state law