This article from the Intercept offers a brief history of intercountry adoption in the US as a response to crises, such as the earthquake in Haiti, and connects that to the fear of a new "adoption rush" in response to the current family separation crisis at the US border with Mexico. "Children, including infants, began arriving at care facilities around the country," says the article of the family separation crisis, "sometimes in the dead of night, sometimes without being told where they were going, sometimes without paperwork noting their parents’ detention locations or even their names." This makes children more vulnerable to permanent separation, and adoption.
The article continues to discuss intercountry adoption and recent international trends to curb or ban intercountry adoption amid instances of corruption, exploitation, trafficking, and other ethical concerns. The article notes that the family separations at the border have been handled so poorly that there is a lot of uncertainty as to the status of the children now in the care of US detention centers and it remains unclear what policies would apply to their cases. "Many worried that children being placed in foster care [...] could end up staying there so long that they would trigger a mechanism within the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act that was intended to keep children from languishing in foster care for years. The law provides that if a child has been in foster care for 15 out of 22 consecutive months, except in cases of relative foster care, child welfare agencies must stop working toward the goal of reunifying the child with their parents and instead, move to terminate parental rights and make the child available for adoption."