This article from the Intercept explains recent concerns regarding the placement of 81 migrant children in the US into the care of an adoption agency, and the linkages between this and other occurrences of family separation in the United States, including the long history of removal of Native American children from their families. "To adoption reform advocates, who monitor unethical and abusive practices in child welfare, it looked like any number of adoption crises in the past, like the airlifts out of Haiti in the wake of its cataclysmic 2010 earthquake. Then, masses of unaccompanied children were suddenly labeled orphans and became the focus of a deafening campaign in the U.S. to rescue them through inter-country adoption," says the author.
According to the article, "When migrant parents were taken into ICE custody at the border, their children became wards of Health and Human Services, specifically its Office of Refugee Resettlement, which facilitates the care of “unaccompanied alien children.” Although they’d arrived with parents, upon separation, the children had been officially transformed into unaccompanied minors with immigration cases distinct from the adults they’d arrived with." Many children have been placed in detention centers and care facilities around the country without any paperwork or notes on the locations and names of their parents, making tracing and reunification more difficult. All of this has had advocates "worried that the agency was finding in the separated children a new adoption supply."