An attorney and executive director of a North Texas adoption agency, was arrested last week on child trafficking charges.
Jail records show 68-year-old Jody Hall was booked on two counts of sale or purchase of a child. The Tarrant County Sheriff's Office says Hall offered money to pregnant women in jail custody to put their children up for adoption through her nonprofit.
But it's not the only time Hall's name has been connected with illegal adoptions.
In 2019, the website Civil Beat in Honolulu launched an investigation into black market adoptions from the Marshall Islands. That investigation, entitled Black Market Babies, identified a number of attorneys who tried to facilitate apparently illegal adoptions from the island country.
Honolulu Civil Beat's John Hill first came across Hall in his reporting on the Marshall Islands. He spoke with KERA's Bekah Morr about that investigation.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Before we get into your reporting in detail, can you talk about the history of adoption in the Marshall Islands and what led to that reporting?
The Marshall Islands have a history of exploitative adoptions. And, part of it is that the Marshallese have a much different tradition of adoption than we find in the United States. In the Marshall Islands it's very rare for a parent to have their parental rights permanently severed, as happens here in family courts. Instead, they have a tradition of informal child sharing where a child might go and live with a relative or a friend for a few years and then come back to the child's birth parents. And as a result of that — those different traditions — in many cases I think the Marshallese birth mothers did not understand that they were giving away their children for good. And it wasn't, in many cases that we talked to them, fully explained to them what was going to happen. In some cases, it seems like they were promised they would have continued contact. But there's a long history of these kinds of adoptions out of the Marshall Islands. And there was a scandal maybe 20 years ago, and there were some reforms made. But as we found out from our reporting, the reforms didn't really, take.
Can you talk a little bit more about those reforms and what your initial investigation into Marshallese adoptions found?
We started looking at it because we were interested in the history of exploitative adoptions there. We had a podcast, and we were talking to a young man who was of Marshallese ancestry who was living in Florida about reconnecting with his roots in the Marshall Islands. In the course of doing that reporting, we discovered that the supposed reforms that had occurred in the Marshall Islands 20 years ago, had not really worked, and that there were a number of attorneys in the United States who were doing illicit adoptions despite the reforms.
And that reporting eventually led you to communications between Jodi Hall and at least one would-be adoptive mother. You found she outlined some details of a plan that appeared to be in violation of federal law. What did you learn from those communications, and how did it dovetail with what you'd already learned in your previous reporting?
Well, we knew that we had already identified a number of lawyers who were doing these kinds of illicit adoptions. And after we published our initial stories, we started getting tips about some other lawyers who were doing similar things, including Jody Hall in Texas. Now it appears that what Jody Hall was doing at that time was arranging adoptions with Marshallese birth mothers who already lived in Arkansas, which is legal, if they're already living in the United States. And people from the Marshall Islands can travel to the United States without a visa, then if they're already living here and become pregnant, they're allowed to give up their children in adoptions.
But what we found was that in some of these cases, the adoptions fell through, and the text provided to us by clients of Jody Hall showed that she was talking about flying women from the Marshall Islands for the purposes of having their children in the United States and giving them up for adoption. And that violates a treaty between the United States and the Marshall Islands.
The United States has compacts with a number of different Pacific nations, including the Marshall Islands. And one of the provisions is that, residents of those nations can come to the United States without a visa. But in the Marshall Islands, because of the earlier problems about adoptions, there was one exception to that, which was that you couldn't travel visa free to the United States if you were coming here to give up your child in an adoption. And so that's why that's what made these things illegal.
Hall's nonprofit Adoptions International lost accreditation. Can you talk about why that is?
Five days after our reporting on Jody Hall, the one agency that is commissioned by the U.S. State Department to accredit international adoption agencies, apparently read our reporting and suspended Jody Hall's accreditation to do international adoptions. And then a couple of months after that, they permanently canceled her accreditation. And so she was no longer accredited by the only agency in the United States to do international adoptions.
At least one other person you identified in your reporting was charged in the Marshall Islands. What can you tell us about Justin Aine, who you identified as someone that Jody Hall was working with?
Justin worked with a number of different lawyers in the United States. He was a well-known adoption fixer who would arrange for the women to fly to the United States. And when we did our reporting in 2019, the courts of the Marshall Islands indicted Justin Aine for his role in brokering these adoptions. My understanding at the time was that, despite the charges against him, he left the Marshall Islands and was seen shortly after he was indicted in Arkansas — where there's a big Marshallese population — by several people who reported seeing him. And he was continuing to help lawyers like Jody Hall broker these adoptions.
These adoptions are oftentimes exploitative, and I think that when they crossed the line in a lot of states is: not only is there the prohibition of Marshall Islands residents flying or being flown to the United States to give up their children for adoption, but within the United States, you're not allowed to pay for babies. In most states, you're allowed to make payments to pregnant women to sort of maintain their health and things related to pregnancy. But you're not allowed to just sort of say, here's a bunch of money, we want your baby. And so, that is a line they're alleging in Texas that she crossed with these jail inmates.
John Hill is investigative editor with the website Civil Beat in Honolulu. Read the entire Black Market Babies investigation here.
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