By admin 
Just 18 children from other countries were adopted to Colorado parents last year, the lowest on record and the latest evidence that the number of international adoptions has fallen off a cliff.
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The decline in international adoptions is happening across the country, not just in Colorado, and although reforms were needed, adoption experts said the barriers to foreign adoption have grown too big. There were about 23,000 international adoptions to U.S. families in 2004; in 2024 there were fewer than 1,200, according to the latest report from the U.S. Department of State.
The families that want to adopt children and the children that need adopting are “seemingly infinite,” said Dan Nehrbass, president of Nightlight Christian Adoptions, one of four agencies in Colorado still handling international adoptions. But an international, ethical push to keep children in their own countries and cultures, and some countries’ improved domestic adoption programs, have led to increased bureaucracy and far fewer adoptions to U.S. families.
“Adoptions do not rise and fall based on supply and demand,” Nehrbass said. “Adoptions rise and fall based on policy. Regulations should be designed to address the problems that actually exist and not be employed to address problems that don’t exist.”
International adoptions to Colorado families have dropped from 42 in 2023, 38 in 2024, to just 18 in 2025, according to the latest adoption report from Colorado Department of Human Services. It’s the third year the information has been published in a public report.
Colorado had 143 international adoptions in 2016, and 573 in 2006, according to the Department of State.
What caused the decline
The dropoff is overwhelmingly due to bans and restrictions in several countries, including the handful of nations that were once the top countries for international adoptions by U.S. families. China and Ethiopia have banned foreign adoptions. Russia banned adoptions for U.S. citizens. Guatemala and South Korea ended international adoptions because of fraudulent documentation and concerns about child trafficking, including that children were given away without the permission of their biological parents.
The Hague Adoption Convention, an international treaty the United States entered in 2008, put safeguards in place to protect children. The agreement requires extensive documentation to make sure biological parents agree to an adoption, and that there are no available relatives in a child’s home country. The downside is that the agreement added layers of bureaucracy to the process, and some countries do not have the money, staff or attorneys required to do the work, which means fewer children are legally cleared for adoption.
Delays in the process have been compounded by lengthening processing times for immigration paperwork handled by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. A visa to adopt a child from Morocco or Nigeria used to take about six months. Now it takes 28 months, Nehrbass said.
Nehrbass, who adopted a 5-year-old girl from Kyrgyzstan 11 years ago, said that reforms meant to keep children in their native countries and to crack down on child trafficking and fraud have led to thousands more children waiting in orphanages around the world.
“No child’s native culture is an orphanage,” Nehrbrass said. At the time she was adopted, Nehrbass’ daughter had never been to a school, store, restaurant or cultural festival, he said.
Nightlight, which is licensed to do international adoptions in Colorado and 11 other states, now handles 10% of international adoptions in the U.S., up from 1% several years ago, as many other agencies have gone out of business or focused solely on domestic adoptions.
Families deterred by cost, wait time
Kelly Carmody, executive director of A Love Beyond Borders in Denver, said the problem isn’t that international adoptions are in decline. It’s a good thing, she said, that some countries have increased domestic adoptions and are trying harder to find family members to take children, and that governments are trying to protect children from trafficking.
The problem is that children who need families — often children who are older or have medical issues — have been left waiting as prospective adoptive parents get bogged down in bureaucracy and sometimes give up because the process has become so long and expensive, she said. International adoptions can take years and cost $25,000-$65,000.
“Our goal as adoption professionals has never been to increase adoption numbers,” she said. “I would love nothing more than to work myself out of a job.”
A two-year wait is long for a family. “To a young child, that’s a significant portion of their childhood,” said Carmody, who has adopted one child from Kazakhstan and two more from Colombia. “We know the children that are waiting and are not able to be returned safely to their biological families. We see the impact of it in a very real way.”
A Love Beyond Borders stopped doing international adoptions about three years ago, but the agency still does home studies for prospective parents, which is one step of the approval process.
The National Council for Adoption last fall criticized the Department of State’s latest adoption report for failing to address the “unconscionably protracted wait times for families in process.”
“Intercountry adoption has not been prioritized, which is evident in the declining numbers of children adopted,” wrote the group, based in Virginia. “This is critically failing to serve American citizens and help orphaned children find permanent families.”
Domestic adoptions in Colorado also have declined, in part because of efforts to keep children with their biological families or with relatives. Private, domestic adoptions, which do not include foster children, dropped to 86 last year from 111 in 2023, according to the Colorado Department of Human Services.
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