Honolulu, HAWAII — A Texas lawyer is arranging adoptions that involve birth mothers flown from the Marshall Islands to the U.S. in defiance of a treaty between the two nations,  and has told U.S. clients she has done it repeatedly.

“Yes, it’s legal to pay for tickets,” Jody Hall, who runs a Dallas agency called Adoptions International, wrote a prospective adoptive mother who questioned it. Hall’s interpretation is at odds with those of the Marshall Islands government and U.S. Department of State.

The woman expressed qualms, having just spent more than $13,000 on a failed adoption Hall set up involving a Marshallese birth mother in Arkansas who decided to keep the baby.

“It’s easier to control these because we buy the tickets,” Hall responded, according to a text provided by the woman. “That way they can’t change the tickets. We placed 3 in the past 3 weeks.”

Hall said the fees would include money paid to “helpers in Honolulu” who would pick up the Marshallese woman and her baby at the airport and take them to a hotel during the long layover.

In a series published in November, Civil Beat documented how a handful of U.S. lawyers ignore the Compact of Free Association between the two nations to fly women from the Marshall Islands for adoptions. Hall was not a part of that story.

The treaty and Marshall Islands law restricted adoptions in the U.S. in response to lurid stories two decades ago of Marshallese women being exploited. Even now, as in the 1990s, the women often believe they will maintain contact with their children as they likely would in the Marshall Islands, which has a long tradition of informal “child sharing” in which parental rights are never terminated.

The black market pipeline continues to thrive, boosted by recent entrants such as Hall, even as authorities, for the most part, appear to do nothing. Hall is in good standing with the State Bar of Texas, the Texas agency that regulates adoption agencies and has even been accredited as meeting the Hague convention on international adoptions.

Hall in recent years has worked with Justin Aine, a well-known adoption fixer who in March was charged in the Marshall Islands with human trafficking for his alleged involvement in facilitating Marshallese adoptions in the U.S.

Aine, despite facing a serious charge carrying a maximum sentence of 15 years, has left the Marshall Islands and is back in Arkansas, where he has lived and worked as an adoption facilitator for many years, according to several people there.

It’s unknown whether Aine is still working with Hall. In the past, Aine has transported Marshallese women from Arkansas to Hall’s Dallas office for adoptions. It’s legal for Marshallese women already in the U.S. when they became pregnant to participate in adoptions.

But these transactions raise other questions. Two of these women say they were promised or asked for contact information for the parents who adopted their children, but never got it and now don’t know where they are. Aine, they say, did all the translating.

“I really want to see my child,” Emy Lejjena told Civil Beat last year after she drove with Aine from Arkansas to Texas to give up her 2-year-old child for adoption.

Hall did not respond to a list of questions emailed to her this month. Last year, reached briefly by phone, she declined to comment. Aine could not be reached for comment.

Read more at Civil Beat