Thursday, March 24, 2022

Authorities Pump Brakes On US Far-Right Former Legislator’s ‘Rescue’ Of Ukrainian Kids
Screenshot/On Fire Ministries

By Matt Shuham
TPM
March 23, 2022

Three weeks after the far-right former state legislator Matt Shea arrived in Poland with dozens of Ukrainian orphans, including several he is attempting to adopt, authorities in multiple countries are pumping the brakes, grinding Shea’s plans to a halt — at least for now.

“The children will not leave Poland, unless Ukrainian authorities decides to do so,” Artur Pomianowski, the mayor of the small Polish town where Shea and the children are now staying, told TPM.

Shea, who served in the Washington state legislature from 2009 to 2021, is best known for allegations that he’s been involved in domestic terrorism, his advocacy for the separatist 51st state “Liberty” movement, and a document he authored outlining steps for killing non-believers during a hypothetical religious war.

But he’s also a potential adoptive father: Shea’s wife is Ukrainian, and in recent weeks the far-right figure has acknowledged his family’s effort to adopt four children from Ukraine — an effort that was interrupted by Russia’s sudden invasion of the country.

So Shea and a team of Americans traveled to Poland, linked up with a local right-wing evangelical pastor, and launched a “rescue action” that resulted in buses full of Ukrainian children crossing the border and ending up at a Polish hotel — and plenty of concern from Polish locals worried about child trafficking.

To hear Shea describe it, the operation to aid the orphans of Mariupol, a city in Ukraine’s east that’s been subject to weeks of heavy Russian attack, was a religious quest of Biblical proportions.

“We flew and drove 72 hours, with about four hours of sleep, to bring those orphans home,” Shea said in a sermon in Poland shortly after the kids arrived. “And now the next step is to bring them home to the Father.”

The extent of Shea’s actual involvement is less clear: In a video posted online by the congregation he founded, On Fire Ministries, Shea said that he met up with the children after they had been evacuated to Lviv, a city in Western Ukraine just over an hour from the border with Poland. The Polish pastor Shea is working with, Paweł Chojecki, runs a right-wing media outlet that said the children “met their American rescuers after a 16-hour long train journey.”

Within days of Shea, his team and the kids arriving in Poland, locals had grown concerned about the children, leading local authorities to get involved.

Pomianowski, the mayor of the Polish town of Kazimierz Dolny, set off alarms stateside when he told The Seattle Times that Shea and his team “have given us some contradictory information and, for that reason, it is difficult for us to trust them.”

Shea, who has not returned TPM’s requests for comment, wrote on Facebook Saturday that “The State Department has indicated that those people in the final stages of adoption (defined here as approved by the US and Ukraine but not Ukrainian Court) should be finalized as soon as possible so those families can be reunited.”

But the group Shea is working with, Loving Families and Homes for Orphans, is not an official “adoption service provider,” as he’s acknowledged several times. Instead, it’s a hosting organization, which set up private trips for potential adoptees to meet their potential families in other countries.

A State Department spokesperson, asked to comment on Shea’s Facebook post, told TPM, “The Department doesn’t have a role in hosting programs, which are coordinated by private organizations with the permission of the Ukrainian authorities.”

“The Ukrainian government has confirmed that it is not approving children to participate in host programs at this time,” the spokesperson said. “Instead, the Ukrainian government is taking measures to ensure the safety of children in neighboring countries. The Ukrainian government has informed us that it has moved many of the children in its care to Poland for safety and, where necessary, medical treatment.”

The spokesperson also referred to a statement from the Ukrainian Ministry of Social Policy (translated here) that said as much — in much more forceful language.

“Recently the mass media and social networks have been filled with notices about the willingness of foreigners to adopt a child from Ukraine and with appeals that Ukrainian children need to be adopted abroad,” the statement read. “The Ministry of Social Policy emphasizes that under current conditions intercountry adoption is impossible and that disseminating such inaccurate information contains signs of fraud and violations of the rights of the child.”

“The National Social Service is not currently considering cases and is not providing consent and/or permits for the adoption of children by foreigners or by citizens of Ukraine who reside beyond its borders,” the statement read, adding that without proper verification, “there is a great risk that the child could fall into the hands of fraudsters, persons who would not ensure the child’s rights and best interests, or human traffickers.”

The situation recalls that of Laura Silsby, an Idaho woman who was arrested in 2010 while attempting to take 33 children from earthquake-struck Haiti into the Dominican Republic without proper permission, said Kathryn Joyce, an investigative reporter at Salon and the author of a book on the modern evangelical adoption movement, The Child Catchers.

“These aren’t people who should be engaging in these vigilante rescue missions,” Joyce said.

Even if Shea, his team and the prospective adoptive families they say they represent have the best intentions, Joyce said, there’s an inherent risk involved in moving kids across borders in the middle of a crisis.

“What often ends up happening later on is the decision ends up having sort of been made in the moment,” she said.

Pomianowski, the mayor of the Polish town, told TPM of the Ukrainian children: “We do not know how long are they going to stay in Kazimierz Dolny.”

What The Heck Is U.S. Extremist Matt Shea Doing In Poland With 60 Ukrainian Kids?

Screenshot/idź Pod Prąd
By Matt Shuham
TPM
March 17, 2022 

The far-right former Washington state legislator Matt Shea is in a small town in Poland with a bunch of children that he says are orphan refugees from Ukraine. The local Poles are wary, and some basic questions have gone unanswered.

Wait… what? Well, exactly. Here’s what we’re wondering about this strange situation, and the best answers we have so far.

1
 You’re talking about that Matt Shea?

Yes, you may be familiar with him through our reporting here at TPM: Shea was a longtime far-right legislator in the Washington House of Representatives until 2020, when he opted not to run for reelection after a report concluded that he’d engaged in domestic terrorism — the result of his involvement in the standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife refuge.

Shea, who the report found had been involved in several armed stand-offs, is also known for his support of a separatist 51st state movement, and for authoring a document, “Biblical Basis for War,” that included steps for killing non-believers (Shea is Christian).

So in short: Sounds like the kind of guy we’d want shuttling purported orphans across international boundaries in the middle of a war.


2 Who are these kids?

This isn’t clear. We do have some information, based on claims from Shea and those on his team, the accounts of locals who’ve rung alarm bells, and several reports from American outlets. But the picture is still hazy.

Shea wrote last week that he’d taken a team to rescue 62 children from an orphanage in Mariupol, which has been under heavy Russian attack for several days, and transported them to Poland.

In an interview on a Polish television show last week flagged by the Seattle Times, which reported on the situation Wednesday, Shea described three categories of kids in the group: Those whose adoption by American families was interrupted by the war, those who had been hosted in America but were at an earlier stage in the adoption process, and those who had not begun the adoption process.

But the former legislator’s assurances haven’t satisfied locals, who apparently have been demanding answers about the American and his gaggle of purported refugee orphans.

So, amid the scrutiny, the group Shea is working with, Loving Home and Families for Orphans (LFHO), published a statement that was posted online by the guest house where Shea and the kids are staying.

The statement — which counts 63 kids in the group, not 62 — says the childrens’ orphanage was destroyed by Russian bombing.

3 Is Shea working with a reputable organization?


That’s also not totally clear right now. The Seattle Times reported that a non-profit with the name Loving Families and Homes for Orphans had been registered in Florida just last month. It was registered in Texas in 2018, according to the report, but not as an adoption agency, nor is it registered with the organization overseeing American agencies involved with international adoption.

On the Polish television show, Shea described LFHO as a hosting organization with the intent of facilitating the adoption of Ukrainian orphans in America. He attacked “elements here in Poland” who were spreading “lies and rumors” about the group.

One Chicago pediatrician who’d seen the children in recent days told the Spokane Spokesman-Review, “The kids are all well taken care of.”

4 How did this story come to light?

According to Range, an Inland Northwest news outlet, Shea’s arrival with dozens of children in the small Polish town of Kazimeirz Dolny raised questions — and then concerns — with locals, who appealed to local authorities and then national authorities in both Poland and the United States.

Polish Americans like the lawyer Marta Milan, quoted in the Range piece, starting flagging the story to news outlets. The Seattle Times and Spokesman-Review reported on the situation followed by several others.

Authorities in Kazimierz Dolny reacted with some alarm to the news, and to their discussions with Shea. Weronika Ziarnicka, an aide to the town’s mayor, told the Times that she went to check on the kids after hearing from a group of local volunteers. She said Shea “got really angry,” refused to tell her his last name, and said he’d spoken with the mayor and that everything was okay.

“And I know it’s not true because the mayor is the one that asked me to go,” she told the Times.

A Polish reporter, Katarzyna Lazzeri, told Range that “one of the American volunteers informed local authorities that they wanted to take children soon to the United States of America,” but Shea separately denied this, saying, “Neither we nor our partners have any intention of taking the children to the US.” One Polish report flagged by Range said the matter had been referred to a family court.

The Spokesman-Review quoted an email from a State Department official confirming that she’d flagged the situation to the U.S. embassy in Warsaw.

5 Is Shea leveraging his far-right contacts?


That’s another significant, unanswered question. Both the Times and Range noted Shea’s recent interview appearance with Paweł Chojecki, a right-wing Polish pastor who’s disparaged Catholics in the past.

Range reported that he leads a small far-right political party in Poland, and that he’d pushed conspiracy theories about COVID-19 for months. Shea has done interviews with Chojecki at least as far back as 2018, Range noted, and the far-right Pole appears to be an important contact for Shea in the area.


Matt Shuham (@mattshuham) is a reporter in TPM’s New York office. Prior to joining TPM, he was associate editor of The National Memo and an editorial intern at Rolling Stone.

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