Virginia Supreme Court rules US Marine's adoption of an Afghan war
orphan will stand
[February 13, 2026]
By JULIET LINDERMAN and CLAIRE GALOFARO
The Virginia Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a U.S. Marine and his
wife will keep an Afghan orphan they brought home in defiance of a U.S.
government decision to reunite her with her Afghan family. The decision
likely ends a bitter, yearslong legal battle over the girl's fate.
In 2020, a judge in Fluvanna County, Virginia, granted Joshua and
Stephanie Mast an adoption of the child, who was then 7,000 miles away
in Afghanistan living with a family the Afghan government decided were
her relatives.
Four justices on the Virginia Supreme Court on Thursday signed onto an
opinion reversing two lower courts’ rulings that found the adoption was
so flawed it was void from the moment it was issued.
The justices wrote that a Virginia law that cements adoption orders
after six months bars the child’s Afghan relatives from challenging the
court, no matter how flawed its orders and even if the adoption was
obtained by fraud.
Three justices issued a scathing dissent, calling what happened in this
court “wrong,” “cancerous” and “like a house built on a rotten
foundation.”
An attorney for the Masts declined to comment, citing an order from the
circuit court not to discuss the details of the case publicly. Lawyers
representing the Afghan family said they were not yet prepared to
comment.
The child was injured on the battlefield in Afghanistan in September
2019 when U.S. soldiers raided a rural compound. The child’s parents and
siblings were killed. Soldiers brought her to a hospital at an American
military base.
The raid was targeting terrorists who had come into Afghanistan from a
neighboring country; some believed she was not Afghan and tried to make
a case for bringing her to the U.S. But the State Department, under
President Donald Trump’s first administration, insisted the U.S. was
obligated under international law to work with the Afghan government and
the International Committee of the Red Cross to unite the child with her
closest surviving relatives.
The Afghan government determined she was Afghan and vetted a man who
claimed to be her uncle. The U.S. government agreed and brought her to
the family. The uncle chose to give her to his son and his new wife, who
raised her for 18 months in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, Mast and his wife convinced courts in rural Fluvanna County,
Virginia, to grant them custody and then a series of adoption orders,
continuing to claim she was the “stateless” daughter of foreign
fighters.
Judge Richard Moore granted them a final adoption in December 2020. When
the six-month statute of limitations ran out, the child was still in
Afghanistan living with her relatives, who testified they had no idea a
judge was giving the girl to another family. Mast contacted them through
intermediaries and tried to get them to send the girl to the U.S. for
medical treatment but they refused to let her go alone.
When the U.S. military withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban took
over, the family agreed to leave and Mast worked his military contacts
to get them on an evacuation flight. Mast then took the baby from them
at a refugee resettlement center in Virginia, and they haven’t seen her
since.
The AP agreed not to name the Afghan couple because they fear their
families in Afghanistan might face retaliation from the Taliban. The
circuit court issued a protective order shielding their identities.
The Afghans challenged the adoption, claiming the court had no authority
over a foreign child and the adoption orders were based on Mast
repeatedly misleading the judge.
The Virginia Supreme Court on Thursday wrote that the law prohibiting
challenges to an adoption after six months is designed to create
permanency, so a child is not bounced from one home to another. The only
way to undercut it is to argue that a parent’s constitutional rights
were violated.
The lower courts had found that the Afghan couple had a right to
challenge the adoption because they were the girl’s “de facto” parents
when they came to the United States.
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Marine Maj. Joshua Mast and his wife, Stephanie, arrive at Circuit
Court, Thursday, March 30, 2023 in Charlottesville, Va. (AP
Photo/Cliff Owen, File)
Four of the Supreme Court judges — D. Arthur Kelsey, Stephen R.
McCullough, Teresa M. Chafin, Wesley G. Russell Jr. — disagreed.
“We find no legal merit” in the argument that “that they were ‘de
facto’ parents of the child and that no American court could
constitutionally sever that relationship,” they wrote. They pointed
to Fluvanna County Circuit Court Judge Richard Moore’s findings that
the Afghan couple “are not and never were parents” of the child,
because they had no order from an Afghan court and had not proven
any biological relationship to her.
The Afghans had refused DNA testing, saying it could not reliably
prove a familial connection between opposite-gender half-cousins.
They insisted that it didn't matter, because Afghanistan claimed the
girl as its citizen and got to determine her next-of-kin.
The Supreme Court leaned heavily on a 38-page document written by
Judge Moore, who granted the adoption, then presided over a dozen
hearings after the Afghans challenged it. He wrote that he trusted
the Masts more than the Afghans, and believed that the Masts’
motivations were noble while the Afghans were misrepresenting their
relationship to the child.
The Supreme Court also dismissed the federal government’s long
insistence that Trump’s first administration had made a foreign
policy decision to unite her with her Afghan relatives, and a court
in Virginia has no authority to undo it. The government submitted
filings in court predicting dire outcomes if the baby was allowed to
remain with the Marine: it could be viewed as “endorsing an act of
international child abduction,” threaten international security
pacts and be used as propaganda by Islamic extremists — potentially
endangering U.S soldiers overseas.
But the Justice Department in Trump’s second administration abruptly
changed course.
The Supreme Court noted in its opinion that the Justice Department
had been granted permission to make arguments in the case, but
withdrew its request to do so on the morning of oral arguments last
year, saying it “has now had an opportunity to reevaluate its
position in this case.”
The Supreme Court returned repeatedly to Moore’s finding that giving
the girl to the family “was not a decision the United States
initiated, but rather consented to or acquiesced in.”
The three judges who dissented were unsparing in their criticism of
both the Masts and the circuit court that granted him the adoption.
“A dispassionate review of this case reveals a scenario suffused
with arrogance and privilege. Worse, it appears to have worked,”
begins the dissent, written by Justice Thomas P. Mann, and signed by
Chief Justice Cleo E. Powell and LeRoy F. Millette, Jr.
A Virginia court never had the right to give the child to the Masts,
the dissent said.
They castigated the Masts for “brazenly” misleading the courts
during their quest to adopt the girl.
“We must recognize what an adoption really is: the severance and
termination of the rights naturally flowing to an otherwise
legitimate claimant to parental authority. Of course, the process
must be impeccable. An evolved society could not sanction anything
less than that. And here, it was less,” Mann wrote. “If this process
was represented by a straight line, (the Masts) went above it, under
it, around it, and then blasted right through it until there was no
line at all — just fragments collapsing into a cavity.”
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