I've been seeing some things about the stolen immigrant children being put up for adoption, and I was wondering if you know of any ways people can fight that from the perspective of prospective adopters? Like I saw an article about a mother losing her fight to stop her child from being put up for adoption, but what if prospective adopters sue bc the children aren't being put up for adoption legally or something?
So family law is Not At All My Thing, but my educated guess is that it would probably be really hard to establish standing.
So, standing is what you need in order to sue. If my neighbor’s in a car accident with my high school gym coach, I can think, “ooh, that’s bad,” but I can’t be like, “Hey, Coach, I will sue you because I think it’s bad that you got in a car accident with my neighbor.” I’m completely unrelated to the problem; it doesn’t affect me at all. So I can’t sue. My neighbor can sue because he was the one in the accident, but I can’t sue for him. I don’t have standing.
You need to have a real or imminent injury (“injury” just means “a bad thing that happens to you,” not like breaking your leg or something) in order to have standing. “Someone’s threatening to take my kid; if I don’t sue, I will lose the kid,” is an injury. (There’s also other stuff needed for standing like ripeness, case/controversy, etc. but I’m just talking about injury right now)
"The kid I adopted wasn’t taken from their parents legally” is sad, but it’s not a bad thing happening to you personally. Also, just as a practical matter, I cannot imagine any prospective adoptive parent shooting themselves in the foot legally by arguing they don’t want to adopt a kid, even under these circumstances.
The only thing I can think of is for an adoptive parent to sue as a next friend (where you do legal stuff on the kid’s behalf). This usually happens if, like, a minor wants to sue someone, but is too young to bring the suit themselves. Then you can say, speaking for the kid, “Hey, I was adopted illegally, I want to go back to my mom!” But again, I’m not sure how viable that would be or how likely it would be that any of these people would actually do that, or what legal arguments they would make even if they did.